Instead of going the typical route of hiring in-house art advisors, Facebook has established an artist-in-residence program. Drew Bennett, the director of the program, discusses some of the art found around—and create specifically for—the office.
“This is a visualization of how a couple interacted with each other on Facebook over the course of a month."
“Jane’s work is ecologically charged,” Bennett says. “As a scientific illustrator she illustrates species that are endangered, specific to the site, so all these birds represented here migrate through the salt flats around us, and lay their eggs in the salt flat, so it’s educating this community about things around us that they’re not otherwise aware of in a really beautiful and inspiring way.”
“This is the work in progress, People get to experience her process, and in terms of bringing contemporary artists in a variety of different visual languages, this not an inherently art viewing audience, and I think this is an important thing to realize when curating, and so what’s the point of access for this art? And by witnessing it become created people get a sense of ownership and connection and accessibility to work that they would not understand otherwise.”
“This work speaks to geography and the essence of land mass connecting. It’s kind of like an exploded map."
“[Brian] came in before right as I was building out the program. So this…was made a little bit more as a commission."
“This is indicative of the body of work that she was making five to seven years ago, under the regular commissioning circumstances she had to rest on previous work."
“So something like this, it’s hard to commission for, it really takes someone being open to the space in responding to it. It continues up and around. This is the example of [Kelly’s] work under the residency opportunity as opposed to a commissioned opportunity.”
“She opened up and took on the space in a much more intimate and engaging way then you could in just a regular commission."
“She got to know a lot of the people around here, develop relationships with them, and work alongside the other employees on a day-to-day basis.”
“Barbara’s work is built out of lath, which is coming out of old buildings that inherently have a lot of character. And in the self referential nature of this work, [it] is similar to the way engineers build technology for the product and that growth and connectivity inherent in the forms is also in dialogue with the way that we’re thinking about how entities and people can connect to each other.”
“He collaborated with an engineer who works in this building, and they designed a system of code that’s an infinite loop. So, in our coding language this translates into ‘Continue striving for perfection and don’t stop until complete, but also perfection is impossible.' So the work is in a physical loop and it also reads as a loop, and it’s a collaboration between an artist and an engineer. And also, aside from that back story, it just charges the space in a way that when these walls were white before, it’s nice light, but now it’s to me like a very exciting and very successful room.”
“He did an amazing job. In terms of the program wanting to mix up ideas and challenge people and provoke people, he has a really supreme sense of intelligence that allowed him to dig deep into our culture as one of us and regurgitate what he found in a playful and humorous manner.”
“He only works in silk screen, so he’s never made one of these things realized more than four-feet by four-feet for sure. So, for him to come here and take his visual language and apply it to wooden triangles, and expand many times beyond the scope of [the] physical work he’s had the chance to make before, is a really exciting opportunity for him in terms of experience.”
A canvas by artist David Choe graces the reception area of Building 10 at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.
The artist-in-residence program is based in the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory.
