Scott Rothkopf '99 is the first undergraduate to curate a full-scale exhibition at the University Art Museums which is not based on the Museums' own holdings. Photo by Kris Snibbe.

Scott Rothkopf '99 has a habit of taking on more than he can handle . . . then proving that he has underestimated himself.

This is what happened one day last October when he visited conceptual artist Mel Bochner in his studio in lower Manhattan.

Rothkopf, a history of art and architecture concentrator, became interested in Bochner through courses in contemporary art he had taken at Harvard and through a summer internship at New York's Whitney Museum. It was the photography that Bochner had done in the mid- to late-'60s that particularly fascinated him. He decided to call the artist and ask if he could see more of the work.

"It was my first visit to an artist's studio, but he was incredibly gracious and welcoming and we really hit it off," Rothkopf said. "We talked for about four hours. In the end I asked him if he would be interested in exhibiting some of this work. I didn't even know if I was in a position to do that."

Strictly speaking, he wasn't, not based on precedent anyway. Never before had an undergraduate curated an exhibition at Harvard based on loaned materials from outside the University's collections.

But with the encouragement of his thesis adviser, Yve-Alain Bois, the Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art, he put together a proposal and presented it to the curatorial board of the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM). They gave it the thumbs up. Rothkopf's exhibition of Bochner's photographic work will open in the Sert Gallery in the spring of 2001.

James Cuno, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Arts Museums, explained why the board decided to take the unusual step of allowing an undergraduate to curate a major exhibition:

"Other people may come up with good ideas, but Scott's someone who is actually going to do it. He has intelligence, learning, maturity, confidence, ambition, and articulateness. He's the real thing, and someone like that doesn't come along very often."

Bochner summarized his impressions of Rothkopf in a similar vein: "He's a very impressive young man, sophisticated beyond his years. He seemed very well prepared, very knowledgeable, and open. You don't expect an undergraduate to know that much. He's also very intense and passionate about his ideas -- that's what impressed me about him."

Rothkopf's passion and intensity have been developing for a long time. He grew up in Dallas, not the ideal environment for a budding art historian, perhaps, but not without merit either. "It was a good place to grow up," he said. "There were a lot of cultural opportunities, although they tended to be somewhat conservative."

Fortunately, Rothkopf's parents gave him every chance to develop his artistic side. Among the cultural opportunities he was exposed to were Saturday morning acting classes.

The building where the classes were held had the most lasting effect on him, however. It was the Dallas Theatre Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Spending time there sparked Rothkopf's interest in Wright's architecture, and he and his mother would plan trips to other parts of the country where Wright buildings stood.

"Row L, Perspective," a 1966 photograph by Mel Bochner

Visits to New York City, where his grandparents lived, exposed Rothkopf to the wonders of the Museum of Modern Art, and he returned home filled with ideas about the new directions art could take. But Dallas had no galleries where he could view the latest productions of the art world, so he frequented the local Borders Bookstore and pored over any volume that showed the creations of contemporary artists.

From an early age he pursued an interest in making art as well as studying it. In high school he mounted an exhibition of his own conceptual pieces, a series of medicine cabinets whose contents and design reflected the personalities of particular people.

At Harvard he has continued to take studio courses and at one time contemplated a split concentration, combining visual and environmental studies (VES) and fine arts (now history of art and architecture). But writing about art has emerged as his chief interest.

Here, as elsewhere, he has made a habit of overreaching himself. The knowledge and sophistication he displayed in a freshman art class helped him get into a graduate seminar his second term. The seminar, Visual Practice and Theory since 1980, proved even more challenging than he had expected.

"There were nine grad students, two seniors, and me," Rothkopf said. "I kept wondering, what am I doing here? I was totally overwhelmed. It was the most difficult thing I've ever done. But by the end I was totally hooked."

Rothkopf's senior thesis was another opportunity for him to test himself. He picked Surrealism in America in the 1960s, a topic on which the critical literature was scant, pop art and minimalism having captured the bulk of critical attention in those years. But Rothkopf felt it was a chance to extend himself.

"I thought it was important to choose an intellectually ambitious topic, but it was an enormous chunk to bite off. I was a little nervous about taking it on."

Bochner's photographic work, although it was done during the same time period, was the product of an entirely different artistic movement. Rothkopf's ability to focus on both simultaneously is one indication of the breadth of his interests.

Bochner came out of minimalism, an effort to pare artistic form down to its bare essentials, but he, along with several other artists of the period, took the process a step further, removing the emphasis from the physical object and placing it on the idea behind its creation.

Thus, one of his best known installations is "Measurement Piece," consisting of a nearly empty room whose measurements have been inscribed on walls, floor, and ceiling, creating in effect a three-dimensional diagram identical with the object it describes.

Bochner's photographs, which he produced between 1966 and 1969, fascinate Rothkopf because of the way they question the relationship of reality to representation. Many of them disorient the viewer by creating the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat surface, showing stacked blocks or grids viewed in perspective, in many cases blown up to enormous size.

At the time it was done, Bochner's photography fell into no recognized category, and, as a result, little of it has been exhibited. But currently there has been new interest in conceptual photography, and Rothkopf hopes his exhibition and the critical catalog he will write for it will help to create a new theoretical approach to that work.

Meanwhile, Rothkopf has his post-graduation life cut out for him. A guest curatorship from HUAM will enable him to live in New York while he works with Bochner, deciding which works will appear in the show and how they will be exhibited.

An incidental benefit of the guest curatorship is that it will allow him to frequent New York's museums and galleries to his heart's content.

"I never get tired of looking at art," Rothkopf said. "I feel extremely lucky to have my academic work coincide with something I enjoy so much."