FEATURES

The Benefits of International Engagement

Faculty are key to defining global citizenship for colleagues and students. Their ongoing engagement with international exhibitions, participation in conferences, help in establishing institutional linkages, and work on sustained research projects, all extend A&D’s reach and community in powerful and lasting ways.

Participating in Exhibitions

Over the past few years faculty have exhibited work on six of the seven continents (only Antarctica eluded our reach), including biennials in New Zealand, China, Hungary, and South Africa; solo exhibitions in China, Norway, and Israel; and group exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Scotland, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Argentina.

Attending Conferences

A growing number of faculty are attending international conferences to present papers, serve on panels, or demonstrate current projects. Through their participation they expand their, and the School’s, networks and broadcast the talents of A&D faculty. Faculty have recently participated in conferences in Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Boznia, Prague, Germany, and Spain, among many others.

Setting up Institutional Relationships

With support from A&D alumna Ann Aikens and her husband, Bob, faculty also travel for the School to help establish new educational relationships with other colleges and universities. Faculty have been instrumental in establishing new institutional relationships with schools in Scotland, Denmark, Iceland, Costa Rica, Australia, Peru, Italy, Chile, Turkey, Surinam and Norway.

Faculty Research

Perhaps most important, many faculty members have developed sustained research relationships with international communities and individuals.

These relationships are key because they extend over time, and because their impact is felt not only in their home countries, but in creative communities across the world when work is shared through exhibition, installation or publication. These efforts also inform the A&D learning culture, allowing faculty to guide students as they make their own connections with the world community.

A sampling of these projects includes:

North Korea

Koryo Saram - The Unreliable People is a one hour documentary film co-directed by A&D Associate Professor Y. David Chung and Matt Dibble. Over years of research, Chung gathered together information and images on Stalin’s 1937 campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcible deportation of those of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of Far East Russia near the border of North Korea. The story of the journey of these 180,000 Koreans, (designated by Stalin as an “unreliable people”) from their homes in Far East Russia to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away, is the central focus of this film.

David Chung

Mexico

Assistant Professor Phoebe Gloeckner was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a graphic narrative about a Mexican girl murdered at the turn of this century in Ciudad Juarez, a major U.S.-Mexico border crossing adjacent to El Paso, Texas where Gloeckner has (so far) made over 10 trips to conduct research. The project also represents a radical change in her method of work, Gloeckner says. “Rather than draw images, I have developed a three-dimensional technique, teaching myself to use tools and to construct nearly everything I would normally draw.”

Phoebe Gloeckner

Poland

In 2008 Associate Professor Hannah Smotrich (in collaboration with anthropologist Erica Lehrer of Concordia University and sound artist and A&D Assistant Professor, Stephanie Rowden) completed a bilingual, participatory public art installation at the 18th Jewish Cultural Festival held annually in Krakow. This piece, Entitled, “Odpowiedz... Please Respond,” allowed festival goers to pause, reflect and converse via written notes and audio interviews on the many questions surrounding Jewish heritage in Poland today.

Hannah Smotrich

South Africa

Over a span of 15 years, Professor Edward West has maintained an ongoing research engagement with South Africa, first for the photographic project, Casting Shadows, when following the dismantling of apartheid, West traveled to townships and informal settlements across the country to represent South Africa’s communities of color. The project results were shared with the University community through a solo exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the publication of a monograph. Most recently West has returned to Cape Town to complete one part of a three-tiered transnational project on mixed race communities. Other locations for the project include Hawaii and Cuba.

Edward West

Palestine & Israel

Born and raised in Israel, Assistant Professor Tirtza Even’s current work represents the complex and sometimes extreme social/political dynamics of sites in Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others. Her most recent international project, Once Wall or Ripple Remains, focuses on encounters in 1998 in the occupied territory of Palestine. Spanning more than seven years to date, the project uses a wide range of media (from single channel video, CD-ROM, website, to written text, 3-D animation, and interactive installation) to examine the shifting record that is memory and media.

Edward West