Matthew C. Kramer

Night Light was a one-night site-specific installation on Vassar’s Sunset Lake. The event was attended by upwards of 700 students and residents of Poughkeepsie. There were performances by school musicians, and local food venders sold food. The installation took a team of twenty over ten hours to install. Night Light is a study in how simple art pieces can activate community spaces.

For a year, I photographed every party I attended. The goal was to accurately document the nightlife at a small college. The photographs—unposed, spontaneous, revealing—stand in contrast to the more sanitized and less intimate images that appear in public or social media.

Providence Arch is a 16-by-16-foot arch, made of wood and steel cabling, that frames the skyline of the city’s downtown. The project was funded by the Rhode Island I-195 Redevelopment District Commission.

Providence Arch framed the path of the now-removed highway and echoes the form of the I-way Bridge that is part of the new section of the Interstate. The piece was designed by Matthew Kramer and built with the engineering, construction, and design help from Ben Strom.

StumpChair is an ongoing street art/furniture project, designed and enacted in collaboration with Coby Unger. Stumpchairs create public seating and activate city spaces. StumpChair has been well received in the Providence community. For more information visit our facebook page.

The Sukkah Project was a collaboration between the Vassar’s Office of Religious life and the Vassar Art Department. Sukkoth is the Jewish harvest holiday in which participants sleep in a temporary structure, built according to strict religious rules. The Project adhered to these laws while making constructions that were playful and modern.

The small sukkah is built over the stump of a recently felled tree. The stump functioned as a table to eat at during the holiday and a symbol of the harvest. Matthew Kramer designed the red twine sukkah and built it in collaboration with five other students, Noah Lourie Mosher ’12, Kristin Regler ’12, Samantha Shin ’12, and Sierra Starr ’12 and project adviser Tyler Rowland '00. The team also designed and built a larger communal sukkah out of reeds and steel framing.

I am also schooled in wood block printing, linocut printmaking, & silkscreening.