the ART of
COLLABORATION
The recent performance art event “What We Keep” brought together poets and visual artists for a valuable learning experience.
T
HE 15 CREATIVE WRITING students in Assistant Professor Julia Koets’ Graduate Poetry Workshop got an unusual assignment: Visit and interview nine master’s-level visual arts students who are creating sculptures, paintings and other artwork for their thesis projects. “Ask about their pieces, the materials they use, their process,” Koets instructed. “Find art that inspires you and write two ekphrastic poems” — poetry that responds to visual art. Koets’ students are in the Master of Fine Arts program in the English department at the College of Arts and Sciences. She teamed up with Associate Professor Noelle Mason in the newly renamed College of Design, Art and Performance, a short walk away at USF Tampa. Mason’s students were about to graduate with MFA degrees from the School of Art and Art History. But that’s just the beginning of this multidisciplinary collaboration, which resulted in “What We Keep,” a performance art event designed to appeal to a broad range of students while providing the poets and visual artists with valuable learning experiences. It worked. “There was a great crowd including many people I didn’t recognize, which was my hope,” Koets says. “An undergraduate engineering major came up to me after the
reading and asked, ‘Can you tell me about creative writing classes?’” The collaboration included the USF Contemporary Art Museum, which hosted the event earlier this year, with then-curator of education Leslie Elsasser, MFA ’07, coordinating and publicizing it throughout the USF community. WUSF Public Media’s Warren Buchholz, ’14, created a series of videos spotlighting the poetry readings for Arts Axis Florida. The spectators browsed the MFA thesis exhibition, “I Keep the Ladders Clean;” attended the outdoor poetry readings; and participated in a Q&A session. The poets also created a zine of their work. “I’ve been to poetry and fiction readings at other universities, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Bob Varghese, ’13, a graduate student in the poetry class. “I don’t know of any other university where they have a collaboration with so many areas to get the artwork out there. It’s one of the things that makes USF special.” It was the second year for the project, which aligns well with the museum’s mission, says Elsasser. “We’re a contemporary art museum and contemporary artists deal with contemporary issues,” she says. “Climate change, political situations, democracy, equality, sexuality — these things affect all of us. And art speaks about all of those things. It opens the doors to really big ideas and big conversations.”
To view WUSF’s videos from “What We Keep,” visit usf.to/WhatWeKeep, or scan the QR code.
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UNIVERSITY of SOUTH FLORIDA
Photos: DON FULLER / USF Contemporary Art Museum
By PENNY CARNATHAN, ’82, Life Member // USF Advancement