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September 22, 1998
RELEASE ON RECEIPT
Oberlin
One of Only Two Colleges Nationwide Awarded a Henry Luce
Foundation Grant
Media
Contact: Marci
Janas
OBERLIN, OHIO --A prestigious grant from The Henry Luce Foundation, providing up to $1 million in support, was recently awarded to Oberlin College. The grant will fund a new professorship--the Henry R. Luce Professorship in the Emerging Arts--for six years; thereafter, it is renewable for up to three years. A national search committee, to be convened by President Nancy S. Dye, will select the Luce Professor during the coming year.
According to Clayton Koppes, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Oberlin is ideally suited for the position "because of its rich traditions of arts education. Oberlin's world-class Conservatory and Allen Memorial Art Museum, its nationally-recognized programs in art history and studio art, creative writing, theater and dance, and its student artistic initiatives and collaborations in all of the musical, fine and performing arts," Koppes said, "are unmatched by any other American college and equaled by few universities."
Oberlin is one of only two colleges in the United States this year to receive a grant from the Luce Professorship Program. Established in 1969, the program encourages academic innovation and creativity through integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research in American private higher education.
"The Luce Professorship will enable Oberlin faculty and students to lead in the creation of a new artistic language for the 21st century," said dean of the Conservatory Karen Wolff. "This language will reflect the converging styles, cultures, art forms and technologies of our time. The prospects are exciting."
The need for the "new artistic language" to which Wolff refers is a direct result of the rapidly shifting influence advancing technology has had upon the arts. In its proposal to the
Luce Foundation, Oberlin explained that the proliferation of digital imagery, computer-generated sound, video footage and audio clips presents the public with aesthetic experiences as startlingly new to us as the introduction of photography and sound recording were to those living in the nineteenth century.
The program funded by the Luce Foundation was devised by a committee of faculty and staff chaired by David Love, Associate Vice President for Research and Development, that included Professor of Art William Hood, Associate Professor of Computer Music and New Media Richard Povall, Professor of Philosophy Norman Care, Director of Foundation and Corporate Support Pamela Snyder, Assistant Professor of Art Lynn Lukkas, and Deans Koppes and Wolff. A visit to campus by representatives of the Luce Foundation featured discussions with students active in interdisciplinary arts creation and performance, and with faculty and staff from the Conservatory of Music, Allen Memorial Art Museum, and the departments of Art, English, Philosophy and Theater and Dance.
"Just as the camera reinvented the way we think we see, and proposed new standards for what we see as "reality," said Professor Hood, "so, too, film and video have made it possible for visual artists to use modes of seeing that are simply unprecedented in the world's art because they are time-based without being captives of real time."
"Unprecedented modes of seeing" require new interdisciplinary models of arts education and intellectual frameworks for examining the criticism, theory, ethics and aesthetics of new modes of making art. They require an entirely new sort of arts curriculum. How do we prepare for the new models made possible by technology? How do we study them? Critique them? Interpret them? What aesthetics do we apply to them? What ethics? These are the issues that the scholar chosen to be the Henry R. Luce Professor in the Emerging Arts will need to address. He or she will be charged with:
- developing and teaching new interdisciplinary courses designed to provide a theoretical framework for the emerging arts;
- conducting seminars for faculty from the various art disciplines and the humanities, with the goal of developing a shared understanding of and curricula
- for the new interdisciplinary arts courses; and
- strengthening the arts community as a whole at Oberlin by identifying talented, emerging artists and providing an intellectual context for their work.
Although digital technology and electronic media have been integral in art-making and comprise the initial focus of Oberlin's project, the Luce Professorship will actually have a wider scope. The term "emerging arts" is key to understanding that the scholarship and teaching of the Luce Professor will continue to follow and address future directions in art-making, whatever they might be.
The Oberlin College Conservatory of Music is America's first conservatory of music, and remains the only major music school in the United States devoted primarily to the education of undergraduate musicians. "The Conservatory, the rich and diverse arts programs in the College and the more than 11,000 objects in the Allen Memorial Art Museum's superb permanent collection," said Koppes, "will provide a fertile training ground for these emerging arts. Oberlin will be an extraordinary 'laboratory' for the scholar selected to be the Luce Professor."
