Edward Martin Levine is born on March 4, 1935, in Brooklyn, NY, to Barnet and Jennie Levine. He has one older brother, Melvin Charles Levine.

Receives a B.A. from Yale University (1957)

Attends the New School, New York (Summer 1962)

Receives M.A. from New York University (1964); Ph.D in 1975

Soon after completing his M.A., Levine becomes an instructor at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, where he teaches in the Humanities Department until 1968. He is not yet making art. Instead, Levine writes about the art and artists of his time.

He publishes “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity” in Western Humanities Review, exploring the concept of ambiguity in twentieth-century art, particularly in cubism, action painting, and op art. Levine argues that modern art has moved away from a single perspective toward multiple points of view, thereby introducing ambiguity and forcing the viewer to confront uncertainty. The following year, in the same journal, Levine publishes “The Hybrid Dramas of George Segal,” in which he traces this sense of uncertainty through the sculptural arrangements of George Segal, connecting Segal’s themes of boredom and waiting with theater of the absurd and the plays of Samuel Beckett. 

This and other articles from the time are early examples of Levine’s philosophical nature and strong ability to write about the complexities of artistic experience and how they relate to everyday life. Samuel Beckett, especially, would become an enduring influence on Levine’s work, culminating many years later in several installation projects centered on Beckett’s seminal play, Waiting for Godot. 

Levine becomes an assistant professor of art at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa, and then an assistant professor of art at Temple Buell College, in Denver, Colorado.

“Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience” is published in Art Journal. The article discusses abstract expressionism in relation to other art movements and philosophical ideas, particularly existentialism, romanticism, and mysticism. Levine’s deep understanding of art history and his strong interest in the art of his time allows him to write with authority while contributing his own ideas and understandings of the subject.

Levine moves to Turlock, California to briefly assume a role as associate professor of art at California State College, Stanislaus.

After a series of short tenures at small universities and colleges across the country, Levine becomes chairman of the art department at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio. Here he builds a reputation for developing inventive public programs that introduce students and faculty to nationally recognized artists and contemporary art discourse. Marcia Tucker, founder and director of the New Museum in New York City, will later credit Levine, along with Marjory Talalay, Joe Erdelac, Don Harvey, Jack Boulton, and Betty Collings, with initiating what she calls the “Ohio dialog,” which is in part responsible for the New Museum’s commitment to art outside of the “geographic (and often esthetic) mainstream.”

Over the course of six years, Levine procures over $150,000 in grants from the NEA, The Ohio Arts Council, and the City of Dayton for the development of artist residencies and alternative spaces workshops. 

During this time, he continues writing articles that engage with prevailing art movements of the 1960s and ’70s, further clarifying his developing perspectives on the role of art and objects in visual experience.

In “The Failure of Modernism and Tradition” Levine looks critically at the modernist view of the development of art, specifically Clement Greenberg’s modernism. Levine sees a trajectory in which modern art has been developing “away from the art object as a reservoir of artistic experience” and toward an exploration of consciousness. Levine furthers this argument in “Robert Irwin: World Without a Frame” by tracing an evolution in Irwin’s work from exploring the boundaries of the art object to the notion of an art without objects, in which the viewer is left to shape their own sense of reality. Irwin’s installations were, for Levine, a move towards dismantling traditional hierarchies of art to explore the interplay between environment, perception, and visual experience.

“To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.” —Robert Irwin 

Levine initiates a pioneering exhibition program for site-specific installation art at the university’s Stein Galleries. The galleries offer a distinctive mezzanine space for artists to respond to and, because site specificity is a relatively new concept in art-making, he wants to explore its potential and introduce this art practice to the campus. 

In 2010, curator Eva Buttacavoli will characterize installations from these years as “historical markers” connecting Wright State University to contemporary art transformations. In a notice for a retrospective exhibition she organizes that year, Hole in the Middle of the World, she notes that the installations, featuring artists such as Vito Acconci, Terry Allen, Stephen Antonakos, Patrick Ireland, and Robert Irwin, redefined installation art.

In his dissertation, “Visual Ambiguity in Cubist Painting and its Relationship to Contemporary American Painting,” Levine traces the role of visual ambiguity from Cubism to the paintings of Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella. Years later, in a taped conversation with East Carolina University colleague Clarence Morgan, Ed, will confide that he was ultimately very disappointed in his dissertation:

“My dissertation really was about a metaphysical notion. I mean, I wanted it to be about a metaphysical notion. That is, what is the meaning? Why does this question of visual ambiguity seem to be so important in the twentieth century? And I wanted to investigate what artists are using it, why they’re using it, and then try to extrapolate from them some notion about what the meaning of the world is and what our relationship to the world is because of the changing climate of the twentieth century and how to target visual perception into that. And I wasn’t allowed to do that, so I had to do a very technical dissertation. So my dissertation was very technical, very boring.”

In collaboration with Paul R. Wick, the administrator of the Dayton City Beautiful Council, Levine establishes Dayton’s Alternative Spaces Residency Program, a visiting artist program that commissions artists to develop temporary public art on and off campus. Under the auspices of this program, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, artists who are expanding the definition of public art—including Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Jody Pinto—are invited to explore the city, choose their sites, and develop their commissioned projects with an unusual amount of creative freedom. 

Levine leaves Wright State the following year, but this program continues to make waves until 1983. 

From 1976-1978, Levine exhibits his own work at Wright State University’s fine art galleries.

Levine moderates a symposium on the meaning of the art of the 1960s as it relates to current trends: “Art of the ‘60s: A View from the ‘70s.” Artists on the panel include Jackie Ferrara, Richard Fleischner, and Doug Hollis, who have executed works in the Dayton area prior to the symposium.

Images: Andrew Leicester, Three Cones, Rainfall erosion project. Sand, polyethylene, snowfence; Tom Doyle, Untitled. Oak and white pine beams and white pine planks; Peter Gourfain, Untitled. Ceramic pots, red clay, red slip, white slip. 

Levine’s faculty photo at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 1980

Image: Photo and artist statement in Six in Ohio (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Gallery of Fine Art, 1978).

In an early example of his pedagogical interest in interdisciplinary collaboration, Levine leads the conference SITE: Sculptors and Landscape Architects Exploring Interdisciplinary Alternatives, sponsored by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The conference convenes prominent artists and landscape architects, including Robert Irwin and M. Paul Friedberg.

Room Construction, 1980. Artists Space, NY.

In her assessment in The Village Voice,  Kay Larsen describes Levine’s installation as having “architecturally altered an isolated room by subtly manipulating light and proportion. The windows and doors in his drywall partitions correspond not to body space but to the room’s space, thus confusing one’s kinesthetic prejudices.”

At the November meeting of the National Council on the Arts, the four National Endowment for the Arts programs (music, media, literature, and visual arts) present their annual program reports. As chairman of the Visual Arts Policy Panel, Levine, along with visual arts program director Jim Melcher and artist Mary Miss, presents a case for the importance of innovation in government-sponsored art projects. Levine explains: 

“[W]hat we are finding in the field…is a fear that the nature of esthetic inquiry…is causing a lot of people to pull back, and the very pulling back will preclude innovations from taking place…I think that it becomes patronizing for the government to try to preclude controversy. The controversy is very real and very important because controversy is really about the values of society and the values of society are only questioned really through the work of the artist, mostly, on a cultural level.”

”New Directions: Minneapolis College of Art and Design, A Selected Exhibition of Faculty Works,” Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota. Levine exhibits work alongside other MCAD faculty, including Kinji Akagawa, Lee Bjorklund, Tom DeBiaso, Frank Gaard, Herb Grika, Ken Feingold, Carole Fisher, Rik Sferra, and Jantje Visscher.

Levine receives the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship for sculpture.

Levine publishes “Vision and Its Medium” in Art Journal, emphasizing that there should be no hierarchy of mediums, only those that are more or less appropriate for an artists’ practice. Ultimately, for Levine, a given medium is merely a “mode through which we come to uncover our thinking and feelings about visibility.”

The journal “The Public Interest” publishes dissenting arguments written by Levine (along with John Beardsley, Wolf Von Eckardt, and Robert Fleming) to an article published in the same issue by Douglas Stalker and Clark Glymour titled “The Malignant Art Object: Thoughts on Public Sculpture.” In their article, Stalker and Glymour attack publicly funded sculpture as causing “substantial and identifiable harm” to the public, likening these harms “in structure, though perhaps not in degree, to the harms often said to be caused by the public display of pornography.” In his dissent, Levine argues that the value of art in a democratic society lies in its ability to challenge cultural assumptions, not merely reflect them—that art is inherently experimental and meant to interrogate existing norms to make way for new perspectives.

The foundation of many of Levine’s core values, so evident when he later establishes the Harpo Foundation, can be traced back to these ideas of the centrality of the artist and their potential to extend the experiences of art and art–making.

Levine leaves the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1983 to start a six-year tenure as the dean of the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University, in Greenville, North Carolina.

In a recorded conversation between Clarence Morgan and Ed Levine that took place just prior to Levine leaving his post as Dean of the School of Arts at East Carolina University to start his tenure as Director of Visual Studies at MIT, Levine described himself and his time as dean at ECU as feeling “like a halfback [football player], not very big, not very strong, looking for an opening. And when I saw an opening, I’d take it…I thought one way of opening a dialog was to bring a lot of people in here, so that faculty and students would see what’s taking place in the contemporary world and bring alternatives to those being taught here.”

Lunchroom, Levine’s first outdoor sculpture, is installed on the campus of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Levine establishes the environmental design program concentration within the communication arts area at Eastern Carolina University. Two years later, he hires experienced architect Abdul-Shakoor Farhadi as ECU’s first professor of architecture.

Levine’s work is selected by guest curator Howard Fox to be included in North Carolina Artists Exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh.

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Images: Installation views at North Carolina Museum of Art.

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Images: Front and aerial views of installation at SECCA.

Levine publishes “Problems of Teaching Creativity,” outlining the failures of traditional educational paradigms, which overemphasize analytical thinking rather than the importance of wonder and a willingness to explore.

Levine is invited by Waterworks Gallery director Robert Haywood to create a site-specific installation in Salisbury, North Carolina. Co-exhibitors include painter Mary Lou Stewart and sculptor Patrick Dougherty.

Levine marries Patricia Fuller in Pitt, North Carolina.

Images: Dancers interacting with Connections and Detours installation. Photo on right by Tony Rumple.

Levine receives a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Ghosts Can Only Walk Straight Lines is installed at Artpark, Lewiston, New York.

Levine invites a colleague from his previous posting at MCAD, environmental artist Kinji Akagawa, to install a site-specific three-piece wooden sculpture behind the fine arts center on campus. He explains that the piece, inspired by the restful qualities of North Carolina porches, is meant to “bring the School of Art and the campus more closely together.” This emphasis on the utility and aesthetic value of vernacular architecture will echo throughout Levine’s later work, particularly in his works in Vermont Village, which respond to the local farmhouses and buildings of rural Vermont.

Levine, along with Charles Coble, the dean of ECU’s School of Education, and Judy McCall, the Caswell Center coordinator, forms an organization called the Design Group for Populations with Special Needs, dedicated to bringing meaningful design, including interior spaces, furniture, and utilities, to the elderly, incarcerated, developmentally and physically challenged, and hearing and visually impaired.

“I’ve always seen the need for us in the School of Art and the university at large to make a larger commitment to the community. I’m excited about working with the community and participating in bringing aesthetic consideration into the lives of these people.”

 This initiative would continue throughout the 1990s.

Images: Wilmington Wall, 1988; Ed Levine at site for Wilmington Wall; computer rendering for Wilmington Wall, 1988.

Levine participates in the thirty-fifth Arts Festival of Atlanta: “National Site Works” is curated by William Fagaly, the assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, in conjunction with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Levine exhibits his work Birdie alongside pieces by Ted Gardeline, James Casebere, and Meg Webster, all of whom were selected from a pool of artists nominated by Siah Armajani and Nancy Holt. The festival includes a symposium on site art at the High Museum of Art on Sep 10, 1988.

Levine is invited to establish a visual arts program at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he directs until 1998. He develops what is Initially an undergraduate offering into a degree-granting graduate program with a focus on public art. In a conversation with ECU colleague Clarence Morgan, Levine explains his decision to accept the position: “All the other possible jobs that came my way over the last several years were basically things I already knew about. The MIT thing is like starting life all over again…”

Levine’s Walking the Straight and Narrow installation is on view at the Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Levine and Fuller purchase a summer home on 10.2 acres on Back River Road in South Royalton, Vermont.

Levine begins building in a clearing at the bottom of the property. He is photographed in July 1992 standing in front of a building that is noted in a different Polaroid as “Ed’s studio.” As the project evolves, Levine later refers to this building as the ”Village Shop.”

 Eventually, the Vermont project comprises over fifty site-specific works in the landscape. 

The Cambridge Arts Council commissions Levine to create Floating Stones in the Garden Street Glen of Danehy Park, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the installation, Levine consults with landscape architect John Kissida to make sure that the work, consisting of eleven three-foot-square granite stones and numerous freshly planted trees (including river birches, pin oaks, red twig dogwoods, and fragrant sumacs), integrates seamlessly into the landscape of the park. Levine intends for people to experience the work as a natural part of their day rather than observe it as a work of art.

Images: sketch of Floating Stones; Floating Stones as originally installed at Danehy Park.

Images: Installation photograph of Floating Rocks: Looking into Time; site plan for Floating Rocks.

Levine steps down as director of the visual arts program at MIT to teach full-time as a professor of art, offering courses on architecture, film, and photography.

Levine and Fuller purchase a home in the Coconut Grove area of Miami, Florida.

Finding a Place for Godot is on view at the Boston Public Library. In this exhibition of Levine’s photography, he places a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in various locations throughout the library in order to explore “the book’s journey from a linguistic to a sculptural object and the manifold interactions between the book and its site.” Levine notes, “You may ask why Waiting for Godot? Because it is funny.”

Levine retires as a professor of art from MIT.

Image: excerpt from That Place brochure, 2002.

Images: Thoreau’s Hut, 2003. Pine, cedar, recycled brick, flagstone, and stainless steel on concrete pad. Height: 15′ 3″; Width: 10′; Depth: 15′; Birdblind, 2003. Cedar and stainless steel on concrete pad. Height: 9′ 8 1/4″; Width: 19′ 3 5/16″; Depth: 9′ 5″;Benches, 2003. Wood and Copper. Height: 12′ 8″; Width: 9′ 4″; Depth: 2′ 1″

In this photographic installation, Levine examines linguistic and narrative structures by installing an image of the signed letters G-O-D-O-T, referring to Waiting for Godot, a work that questions rationality and the prospect of effective communication in the wake of World War II. The piece is aptly set in a library, a space typically associated with silence.

Installation view at Green Library.

Levine publishes Uncovering the Body: Essays on Art and the Body, which provides an alternative perspective to the mind-body duality taken for granted in older modes of discussing art, instead favoring an embodied experience of art.

After receiving an inheritance, Levine establishes the Harpo Foundation to support emerging and under-recognized visual artists. In a letter written to the board, Levine expresses the mission: “The Foundation was not set up as a philanthropic endeavor but as a way of returning to the field the gifts of assistance that were provided to me by various organizations and people too numerous to name. The Foundation is my way of repayment.”

Harpo Foundation begins supporting two residency fellowships to Native American visual artists at the Vermont Studio Center to support the development of visual artists and the potential for intercultural dialogue. In 2020, under Levine’s bequest, this program is endowed as the Harpo Foundation Native American Residency at Vermont Studio Center.

Ed Levine dies, survived by two sons, Jeremy Levine and Chaim Levine. He is eighty-four. The Harpo Foundation has given grants to support the development of over 150 artists and will continue to make grants to artists post-bequest.

The Harpo Foundation launches the Back River Road Residency Retreat after Levine lays the groundwork for residencies at his summer home in South Royalton, explaining in a letter he wrote to the Board that, “[R]esidencies should develop in ways that will encourage a new conversation between the artist and the landscape.”

Image: Kapulani Landgraf (The Impact Award’s innuagural fellowship recipient), Hoʻoheihei, Māhoe Mua 2024, Media: Naʻau (pig gut) with red fishhooks and headless nails. Image courtesy of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Back River Road opens to the public for tours of Levine’s Vermont Village and Vermont Settlement project. Harpo Foundation uses the title Vermont Village: A Conversation between Art, Water and the Land, or Vermont Village for short.