With her photographic exploration of Brutalism, Viera Levitt reveals the hidden beauty and indeed ‘sweetness’ of this architectural style often derided as gray, crude, soulless and austere. Following on the heals of her solo show “Beauty in the Beast: Photography of Brutalist Architecture” up last summer at the Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Viera continues to capture these 1960s and 1970s buildings with their stark geometric sculptural forms and heroic monumentality. Her ‘subjects’, located in both New England as well as in her native Slovakia share not only architectural similarities, but also the utopian impulse that ran through both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’.

Curator and photographer Viera Levitt, following her RISD Graduate Studies’ Artslink Residency and her internship in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, moved to Rhode Island seven years ago from Slovakia where she was the director of the contemporary art museum, Jan Koniarek Gallery. After 3 years as the Director of the CCRI Knight Campus Art Gallery, she has, since September 2012, worked as the Gallery Director for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Her show at CCRI about its brutalist megastructure, “We Talk About Architecture, Architecture Talks Back” won the 2011 New England Art Award in the Concept/Theme show curator category and inspired her to photograph similar objects through the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities Project Grant. Her photographs of Boston City Hall were published in Nov/Dec 2012 issue of Art New England and today, she continues her research of Brutalism through her work as the Director of UMass Dartmouth’s two galleries, whose campus was designed by the Brutalist architecture legend, Paul Rudolph. Viera has exhibited at Hera Gallery and Myopic Books in Wakefield, the Knight Campus Art Gallery at CCRI, and at the New Bedford Art Museum. From 1996 to the present, she has curated or co-curated more than sixty exhibitions in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and in the USA and has lectured about contemporary art in Bratislava, Brno, Berlin, Rotterdam, Hiroshima, New Delhi, Caracas, Nairobi, as well as in New England.

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