Evan, Katherine, Gina, Libra, Bradley,
This blog is not published for the public yet so that we can do some work without followers, for now anyway. I would like each of you to post a short bio and maybe a sentence or two about what you'd like to gain from this experience. Post as a comment. Mine's below; I look forward to reading yours. Post by January 29 if possible.
Ann Rowson Love Bio:
ReplyDeleteI fell in love with New Orleans in 1994 when Roger Ogden first announced that he was planning the museum and donating his collection. The announcement happened at a museum conference I attended - my first time to the city. I knew then, that I would be a part of this museum (fate?). Before moving to New Orleans in 2000 to become the museum's founding curator of education, my professional path led me throughout the midwest and southeast.
I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I studied art history and education as an undergrad at the University of Kansas, where I also completed my master's in art museum education. I have been a museum educator, arts administrator, curator, and evaluator for nearly 20 years. My work in museums includes positions at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. I also directed a Getty Regional Institute for Visual Art at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga at a wonderful multi-arts center called the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts. Our aim was to help teachers and schools include the arts - art, dance, music, and theatre - in meaningful ways across the curriculum.
When I finally made it to New Orleans and the Ogden Museum, I had married a southerner from Chattanooga and couldn't wait to start the process of opening a new art museum. I left a year after Katrina to finish working on my doctorate studies at Florida State and now I direct a new graduate museum studies program at Western Illinois University-Quad Cities at the Figge Art Museum, another beautiful new museum building. And I miss New Orleans everyday.
Thank you for participating in my dissertation project. As a researcher I'm interested in how we collaborate in museums, both as professionals and community members, including curatorial projects. Sorry my post is kind of long.
Katherine Doss bio:
ReplyDeleteI returned home to New Orleans last month, having been gone three and a half years. I moved here from Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I received my MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina. While there, I focused my work on Louisiana expressive culture and wrote mainly about music, art, and football (of all things).
After graduating from the program, I stayed in Chapel Hill and worked with an anthropology professor, Jim Peacock, to form a community of scholars called the Global U.S. South Working Group. The group is composed primarily of literary authors, psychoanalysts and others who explore culture (i.e. historians, anthropologists, artists and folklorists). We have gathered twice a month for the past two years to discuss the psychological and cultural dimensions of Southern life, considering especially the implications of globalization on that life. I am currently assembling material from the presentations for publication. This allows me the opportunity to learn a new design program!
Before pursuing my degree at UNC, I had the privilege of working at the Ogden Museum for three years as their Office Manager, from 2003-2006. This is where I stumbled across the phrase, "Sense of Place," which is a concept that I returned to often when writing about New Orleans.
I am glad to be a part of this collaboration and enter into a behind-the-scenes curatorial process with the group. I believe museum visitors are so awe-struck by the work of WH Stevens both because his work stands out on its own accord, but also due to the way it has been exhibited at the Ogden. I am interested in a deeper awareness of how museum design affects the viewer.
Short Bio for Evan Christopher: I am a Clarinetist specializing in the music and musical traditions of New Orleans. My musical style and projects are anchored in the vocabulary of early jazz and the Creole clarinet style as it evolved in New Orleans, Cuba, the French West Indies and even Brazil.
ReplyDeleteThe Will Henry Stevens Gallery Project:
I imagine myself to be like many others. I love museums, but am ambivalent about the museum experience. Staring at and into artifacts of greatness achieved through deliberate human effort is so inspiring and can be so empowering. Yet, museums can be so... messy, noisy. I don't mean other museum-goers as much as those loud little placards by each work that compete with the work itself and vie for my attention like an arrogant little tour guide I can't ignore. Oh, and when there are grammatical or factual errors? Ugh, so offensive. It makes me have to concentrate so hard when I want to be mindful of the work's creator and the creative process. Stevens? I'm just getting to know him and I like him. Besides being a fine craftsman and important to our local tradition I think he's clever, fun. He was really searching. Community curator, me? A musician? OK. Just for that challenge alone, I'm in. I think I get it, I'm beginning to understand my "role" and this cat, Stevens, deserves something special.
Left my readings and CD-R in a hotel room in France this week. Sorry. Thanks Ann for offering to replace them when we all meet after the weekend.
ReplyDeleteThe difficult part of this project seems to be that, once one develops some interest in a work or collection of works, it becomes harder to stay mindful that other's interests will be completely different. Even with this particular project, it's difficult to imagine how I can represent anything other than myself. That is, unless I intentionally approach this, NOT as an individual but as some imagined paradigm of the "jazz musician" or "musician community-artist" who embodies a specific set of values, I don't see how I'll really be contributing anything more than one person's quite amateur opinion.
As a teaching artist, I have recently been struggling with this lately. This week I have been trying to design a mini-track presentation for classroom teachers that helps them collaborate more effectively with community artists by better engaging community-specific needs. My goal is to create some exercises and protocols that will encourage students to engage art presentations (spec. musical performance) more meaningfully and authentically. The focus is on helping teachers and teaching-artists, who lead classroom outreach, to find common ground by focusing on tradition and community identity. But, again, this is difficult to nail down unless the individuals involved agree to be subservient to some agreed upon cultural context.
What was my point?... Oh! It seems to me that if you replace "museum staff" with "classroom teachers," "museum visitors" with "students," and "community-artist curatorial team" with "classroom teaching-artists," the problems are very similar.
Sorry this is a little long...it's something I already had.
ReplyDeleteGina Phillips comes from Madison County, Kentucky. Her childhood was marked by an absence of conventional modern conveniences, but she was fortunate to be surrounded by a family characterized by a propensity for mechanical, artistic and musical abilities. She learned that no object or material should be thrown away since it could be reused or turned into something else...something functional or something artistic. She spent many summers with her cousins creating their own elaborate environments out of these accumulations. This environment was perfect training for a life as an artist.
When she was 18, Phillips moved to Lexington, Kentucky to attend the University of Kentucky. She graduated from UK in 1994 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting. During these years, Phillips developed into a mixed-media artist who crafted raw, narrative images. She painted and collaged her tragic/comic narratives onto rather large constructions built from a variety of materials culled from her childhood home such as wood, metal and fabric.
In 1995, Phillips moved to New Orleans, Louisiana to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at Tulane University. She earned her M.F.A. in the spring of 1997. Phillips’ work continued to be characterized by a raw, narrative quality. However, the bulk of her materials became minimized. She began to focus on fabric as a medium. First, she made paintings on printed fabrics. Her painted imagery mingled with the imagery of the printed fabric she used as a substructure. Then she began making pieces solely out of fabric and thread. Phillips’ work often treads a fine line between three dimensional and two dimensional work. In many ways it functions as painting does, there is the illusion of light and space…but the pieces maintain their “objecthood”. Many of her “quilts” are two-sided. She often avoids framing her work so that there may be easy access to the piece as a whole.
Phillips continues to live in New Orleans. She has an affinity for this city and feels that it provides a good artistic community and enough commercial opportunities. She also appreciates New Orleans’ rustic qualities and its quirky personalities. Phillips bought a house in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans in the summer of 2004. Phillips spent a year repairing this single shotgun, turning half of it into studio space. One week after finishing the project, her house was seriously damaged by Hurricane Katrina. For 10 months she lived in Richmond, VA while she waited for a FEMA trailer to be installed in her backyard. She lived in the FEMA trailer for a year and a half while she repaired her home a second time. She moved back into her house in October of 2007 and has started making art again.