New additions to WWU art collection coming from Renée Green

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New additions to WWU art collection coming from Renée Green

September 25, 2025

By Frances Badgett

WWU Communications

The Western Gallery at Western Washington University announces a new addition to its world-class public art collection: "Space Poem #15 (To the Remembered Earth)" by artist Renée Green. The artwork appears in three locations across the WWU campus: suspended banners appear in the skybridge between the Academic Instructional Center East and West; double-sided panels are suspended in the lobby windows of WWU's Interdisciplinary Science Building; and panels hang in the windows of the Western Gallery entry foyer in the Fine Arts Building.

Western Washington University will hold an artist talk and dedication for the new artwork at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 2 in the Academic Instructional Center West on South Campus, with the dedication following at 6:30 p.m.; the event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested via this link.

The Washington Arts Commission, in partnership with Western Washington University, commissioned the artwork. Funding was provided by the Percent-for-Art Program of the state of Washington and with capital funds affiliated with the newly completed Kaiser Borsari building on the WWU campus.

Green is an internationally recognized artist, writer and filmmaker. In the past year alone, Green has held solo exhibitions at Dia: Beacon in New York and Auroras in São Paulo, Brazil. Significant one-person exhibitions of her art have been staged in Berlin, Paris, Vienna as well as Boston, New York, San Francisco, and numerous other cities. Green is a professor in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Other notable achievements include a five-year residency with the Holt/Smithson foundation as part of the "Island Project" in company with artists Sky Hopinka, Tacita Dean, Joan Jonas and Oscar Santillán. She is also the recipient of the Linda A. Orzeck '68 Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, 2023, and has published essays and fiction in "Transition," "Frieze," "Texte zur Kunst," and "Collapse," among other magazines and journals

"Space Poem #15 (To the Remembered Earth)" is part of an extended body of her work.

"Space Poems are open-ended and capacious. In them, it's possible for me to retrieve many things. Existing in a variety of spaces, Space Poems allow room for combining fragments of encounters of diverse kinds," said Green.

Space Poems feature powerful texts printed on suspended banners. As viewers move through the rooms animated by the suspended artwork, they find meaning in the compelling poetry of the words. Green is celebrated for her multi-media installations in which ideas, perception, and experience combine and reflect myriad experiences, both past and present.

Although the artworks are all indoors, importantly they are very visible from outside the building as well.

"These sites were chosen to create a meandering path among specific works in the current Campus Sculpture Collection that resonate with my intellectual and aesthetic interests and trajectory," Green said.

Her consideration of site and time is a hallmark of her work.

The Western Gallery, the contemporary art museum at Western Washington University, engages its regional audience with exhibitions, public programs, gallery encounters, and more. It programs a world-class campus sculpture collection - now 37 pieces strong and growing - with artists including Isamu Noguchi, Do Ho Suh, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Fred Wilson, and Richard Serra. Twice the campus sculpture collection has been identified among the top ten university public art collections in the country. The Western Gallery is a catalyst for learning, embracing the campus and public communities through experiences that explore our world today.