Announcement: Performing Blackness Symposium Today!

The Department of Theatre and Dance’s Performance as Public Practice program and John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series will host a discussion today of Charles O. Anderson/dance theatre X’s TAR, with conversation about Black dance, producing Black art, and the role of art in generating social change. The symposium will take place in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre in the Winship Building on the UT campus from 1:30-5:00p.m.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Thomas Frantz, Professor of African and African American Studies/Dance/Theatre Studies, Duke University

Featured Panelists:
Ms. China Smith, Founder and Executive Artistic Director, Ballet Afrique, Austin
Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, UT Austin
Dr. Michael Winship, Professor, Department of English, The University of Austin

The symposium is in conjunction with two public performances of dance theatre X’s TAR on April 12 and 13 at 8:00 p.m. in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre. Both performances are free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

Conference Preview: The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary

Today we continue our series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference with a look at another one of the great panels we have in store–”The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary.”

Photograph by Andrew Jones

“The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary” is composed of papers that consider the relationship between space, place and literature, art, activism, and identity construction. This panel will take place on Thursday, April 4 from 2:15p.m. – 3:45p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room.

• Vinh Nguyen & Alma Salcedo, “Post-Antebellum Spaces and Places at the University of Texas at Austin: From Lost Cause to Student Activism, Plot of the Land and Sites of Resistance”
• Paul Gansky, “Creosote and Electricity: Telecommunications, Art, and the United States”
• Julia Traylor, “‘I Wanted My Tiara, Damn It’: Drag Royalty in Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties”
• Valerie Henry, “Cattle or Wheat:  Spatial Imaginings and the Production of Local Knowledge in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don”
• L.E. Neal, “The Music of Class Mobility:  Identity Construction in Emerging Western Swing and the Texas Centennial”

This conference is free and open to the public. Conference registration (and refreshments!) begin Thursday April 4 at 1:00p.m. in the Texas Union, 3.128 Sinclair Suite. Stay tuned for more sneak peeks!

Alumni Voices: Dr. David Wharton, Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

Today we share some insights from Dr. David Wharton, the Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade, Texas (2000) and will release Small Town South, a collection of photographs of the south, in Fall 2012. In addition, a selection of his photographs can be found at his website.

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

The work I do now, both my teaching as a member of University of Mississippi faculty and my personal photographic work, have been directly informed by the graduate work I did at UT.  As a teacher, I demand that students search beyond the obvious to discover deeper meanings in nearly all things cultural.  I learned this, not always happily at the time, from seminars with Professors Goetzmann and Crunden.  Goetzmann knew intuitively that everything was connected to just about everything else and took delight in showing us how.  Crunden insisted that we constantly dig deeper and that we think clearly all the while.  Jeff Meikle’s quiet good humor assured us that we could be both good scholars and good people, while Bill Stott’s grand embrace of a broad spectrum of ideas gave us intellectual license to roam.  I try to incorporate all of these qualities into my teaching.  Occasionally I succeed and that makes me feel good.

As a photographer whose work lives in the gray area between art and documentary, I am also able to credit my grad school years.  While working on my MFA in the Art Department, Mark Goodman and Lawrence McFarland made me wrestle with the complicated relationship between photography and reality.  The AMS doctoral program demanded that I steep myself in the study of America’s past and present (something I had managed to avoid as an undergraduate) for several years, but then set me free to do whatever I wanted.  That was a vote of confidence I am thankful for to this day.  It propelled me into completing a photographic/ethnographic/historical dissertation on a small bit of rural culture that was eventually published in book form: The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).  I continue to work in a similar vein, traveling throughout the American South to photograph various aspects of rural and small town culture.  Another book of photographs—Small Town South—will be published this fall (see www.gftbooks.com for more information).  I truly believe that my UT graduate school experiences opened these intellectual doors for me and gave me the confidence to walk through them.

Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?

Do something you truly care about—not something you think you should care about—but something you REALLY do care about.  Find a mentor who will support and encourage you but won’t insist that you do things his/her way.  Life’s too short to always be jumping through hoops.

Announcement: Digital Humanities Project, “The End of Austin,” Seeks Contributors

An end of Austin

Last year, we featured a fascinating digital humanities project, “The End of Austin,” that emerged from a graduate seminar led by Dr. Randy Lewis. This week, we’re pleased to share the news that a small editorial collective will be continuing the project and broadening their call for content to the community at large. Randy offers this call for contributions:

We are moving forward on the second issue of The End of Austin, a digital humanities project that explores the idea of endings in our fair city. We would love to have a contribution from you–a bit of writing, photos, video, art, a song, anything that somehow explores this idea that things are dying, ending, expiring, collapsing in the midst of our growth-obsessed sunbelt burg.

If you are curious, here is an article about the original project, and here is the first installment of the project.

We hope to do something bigger and wilder for issue number two. Our goal is to assemble something interesting, beautiful, meaningful, and disconcerting for release in early 2013. If you would like to contribute something, that’s wonderful. But also think about sharing this with friends, students, and colleagues who might be good at exploring this nexus of art, documentary and cultural geography broadly conceived.

If you have questions, comments, or a submission for the project, get in touch with the board at endofaustin (at) gmail (dot) com. And, again, the first installment can be found here.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Emily Roehl Brings “Nature’s Nation” to Austin on Friday

Today’s story comes from Ph.D. student Emily Roehl, who shares a glimpse of her Master’s thesis in a new artist book coming to Austin this Friday.

This summer has been like so many summers before it: full. For the past four years I have taught reading classes to students ranging from Kindergarteners to retirees, and I stay busy in my “downtime” with (what else?) part-time jobs. But for the past two summers, I have managed to squeeze in a little independent artist book publishing, and this summer—today, in fact—I am busily preparing for the release of my fifth book.

Previously on this blog, I have shared glimpses of the work I have done with Mystery Spot Books, an independent artist book publishing venture based in Austin and Minneapolis that produces small run artist books that explore ideas of land, site, history, tourism, and American material culture. Our fifth book, second eponymous, is Mystery Spot 2: Nature’s Nation, and it features the work of seven artists from Austin, Omaha, and Minneapolis. Last May, we successfully Kickstarted the project, raising funds through individual donations to print the book, and over the past week we have unveiled the finished product at launch events in Minneapolis and now Austin.

This book holds a special place in Mystery Spot Books’ growing catalogue for me, because this is the first time that portions of my Master’s thesis have appeared in print. My thesis is a multimedia project created on Prezi, and it has only lived in digital form over the past two years. In Nature’s Nation, I resurrect (so to speak) sections of narrative from the thesis about my grave, a plot of land I happen to own in rural Nebraska on the site of my great-great grandfather’s homestead. There’s nothing quite like death (one’s own, especially) to get the artistic juices flowing, and in a piece appropriately titled “six feet,” Chad Rutter and I pair words and images to communicate the range of attachments, positive and negative, that assemble at a site as emotionally charged as one’s own grave.

The most exciting thing about this book, however, is the amazing work contributed by the participating artists. All of our previous titles feature the work of Chad Rutter and myself. This is our most ambitious project yet; this time around, we are thrilled to present the work of Caleb Coppock, Paula McCartney, Kate Casanova, Lex Thompson, and Pamela Valfer. Placing all of this work in the same volume provides multiple perspectives, conceptual and aesthetic, on the landscape. Plus, the work is completely gorgeous.

Kate Casanova, from “Floating World”

To get a closer look at the new book and to peruse other Mystery Spot Books titles, join Emily at grayDUCK Gallery in South Austin on Friday, August 17 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Drinks and desserts will be served, and books will be available for purchase.

Grad Research: Bombs and Belvederes

Last week, I introduced a collaborative project that I’ve been working on for the past few years, Mystery Spot Books. This week, I submit another bit of writing from our first book, Mystery Spot Vol. 1, on buried cars in Tulsa and hydrogen bombs hiding in plain sight in New Mexico.

Image by Chad Rutter, Mystery Spot Vol. 1

Sandia Base was a field test area for nuclear weapons run by the U.S. government that operated from 1946 until 1971. The former test site lies southeast of Albuquerque amidst a seemingly unbroken expanse of dry mesas and their tributaries of dusty roads. In May of 1957, at what is now called the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site, a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb fell through the closed bay doors of a plane that was approaching Kirtland Air Force Base to the south. The plutonium pits were safely stored on the plane, but radioactive pieces of the bomb were scattered across the mesas. In 1996, the Center for Land Use Interpretation placed a descriptive marker at the site to commemorate the incident. The marker is a wooden post that stands in the middle of a field and holds a plaque describing the 1957 event. The Air Force cleaned up the site in secret, but if you visit the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site today, you can still find radioactive pieces of the hydrogen bomb hiding in the sagebrush.

Six hundred and fifty miles east of the Sandia Base, also in 1957, the city of Tulsa buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere in an underground bunker designed to withstand nuclear fallout. The car was a time capsule, slated to be unearthed during Oklahoma’s centennial celebration in 2007. The concrete enclosure was intended to protect the car from decay, but a defect in the design of the bunker allowed water to seep in over the years and severely damage the Belvedere. A second car, a Plymouth Prowler, was placed in an above ground vault in 1998 and will be sealed there until 2048. If you visit Tulsa in 2048, you might see a well-preserved 1998 Plymouth Prowler emerge from its sepulcher, or perhaps a design flaw will allow time to do its work on this time capsule as well.

Some things get buried so no one can find them; some things get buried so everyone remembers them. But things don’t always stay buried. What you find if you visit the Broken Arrow site or Tulsa, Oklahoma, is more than the radioactive scraps of a destroyed bomb or a bizarre representation of local pride. One way or another, things come to the surface, and what is revealed when they do is not simply the contradiction between what we hide and what we honor, but the fact that the latter is often a mask for the former.

Grad Research: Mystery Spot Books

One of the most exciting projects I have had the opportunity to work on in the past few years is a collaboration with an artist and good friend in Minneapolis. Due to our shared interest in cultural geography and the weird and wonderful tourist landscape, we began to create book-length publications that explore ideas of land, site, history, and American material culture. These publications are printed in limited editions of 100-250 and include photography, drawings, essays, documentation of site-specific installations, and other artifacts from our travels. We currently have four titles in print, made possible by a generous grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board. The following is a short piece I wrote for our first book project, Mystery Spot, which has become the first volume in an ongoing series.

Photograph by Chad Rutter, Mystery Spot Vol. 1

Preservation and Entropy

The Winchester mansion in San Jose, California, was once an eight-room farmhouse. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, purchased the property in 1884. By 1906, the year of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake, the house had grown into a seven-story mansion. After the earthquake it was reduced to its current four-story height, but construction continued for as long as Sarah Winchester was alive. It is said that on the day of her death in 1922, when carpenters heard the news, nails were left half-driven. In a house with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens, this is just one of the apocryphal stories that has accumulated at the four-acre property in the Silicon Valley.

Tours of the Winchester mansion are offered to the public every day of the year save Christmas. The preservation process, like the building process, is perpetual. 20,000 gallons of paint are required to cover the exterior of the house, and the painting process takes so long to complete that by the time work has finished it is time to begin again. Much of the woodwork and many of the original fixtures are cordoned off or behind glass, and various collections of period furniture have been brought in to replace Sarah Winchester’s belongings, which were auctioned off after her death. One wing of the house, however, has been kept empty and in the state of disrepair brought on by the 1906 earthquake. Here, as in the rest of the house, guide ropes and carpeted paths maintain the distance between visitors and the attraction. Unlike the rest of the house, however, these rooms are billed as a “frozen moment in time,” as if entropy itself could be preserved.

The Winchester tour guide monologue focuses on the peculiarities of the owner’s ever-changing and enigmatic design and on the incredible arithmetic of the house itself. But something is missing from the hour-long tour. The eight-room farmhouse that stood on the site in 1884 has been all but lost in the process of building and rebuilding. While standing in one of the mansion’s many kitchens toward the end of the tour, visitors are informed that they may be standing in a section of the house near where the farmhouse once stood, but the location and dimensions of the oldest rooms are unknown. In a house that was renovated upwards of 600 times, a set of steps and a sentence of tour monologue are all that remain to represent the original structure.

The Mystery Spot Books website is in the works, but you can get updates on new projects (and see more images from the books) here.

Grad Research: The End of Austin, a Collaborative Documentary Project

Here at AMS :: ATX, we’re – perhaps not surprisingly – huge fans of academic projects that engage with the digital realm in meaningful ways. We’re particularly excited by projects like the Archive of Childhood, which we featured last week, and other digital archives like these (among myriad others, naturally). Public access, multimedia, and interactivity all open up possibilities for innovation in research.

But what about digital academic work of a different sort – those that blend the creative and the scholarly on a digital platform?

American Studies and Occupy Wall Street

Since September 17, a large group of protesters has been convening in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street district to express their dissatisfaction with America’s financial system, corporate greed, and economic inequality.  Similar protests have sprung up in hundreds of cities worldwide (Austin included, naturally). Because these protests have been so widespread, we’re likely seeing the birth of a lasting social movement, one that will potentially have substantial political consequences. This is an important moment.

Watch This: Time Lapse of Migrant Mother (in pumpkin form!)

As any graduate student will tell you, free time to enjoy any kind of leisure activity is at a premium. Amidst catching up with work or preparing for upcoming work, though, it’s important to find a moment to decompress and do an activity that exercises a totally different part of one’s brain.

But sometimes those activities manifest as completely odd diversions that still have some relevance to our work in American Studies. Here, we present a video (and sort of an art project) by Carrie Andersen, whose love for working with her hands has manifested in a strange, infrequent hobby: carving intensely detailed pumpkins. Take a look at this time lapse video to see an icon of American photography and life take form in a somewhat unexpected way…