Grants

Grants to Faculty

SUSAN DEVER

Susan Dever, assistant professor of media arts, presented a portion of her manuscript, "Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas," at the first of a three-year series of Canadian film festival/conferences on the cinema of the hemisphere.

She also will use her grant to travel to Mexico to conclude research on that manuscript, which charts a north-to-south influence in New Mexican and Latin American cinema. On this trip, Dever intends to begin research on a new book that will look at how diverse art worlds influence today's film styles.

BILL GILBERT

A grant for Bill Gilbert, associate professor of art and art history, enabled him to complete a video about the potters of Mata Ortiz, Mexico. The video, which records the pottery movement that has transformed a village, also presents the thoughts of its major potters about their relationship to their art.

The video will be in two exhibitions of the Mata Ortiz potters, one this summer at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, which Gilbert will curate.

Juan Quezada of Mata Ortiz, Mexico,
demonstrates forming a pot.

JOHN MALOLEPSY

John Malolepsy, professor of theatre and dance, used his grant to attend a workshop on the technology of show control systems, which can coordinate production aspects of live entertainment.

Following the Orlando workshop, Malolepsy, who is in charge of the department's design program, began developing new curricula incorporating this technology for advanced students in the arts.

Dance professor Jennifer Predock-Linnell has created an original dance/video which was performed this spring. Her grant-funded project continues an ongoing interest in how the live experience of dance performance can co-exist with virtual images of video. The piece explores various questions of dislocation and displacement.

Grants to Students

Fine Arts students are using research and creative work grants from the Arts Technology Center (ATC) and the Arts of the Americas Institute to explore memories, analyze scores, create collective experiences and document elders.

WENDY FLORY

A first-year painting and drawing graduate student, Wendy Flory will use an ATC grant to explore distortions of visual reference and memory in relation to landmarks and a sense of place. A handheld digital video camera will allow her to capture footage that will function as source material for her works in paint. the final product will be a multi-media installation designed to increase the dialogue between the disciplines of arts and sciences.

KELLY HIRAI

With an ATC grant, Kelly Hirai, a senior in music, will apply computer analysis to Morton Feldman's The King of Denmark. He will encode the score's content into a searchable database and write algorithms that could yield cutting-edge research in music theory and analysis. Hirai will be looking for approaches to understand how people hear music and how it is composed.

SARAH SPENGLER

Sarah Spengler categorizes found objects according to an archaeological scheme and constructs images for viewing via microfiche reader. With her ATC grant, the graduate student in photography will use video cameras to transfer the view from each microfiche to television monitors in an adjacent room, allowing a collective experience. Spengler says each item is a sentence element and participants construct its meaning together.

MARCY LOPEZ-WOOTEN

A junior inart and art history, Marcy Lopez-Wooten is the first student recipient of a grant from the Arts of the Americas Institute. Through portraiture and conversations, Lopez-Wooten will document the living legacies of the Hispainc population of New Mexico's upper Rio Grande Valley. The lives and families of the subjects will be intertwined with the histories of their land to create a visual and textual narrative.

finearts@unm.edu