CAS Faculty Grants


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Faculty Grants Funding was awarded for projects that reflect the mission of the Center to bring artists and humanists together to inquire into the role of the arts in societies, to examine the impact of arts on social change as well as the importance of historical events for the evolution of the arts, and to create new work, through practice, publications, exhibitions, performances, or projects.

2006-07 Grant Recipients

Edith Balas Professor of Art History	The Hoka-Néni Symphony This multimedia performance is a symphony inspired by a series of paintings and their interpretation. The series of paintings, entitled Hoka-Néni, is the work of Valentin Lustig, a Hungarian-Romanian artist residing in Switzerland. Its subject is the life and temptations of an ordinary housewife from Cluj in Transylvania, who faced persecution in WWII. The music is to be written by Eduardo Alonso-Crespo, an Argentine composer. The seven paintings, narrating a coherent story, will be shown one by one on a large screen, while the audience listens to music inspired by and composed for the paintings and reads an interpretation of the paintings.

Andrew Johnson Associate Professor of Art	PED.Rio PED.Rio is the sixth incarnation of interactive, community-responsive projects developed by PED, a collective co-founded with artists Millie Chen and Paul Vanouse in 2001. Invited to participate in FILE-Rio 2007, the Electronic Language Festival in Rio de Janeiro, the project is based at the Telemar Cultural Center and included in the exhibition catalogue. PED.Rio will use tandem bicycles in pedal-activated guided tours that engage riders in the historical, material and cultural connections between the two hemispheres of North and South America.

Osman Khan Visiting Assistant Professor of Art	Return to Sender The project Return to Sender will reconstitute ‘limbs’ out of junk mail (unwanted/unsolicited paper mail) and attach these ‘limbs’ back onto trees whose branches have been cut. The project is an exploration of consumerism in light of ecological and environmental concerns erstwhile offering a recycling response that is more provocation than solution to current green and sustainable practices. The project also hopes to engage various neighborhoods and residents in shared participation of construction and installation of the limbs.

Jon Rubin Assistant Professor of Art	Tent Show TV Tent Show TV is a storefront for the research, production and exhibition of experimental video works that are based entirely on the surounding Garfield/Friendship neighborhood. Exploring the neighborhood as a complex social, physical and economic eco-system, works produced through TSTV will be exhibited and distributed through its neighborhood storefront, programmed onto Pittsburgh Cable Television, and presented and archived on the TSTV website. Ideally, this will be the pilot for an institution that can move nomadically throughout Pittsburgh, each season relocating to a new neighborhood and storefront while maintaining its context-specific approach.

Beryl Schlossman Professor of French and Francophone Studies	Art, History, and Images of the Feminine in Baudelaire's Paris Art, History, and Images of the Feminine in Baudelaire's Paris provides a central theoretical focus for a major application of comparative and historical techniques for the study of European literature, art, and culture. The goal is to enhance the understanding of early French modernism through an interdisciplinary approach to Baudelaire's use of visual images in his literary art. The project will explore the relationship between Baudelaire's works and the fine arts, and Baudelaire's impact on modernism. It will examine the influence of French literature and culture on theory in light of Walter Benjamin's theoretical treatment of Baudelaire and Paris during the Second Empire.

2005-06 Grant Recipients

Omer Akin	Can Architects Write Architectural education is significantly influenced by writings of name architects featured in course syllabi, trade journals, and public lectures. The most influential examples of these also reveal troubling weaknesses. These writings, affectionately known as archibabble, are often full of unhelpful pontification, insoluble rhetorical riddle, and plain old bad English. Thus, these extremely talented name architects end up misleading their enthusiastic followers, including students and beginning professionals, who are placed in the unenviable position of choosing between hero worship and reason. This project is aimed at judging the value of several key architects’ writings through syntax and content analysis. Findings will be included in a public lecture entitled “I am not Rem Koolhaas.”

Robert Cavalier	Hosting a Campus Deliberative Poll on "The Role of the Arts at CMU" Like civil society at large, the campus community forms its own society. This proposal seeks to create the conditions for our campus to reflect upon the role of the Arts at CMU and to develop informed opinions on the relevance and importance of the Arts within our own community. Using the protocols of deliberative polling, we propose to host a “Campus Conversation” examining, for instance, the role of arts and performers on this campus, the impact of the arts on Carnegie Mellon – including the impact of controversial displays or performances – and the future prospects for supporting the arts at Carnegie Mellon.

Kenya Dworkin	CASA CUENTOS CASA CUENTOS is a one-person, mobile videotaping, image scanning, memory-mapping and interviewing unit (a ‘mobile home’ or casa), modeled loosely on StoryCorps. Its purpose is to visit and set up at community events, people’s homes, and commercial or recreational spaces to establish dialogues between people on their community experiences via images through time. The ultimate goal of CASA CUENTOS is to edit and produce short videos that create/present a multilayered vision of and for West Tampa, Florida, that includes the private vision of artists and developers as well as that of community individuals (old, young, newly arrived, long-term residents) for the ‘imagined and real community’ of West Tampa.

Clayton Merrell	Oaxaca, Oaxaca (Wahaka, Wahaka) Clayton Merrell will travel to Oaxaca, Mexico to meet with local artists and cultural organizations. First, he will extend the photographic project titled Chiapas through the Obsidian Mirror, photographing reflections on the surface of an obsidian disk to create dark and distorted panoramas that are essentially pictures of the problems of seeing while traveling. Second, he will lay the groundwork for an exchange project between graduate students in the CMU School of Art and young Mexican artists from Oaxaca. This project will culminate in collaborative exhibitions in Pittsburgh and Oaxaca.

Suzie Silver	1968 (Remix) 1968 (Remix) is a live audio-visual performance collage using sounds and images from 1968 to explore the inherent contradictions of this tumultuous year that produced global rebellions, 2001: A Space Odyssey and People Got To Be Free, as well as, Twiggy, Barbarella and Yummy, Yummy, Yummy. Using computers and software and traditional video hardware (DVD players and a video mixer) this performance will result in live dynamically cut and mixed video projections. The premiere performance takes place at the (1968) A Symposium at the Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College on April 8, 2006. Subsequent performances will take place in Pittsburgh, New York City and possibly other cities.

Christopher Sperandio	DWYN (translated from Welsh for "to take back") Cardiff, an ancient capital and port city, is a hub of gaming. Although video gaming now dwarfs Hollywood, young adults are returning to card games as a pastime, perhaps for a type of interaction that PlayStation can’t simulate. Our project is based in Welsh history, made with Welsh historians, language experts and game enthusiasts. Based in this research across cultural boundaries, the game is a bi-lingual re-imagining of Wales, a country undergoing a revolution through their reincorporation of the once-forbidden Welsh language into contemporary life.

Fabian Winkler	Waves Waves is an interactive sound installation using buoys to make playful connections between water waves and sound waves both metaphorically and technically. Specially prepared buoys swaying on the water’s surface create unique, distinctively electronic sounds shaped by the energy of waves. The project will be exhibited in public wading pools in Toronto, Canada in the summer of 2006, encouraging social interactions and musical collaboration between visitors in otherwise rather anonymous inner-city spaces. The buoys’ electronic sounds mix with the well-known layers of urban sounds such as footsteps, traffic, airplanes, pigeons and constantly changing sound compositions.

2004-05 Grant Recipients

Eric Anderson	Unlocking the Visual Mind Unlocking the Visual Mind explores a learning model to engage underserved African-American boys in designing product concepts that address social needs. Shaped into a one-week summer experience, participants will learn to think, understand, create, and communicate complex ideas through visualization tools and methodologies that I have developed. Collaboration will be done with the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., a community service organization of professional African-American men and will use their fraternity center located in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. This program will serve as a pilot with the goal of generating a sustainable summer program to enhance visual literacy and strengthen critical thinking.

Kim Beck	Growth "Growth" explores the development and spread of a mass-produced utilitarian architecture on the American landscape - namely, the storage shed. Kim Beckwill begin the preparation for a larger sculptural project based on this form. Specifically, the grant will enable her to create a set of CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings and build an architectural model for the project. Exploring issues of place, displacement, movement and the built environment, the project is situated at the crossroads of art and architecture. An explicit exploration of sculptural form, this project will offer an implicit, and necessary, socio-political critique of a pervasive structure marking the American landscape.

Nathan Martin	MapHub MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group map. The purpose of MapHub is to explore the introduction of a geographic and historical data sharing application in an urban landscape. MapHub is a peoples' map - a map of an urban geography determined not by traditional methodology but instead by the members who participate and contribute everyday in the experience of urban life. We will use the in development MapHub system to create both a public installation and a phone/web accessible database to monitor public transit timetables.

Brandon McWilliams / Anne Mundell	Growing Theater Growing Theater engages students and mentors in the development of a collaborative theater experience. Through Mentor Role Modeling, Growing Theater uses drama as a medium to expose students to a supportive learning environment that is shared, creative, confident, patient and respectful. Growing Theater Mentors will broaden middle school students' personal and professional outlooks by guiding them through this theatrical process.

Carrie Schneider	From Allegheny to Woolslair From Allegheny to Woolslair: documenting Pittsburgh's Public Elementary Schools is a photographic survey of one fourth-grade classroom from each of the 53 Pittsburgh Public Elementary Schools. Carrie Schneider will photograph each classroom from a frontal, teacher's-eye perspective, to document the grid of desks that physically charts the demographics of each school and its larger community. This formal approach highlights the similarities, differences and potential inequities present among schools and provides a visual cross-sampling of one of the most influential institutions in the City of Pittsburgh.

Fereshteh Toosi	Wanted Wanted is a performance combining live action, video projection and shadow puppetry to illustrate fictional childhood encounters between female political figures, pairing Emma Goldman with Frances Folsom Cleveland and Angela Davis with Condoleeza Rice. The past will be presented with archival film footage and quotes from texts written by and about the women. The structure of the performance will allow for interactive audience participation by combining invisible theater techniques and more traditional object-based theater. Open to the general public but targeted towards teenage audiences, WANTED will visit various venues in Pittsburgh and neighboring states, accompanied by discussion forums.

Fabian Winkler	Karakui TV Karakui TV is an art project investigating early Japanese automata (also called "Karakuri") and their changing social and cultural significance. In this project, robotic systems are connected to TV sets via RCA cables and use the TV signal as a novel audio-visual protocol for robotic control. They robotic systems are stimulated by the TV signal and in turn are able to alter it. In a new form of the 1970's closed circuit TV loop, Karakui TV provides us with a critical interpretation of our own audio-visual culture. The project will be realized as a group project with the help of five students from the School of art. It was invited to participate in TRANSIT 2005, an international exhibition as part of the World Expo 2005 in Nagoya, Japan in September this year.
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	2007-08 grant recipients