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Arts Research Institute broadens its funding impact

By Christina Waters, Ph.D, ARI Administrator

Since its inception, the Arts Research Institute (ARI) has invested more than $600,000 in the research and creative projects initiated by Arts Division faculty. Practicing artists and theoreticians from the departments of Theater Arts, Music, Film and Digital Media, History of Art and Visual Culture, and Studio Art are currently embarked on two dozen, wide-ranging projects, supported with ARI research funds. Here’s a sample trio.

Bulgarian musician Todor Kirov and UC Santa Cruz Music Professor David Evan Jones. The Arts Research Institute provided funds for Jones’ three-month sojourn through Bulgaria and Spain to gather material and experiment with musical traditions for a new CD. (Photo by Inbal Yassur.)

Jones’ sojourn to Bulgaria and Spain inspires new CD
A three-month sojourn in Bulgaria and Spain has provided Music Professor David Evan Jones the on-site material and experimentation with ethnic musical traditions for a new CD of regionally inspired chamber music. The sources for his compositions will range from Bulgarian folk music to collaborations in Barcelona.

"To work collaboratively with a musician from another culture is to become a beginner again while retaining one's expertise,” Jones emails from Spain. “I find the virtuosity and musicality of traditional Bulgarian musicians such as gadulka player Todor Kirov both humbling and inspiring. For me the challenge is to write music that not only draws upon but also integrates elements of our differing cultures.”

ARI provides $20,000 for interventionist celebration, May 15-17
The ARI has provided $20,000 for two-year planning and production support to the cross-disciplinary, multi-site interventionist celebration, Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice. This project was initiated by arts faculty Elizabeth Stephens and Dee Hibbert-Jones.

The unprecedented UCSC campus collaborative arts event will bring together dozens of faculty, students and staff, who will join with interventionist and performance artists arriving from all over the world. What will unfold during the three-day conference, performance and exhibition series involves using humor, surprise and unexpected associations to question commonly held assumptions about the world around us. Interventionist participants - including students, artists and scholars - will be involved in real-time collaborations and exchanges in the form of performance encounters, seminars, panels, hands-on workshops and exploratory arts events.

UCSC campus events will occur mainly in and around Porter College and the Sesnon Gallery (http://arts.ucsc.edu/sesnon/). Other regional institutions including the LAB, San Francisco (http://www.thelab.org/), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Jose (http://www.sjica.org/) and the Santa Cruz Film Festival (http://www.santacruzfilmfestival.com) will host companion exhibitions and films.

The Intervene! Interruupt! website (http://may2008.artintervention.org/) provides a detailed glimpse of the activities planned for May 15-17, 2008. Registration for this groundbreaking creative experience is free.

ARI grants help support Visual and Performative Studies programming
Visual and Performative Studies (VPS) has been an interdisciplinary research force on the UCSC campus for more than a decade, and for the last four years, underwritten in large part by ARI grants, it has served as a collaborative research and programming “think tank” for faculty and graduates from 13 departments. In its topical seminar series VPS engages those on campus involved in the broad fields that converge in the terms Visual Studies and Performance Studies, including visuality and performativity in the media of images, artifacts, texts, and performances. Publications, papers, and conferences have resulted consistently.

Developing the 2007-08 theme, Visual Histories/Performance Histories, participants will probe the intersections between the two knowledge areas — How do performances and images signify past time? — in writing about the past, its events, artifacts, and images. The seminars feature outstanding scholars who present current work on topics related to visualities and performativities and their theorization.

Fall 2007 speakers include Thierry de Duve, University of Lille III, "The Invention of Non-Art" and "The Post-Duchamp Deal;" Anne Wagner, UC Berkeley, "Behaving Globally;" Tom Cummins, Harvard University and Getty Research Institute, "Genesis and Genre: On Becoming a Portrait in the Americas in the 16th Century."

In Spring 2008, ARI funding will help VPS bring such invited speakers as Ales Erejavec, Slovenia; Wessel Krul, The Netherlands; Michael Taussig, Columbia University; and Judith Rodenbeck, Sarah Lawrence College.

Please contact Christina Waters at xtina@ucsc.edu for more information about how you can support the efforts of the ARI.