OBERLIN, OH--How can academia prepare students to enter the arts professions when today's artists can choose to be mystics or engineers, pranksters, activists, entertainers, satirists, techno’ wizards, healers, nihilists, comics, rabble rousers, preachers, and more?

That is a question that international art curator and author Linda Weintraub will explore in a talk titled "Free Radicals: Emerging Artists in Academe" to be presented October 25 at Oberlin College.

Weintraub is Oberlin’s first Henry R. Luce Professor in the Emerging Arts. The new professorship has been funded for a period of six years by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

"Preparing students to make contributions to the arts in today's techno-logically enhanced and genre-crossing environment demands new, interdisciplinary models of arts education and an exploration of the intellectual framework supporting it," explains the Luce professor.

"A limitless inventory of alternatives is now included within the creative act. Participants in any of today's art-related disciplines confront a tumultuous array of options that tease and stretch the traditional constructs of their professions. Artistic possibilities are as bountiful as they are eclectic and chaotic."

The Emerging Arts program seeks to examine the concepts, ethics and aesthetics of the moment and aspires to bridge contemporary art making with academic scholarship. Toward that end, Weintraub is teaching a fall semester course titled "Creative Options in the Contemporary Arts."

She also is at work curating Exquisite Corpos: The Marriage of Music and Art, both as a touring exhibition and as a book. This year her exhibition The Art or Body Crafting opens an international tour in Santiago, Chile.

In addition, she is writing Creative Options for Contemporary Artists, a book that discusses the challenge of preparing students to define their roles within the emerging arts as well as an experimental narrative that traces the relationship between a mythic "curator" and a mythic "artist."

Her other writing includes Painted Bodies of the Americas, (Harry N. Abrams 1999), and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s, (Art Insights1996, 4^th ed.), plus numerous catalogues and articles.