College of Fine Arts at Ohio University: School of Interdisciplinary Arts [Fall 2016]

School of Interdisciplinary Arts Alumni Newsletter FALL 2016

Alumni Newsletter

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR

Charles Buchanan, Ph.D., Director of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts

Cover Photo On the set of “Meadow Bridge,” in Fayette County, West Virginia. Director Tijah Bumgarner talks with lead actress Micah Gilkerson (Darcy) and supporting actress Mahala Fox (Kendra) about the scene.

Photo by Sinisa Kukic.

KEEP IN TOUCH WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO? We’d love to include your updates, stories, and accomplishments in our next newsletter.

Stay in Touch with the College of Fine Arts by emailing us: finearts@ohio.edu DIDN’T RECEIVE THIS NEWSLETTER VIA EMAIL? If you didn’t receive a copy of this newsletter in your email inbox, you’re missing out on additional stories! Subscribe to the digital edition of our alumni newsletter by visiting us: www.ohio.edu/finearts/about/newsletter.cfm

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OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS

The beginning of the academic year brings renewal and change to our school. We are excited to begin exploring, with a strong group of incoming students, the question of interdisciplinarity in the arts.

Each new class brings the promise of stretching and reevaluating this issue, which remains why being a part of our school is so rewarding to both students and faculty. The entering student class reflects the trend toward internationalization of our student body, with the addition of students from China, Botswana and Ghana. This has affected faculty change as well, with Dr. Marina Peterson being named Director of the Latin American Studies program at the university, and with Dr. Garrett Field receiving the tenure-track position in the ethnomusicology/musicology track.

Our graduates continue to be successful in landing academic positions in their areas of expertise, as the class notes reveal. In part this is due to our emphasis on and financial support of professional activities, particularly conference presentations, during our students’ time here.

Overall the school remains a vibrant entity in enhancing the cultural fabric of our college and local community, and our faculty continue to enhance our reputation by bringing our research to both national and international venues. Finally, we were delighted that our program review this past year affirmed us as a “first-rate program” and believed strongly in our viability.

Please drop me a line informing us of your current professional activities, so that they can be shared with our Interdisciplinary Arts community.

Best regards, Charles Buchanan Director of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts

A publication of the College of Fine Arts at Ohio University Rachel Cornish: Director of External Relations Sheldon Andruss: Manager of Online, Graphic, and Digital Marketing Daniel J. King: Writer & Editor (unless otherwise noted) Todd Jacops: Design & Layout

Fall 2016

Drummers lead the burial procession held for the re-internment of the excavated bones from the African Burial Ground in New York City, October 2003. Photo by Andrea Frohne.

ANDREA FROHNE: AFRICAN DIASPORAS, CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS, AND ART HISTORY The discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan in 1991 is widely understood as one of the most significant American archeological finds of the twentieth century. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and a national monument was completed on site in 2007.

Dr. Andrea Frohne, associate professor of African art history with the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and the School of Art + Design, completed her long term research on the topic in 2015, “The African Burial Ground in

New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space,” published by Syracuse University Press.

“Since I’m an art historian, the focus is on arts related issues, but as I became more involved, it became this multidisciplinary undertaking, encompassing New York City politics, anthropology, archeology and colonial history,” said Frohne.

When she began her research, there was no museum or public display to represent the burial ground. Frohne looked at the ways information was disseminated to interested communities and the public at large without a central display site, such as a museum or dedicated exhibition space In subsequent years, she researched artworks commissioned to commemorate and memorialize the Burial Ground. She interviewed the artists, and wrote about how the individual and collective continued...

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Alumni Newsletter Frohne story continued...

works are presented to the public in relation to the site.

“I was interested in how these memorials represent the Burial Ground, through the lens of Africa, which in some ways is appropriated to represent and define [the site and its history],” she said. “The memorials and artworks become the visual identity of the history of the burial ground.”

This research was the topic of her dissertation, completed at The State University of New York, Binghamton, in 2002.

Afterward, the subject continued to demand her attention.

After a decade of grassroots efforts, some of which is documented in her book, there is now a visitor center and a public memorial sculpture. The site is even now designated as a national monument.

“In order to complete this work, [the research] needed to expand in a networked way, to touch on the political, the spatial, and the archeological.

The public isn’t necessarily going to be reading the 1,000+ pages of archeological reports—the result of a decade of research done at Howard University.”

“All the artifacts are stored in the National Park Service Office basement on Wall Street. I attended hearings, listened to activists, interviewed government officials, watched artwork being installed, and looked closely at early maps and surveys related to the development of New York that mark the details of the ground,” she said.

Frohne’s is the first book to approach the topic from outside the strict framework of scientific

analysis, and is guided by her interest in providing cultural, artistic and urban-space contexts to the dialogue around the African Burial Ground.

Frohne uses the completed archeological and biological reports of the remains found on site to explore the lives of the dead. Although the names of the 419 people buried on the grounds are not known, the skeletal remains reveal the violence endured by enslaved people in 18th-century New York City.

Most recently, Frohne curated an exhibition of contemporary African art at the Kennedy Museum of Art. “Encounters Beyond Borders: Contemporary Artists From The Horn of Africa,” was on view from January 22–May 29. The collection brought together— for the first time—eight living artists, originally from the Horn of Africa, and now residing in either North America or Europe.

Frohne’s interests in African diasporas and cultural interconnections bridge this exhibition and her research on the African Burial Ground.

Andrea E. Frohne is associate professor of African art history at Ohio University with a joint appointment in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and the School of Art + Design. Photo by Daniel King.

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OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS

In both the exhibition and the book, she looks back and forth between geographies, considering cultural production

by Africans outside of Africa.

“My original scholarly contribution is to consider multidimensional flows, thereby supplanting a common unidirectional look—only from Africa into the Americas,” said Frohne.

Frohne points to the hundreds of school children exposed to the work at the Museum, an exhibition presenting contemporary images of Africa, and artists making work in and about Africa.

“It certainly opens up global experience, and helps to cultivate global citizenship at a very young age,” she said, “although we must also consider the diversity within Appalachia, its complex social histories, some of which are African American [in origin].”

Fall 2016

UNCOVERING THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE ARTS IN CAMBODIA Phally Chroy, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, is interested in capturing the complex social history of artists in a country still reeling from decades of violence. He is spending his summer in the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and its surrounding provinces, to meet and talk with artists who knew the Cambodia of fifty years ago, prior to the Khmer Rouge takeover.

“What non-Cambodians miss is that Cambodia needs other narratives, other perspectives.

It’s not just all death and destruction. There’s a bigger, more beautiful story to be told,” said Chroy.

Phally Chroy (far right), recording children singing a song in a Cambodian province during his 2007 Fulbright creative research. Photo by Chean Long.

ALUMNUS BUILDS A CASE FOR THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE AND EARLY TOURISM OHIO alumnus Herbert Gottfried, Comparative geography and environmental history.

Arts Ph.D. 1974, retired from teaching nearly ten Gottfried and his wife, Jan Jennings, spent 25 years ago. The longtime scholar of landscape years researching American vernacular architecture architecture and American visual culture continues that was built from mass-produced building to write and publish poetry and prose, as he’s done materials, shipped by rail, and based on ideas his whole life. found in publications like trade papers, trade Gottfried’s 2014 book catalogs, and print souvenirs.

“Landscape in American Over the years they built a Guides and View Books: unique collection of these Visual History of Touring items, from which Gottfried and Travel,” is a first study organized a sample selection of its kind on American of types, geographies and printed souvenirs and images. He added to this their relationship to the collection a selection of pictures development of touring of landscapes from American and immigration. visual culture and began The research making his case. extended his interests “I already knew that in American art history, pictures played a major role in as he studied landscape the development of American images reproduced in architecture and landscape prints, paintings and architecture—especially pictures Gottfried is Professor Emeritus, Department of photographs, nonLandscape Architecture at Cornell University, and a 2005 of landscapes.” said Gottfried. fiction literature, cultural Distinguished Alumni, School of Interdisciplinary Arts, at Ohio University.

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Alumni Newsletter

Director Tijah Bumgarner (left) talks with cinematographer, Sinisa Kukic (right), about how to set up the basketball practice scene at Meadow Bridge High School. Photo by Shane Pierce.

STUDENT FILMMAKER CHALLENGES NARRATIVES IN APPALACHIA Tijah Bumgarner moved to Los Angeles from West Virginia when she was 19. Initially drawn west by a dream of acting, she worked the audition circuit while waiting tables. Eventually she enrolled in the filmmaking program at the California Institute of the Arts, where she found inspiration in a teacher. She began writing from her own personal experience, telling the stories she knew best, which turned out to be about growing up in her hometown of Meadow Bridge, a small rural town of about 325 people in Fayette County, WV. Now an independent filmmaker and Ph.D. student in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, Bumgarner returns home often to reconsider her Appalachian roots, and to develop projects that challenge common stereotypes.

Following accolades for her short documentary film, “Meadow Bridge” (2009), made during her undergraduate studies, and the successes in cinematography she experienced with the West Virginia Rosie the Riveter project documentary, Bumgarner remains committed to making work in

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OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS

“I started working on a feature length semi-autobiographical screenplay about growing up in Meadow Bridge, West Virginia. It’s a script that’s been five years in the making, inspired by the awkward and comedic moments of my own childhood,” said Bumgarner.

Fall 2016

and about places she knows best.

“I started working on a feature length semiautobiographical screenplay about growing up in Meadow Bridge, West Virginia. It’s a script that’s been five years in the making, inspired by the awkward and comedic moments of my own childhood,” said Bumgarner.

“I had a friend who urged me to make the film. [At first] it seemed overwhelming and impossible, but soon it began to take the shape of a coming of age story.”

“I haven’t found many stories like this [coming out of Appalachia]. You tend to see stories that highlight the powerlessness of the people in these communities,” said Bumgarner.

In the summer of 2015, following a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $15,000, Bumgarner began principal photography in her hometown. The film tells the story of “reaching for big hopes in a small town, about a first kiss, hot dog sales, church group campfires, and cars that keep breaking down. We’re using this tag line, ‘You want for nothing, but you dream of something,’” said Bumgarner.

With mixed feelings, Bumgarner decided to return home to produce her semiautobiographical narrative film, valuing her connection to personal experiences and local perspectives.

“Making the same film in California would have been

cheaper and easier, since all the necessary resources would have been close at hand,” said Bumgarner.

From the inception, she was compelled to look inward, carefully considering her motives and the value of creating work in a place so closely tied to her own identity. Through this process, she describes a renewed investment in creating thoughtful representations of the Appalachia she knows.

“I wanted it to be a very local film, including cast and support crew. Set in 1997, the film, “Meadow Bridge,” features a young girl who wants to meet the band Hanson.” Bumgarner even cast her lead character from the high school she attended.

Bumgarner is working continued...

Grandma Nelsey (actress: Penny Mobley) and Darcy (actress: Micah Gilkerson) prepare for a scene where they feed some hungry dogs in the town, filmed at Bumgarner’s uncle’s house. Photo by Shane Pierce.

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Alumni Newsletter

Filming the grocery store scene, in “Meadow Bridge,” when a popular girl from school sees the lead character, Darcy, using food stamps.

Photo by Sarah Smith.

On the set of Meadow Bridge, in Fayette County, West Virginia. Director Tijah Bumgarner talks with lead actress Micah Gilkerson (Darcy) and supporting actress Mahala Fox (Kendra) about the scene.

Photo by Sinisa Kukic.

Bumgarner story continued...

on a Ph.D. dissertation about contemporary art and cultural production in Appalachia, especially the progress narrative—at a time when many are asking what a post-coal Appalachian cultural landscape looks like.

Exploring the creation of Appalachian identity as it occurs in the contemporary moment “must take into account a fuller understanding of the regions called Appalachia as real places,” she said.

“I begin with the notion of mapping and then discuss nineteenth-century writers who put stories forth that helped form the identity of the region. There’s this narrative of progress pushed by industrial culture, and then taken up

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by the coal industry,” said Bumgarner.

“The [identity of the] space, as constructed around coal, is in the landscape which becomes a physical quality in the cultural landscape [of those who live in

“I wanted it to be a very local film, including casting actors and some support crew. Set in 1997, the film, Meadowbridge, features a young girl who wants to meet the band Hanson,” said Bumgarner.

OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS

the region].”

“Then I bring in the idea of a post-coal Appalachia.”

As part of her research, she has interviewed contemporary voices, including poet Crystal Good, writer Scott McLanahan, photographer Roger May and other artists doing work in West Virginia. “I wanted to take a look at the different perspectives people took in this space. I’m attempting to make sense of identity and representation and avoid the stereotypes,” said Bumgarner.

Fall 2016

Photo courtesy of Monico Gontovnik.

COLOMBIAN SCHOLAR, POET AND PERFORMER MONICA GONTOVNIK Monica Gontovnik (Ph.D. 2014) is a poet, choreographer, stage director and performer, who teaches in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the Universidad del Norte, in Barranquilla, Colombia.

For this artist-scholar, the notion of identity is at the center of her scholarly research and her creative practice. Gontovnik described one current project in which she is “performing the archives,” a kind of performancebased investigation into personal history and contemporary identity.

In April, Gontovnik invited the poet Rita Gabis to Colombia.

The two share an uneasy family lineage—Gabis’s grandfather was implicated in the deaths of

Jewish families, including some of Gontovnik’s during World War II. The poets held a public discussion about seeking peace between second generation victims and perpetrators, a timely subject in Colombian public discourse.

Her ethnographic research, in which she explores the work of dozens of contemporary Colombian artists, hinges on a central question, “What’s the strength of the woman?”

“My work has always been about femininity in the arts— about what it means to be a woman and an artist—I really wanted to discover what other women artists felt and thought about their identities in my

home country of Colombia,” said Gontovnik.

“I only talked about women I could speak with directly, those who I could meet with, from different fields in the arts—women in literature, photography, video, painting, poetry, dance and theater,” she said. “so I met with each of them, listened to their experiences, and looked at their work. I wanted to find out how they performed their identity through the work they do. Performing identity means becoming something else— because once you’re marked as a woman, that brings a lot of assumptions to your identity.”

In her dissertation, “Another Way of Being: The Performative Practices of Contemporary Female Colombian Artists,” Gontovnik demonstrates a life-long dedication to, and experience in, the performing and literary arts. Between 19952000 she was artistic director of continued...

Gontovnik, (on far left) circa 1983, has been a cultural figure in her native city of Barranquilla, Colombia for thirty years. Between 1982 and 1997 she directed the Kore Dance Theatre, an all-women group that experimented with original movement for the stage and alternative spaces. Photo by Enrique García.

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Alumni Newsletter Gontovnik story continued...

Class Notes: Ronald Jones (1981) has been appointed to the Harvard Graduate School, Master of Design Studies program in Art and the Public Domain, and is a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London.

Dan Dennis (2013) has been appointed artistic director of Ohio University’s newly opened Tantrum Theater in Dublin, Ohio.

the International Contemporary Dance Festival: Barranquilla Nueva Danza, and she directed the Koré Dance Theater for many years, bringing modern dance movement to events and alternative spaces in Colombia.

She recently introduced her seventh published book of poems, “SHIR (Canto en el umbral),” with a public performance and reading, and is actively involved in editing and managing the digital feminist magazine, La Falda of Huitaca.

gave her greater resilience to function in the academic world with all its idiosyncrasies and expectations.

At OHIO, Gontovnik worked closely with Professor Marina Peterson while completing her dissertation. “She was very strict on us to do the scholarly work, which was difficult, but it prepared me for many things that would come later,” she said.

Lily Wei (2014) has been appointed assistant professor of the arts at Chun Yuan Christian University in Taiwan.

Erin Schwartz (2014) has been appointed assistant professor of art history at Wenzhou-Kean University, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.

Matthew Conboy (2015) is the director of Start with Art: Pittsburgh, a program gifting original photographic prints from emerging artists, to every baby born at three hospitals in Pittsburgh, PA. [startwithartpgh.org]

Circa 1995, Gontovnik, (above & below), performed in the Kore Dance Theatre.

Photos by Juan Camilo Segura.

Andrew “Max” Tohline (2015) has been appointed assistant professor (tenure track), in the Department of Arts, Languages, and Philosophy, Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Nandaka Maduranga Kalugampitiya (2016) has been appointed lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.

Josh Ottum (2016) has been appointed assistant professor of commercial music (tenure track) at Bakersfield College, CA.

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“When I was researching doctoral programs—most of my life had been as an artist in the performing arts, as a poet and performer—I was looking for a program that would allow me to be both an artist and scholar at the same time,” she remarked.

And while there were challenges to accomplishing this, she maintains her experience

She has been on the faculty of the Humanities and Philosophy at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla since 2005, where she teaches courses in gender and contemporary culture, art history, art theory, and contemporary philosophy.

Fall 2016

Brian Harnetty, School of Interdisciplinary Arts alumnus (Ph.D. ‘14). Photo by Kevin Davison.

2016 CREATIVE CAPITAL AWARD RECOGNIZES ETHNOGRAPHIC SOUND RESEARCH Brian Harnetty is a sound artist and composer whose work connects sonic archives, performance, ecology and place.

The School of Interdisciplinary Arts alumnus (Ph.D. ‘14) recently received a 2016 Creative Capital grant—a highly competitive award supporting innovative and adventurous artist projects in development.

His award-winning project, which continues his decade long exploration of sound archives, combines field recordings, transcriptions, images, and historical recordings into newly re-contextualized sound collages.

One of 46 Creative Capital projects receiving support this year from the national arts funding organization, Harnetty’s work “Shawnee, OH” was commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and is currently being developed for a live performance premiere later in the year.

This year’s Creative Capital

awardees were selected from approximately 2,500 applications nation-wide, with the help of curators, consultants, and arts professionals. Drawing on venture-capital principles, the organization is known for seeking out artist projects that are bold, innovative and genrestretching, and then providing the tools the artists need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers.

“Shawnee, OH” fits into a practice considered “sonic ethnography,” the study of culture, people and place through sound. The work engages layers of history and memory with the sounds of mining, fracking, and of a town fighting to survive after a century of economic decline and environmental degradation.

“The award will help me develop the project further, to set up performances, and to help pay musicians to perform it with me. Creative Capital also works hard to help artists network with others and promote the work in larger cultural centers, and to national audiences,” said Harnetty, who was elated with his win.

A performance-based composition, “Shawnee, Ohio” grew out of his dissertation research completed in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts in 2014. The project considers the histories of South-Eastern Ohio, evoking place through sound, and juxtaposing the audible present alongside traces of the past.

“In 2010, I began studying in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts—my advisor was Marina Peterson, who was doing work with the Little Cities of Black Diamonds organization. I began an ethnographic study of this group’s archives, which eventually became a part of my dissertation.”

This study, of the sounds of Appalachian Ohio, informed in part by his family’s roots in the region, draws on oral histories from the Little Cities of Black Diamonds archives, combined with field recordings collected by Harnetty at various locations.

“What’s unique with his work is the emphasis on sound—his skillful listening—an extension of his own composition practice. This dovetails nicely into ethnography, the practice of listening and experiencing, engaging with a range of subjects, leading to a combination of research and creative work,” said Dr. Marina Peterson, associate professor, School of Interdisciplinary Arts.

Peterson added, “Harnetty’s Creative Capital grant is a validation of his project, bringing the significance of the history of this region to a wider view.”

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“Music has no national boundaries,” said Dr. Zong, “I was proud to visit Ohio University on behalf of Chinese and Japanese cultures.”

For the last 40 years, Ohio University has maintained a relationship with Chubu University in Japan. For the first time, an exchange scholar has been hosted in the field of fine arts.

Dr. Garrett Field, assistant professor of ethnomusicology, coordinated this year’s visit by Dr. Ting Ting Zong, a music scholar and musician from Japan who spent six weeks living and working in Athens.

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