Letter from the Director

dear friends of the humanities institute,

I write to you from a time of pandemic and protest in which the humanities prove ever more urgent. Confined in our homes, we turn to literature and the arts to engage our minds and souls; confronting escalating violence, we learn from history and cultural studies about the legacies of past racist ideologies and the ways they shape our present. At the University of Michigan, we are confronting the inequities and injustices that persist in our own practices, and we plan for the Institute for the Humanities to be an active and committed partner in this endeavor as we use our programming to amplify antiracist voices, to promote a global perspective on antiracism, and to create an inclusive and safe environment where everyone can fully participate. We have already begun this work, as you’ll see in this report, and I look forward to reporting on our further efforts as we move forward.

As you probably know, the university campus closed in early March, and since that time we’ve been learning to teach, conduct business, and socialize online. No doubt you, too, have made similar adjustments, and I hope that you are staying safe and well.

We canceled institute events scheduled after March 10, and our graduate student and faculty fellows moved their weekly seminar online; the lively exchange that characterized their faceto-face interactions seemed to transfer quite well to the virtual form. We welcome a new cohort of eight faculty and eight graduate student fellows to the institute in August, and we will again be meeting virtually.

In addition to organizing the events that you can read about in this report, we’ve spent much of our year planning expanded programming for our gallery, made possible by a generous grant of $1.14M from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Mellon funding allows us to put in place consistent programming for each of our exhibitions, to expand our outreach more broadly in southeast Michigan, and to add two large exhibitions to our annual program.

For more than twenty years, the Institute for the Humanities Gallery has featured work that engages current social issues, provoking discussion and even debate both on campus and in the community. The gallery’s artists are identified by our visionary curator, Amanda Krugliak, with assistance from Juliet Hinely, our arts production coordinator. Stephanie Harrell plans and manages our many communications about exhibitions and related programming, Laura Koroncey is our graphic designer, Gretchen O’Hair manages travel logistics, and Sheri Sytsema-Geiger keeps us all on track. Angela Abiodun is our new outreach and coordination manager, and you can read more about her on page 10.

The gallery’s success also depends on the generosity of donors. Every other year, we feature a Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts. In 2019-20 the endowment supported our FebruaryMarch exhibition by Valery Jung Estabrook (see page 35). For the past several years, the Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Program, funded by the Efroymson Family Foundation, has made the gallery a site for exciting engagements with artists at the beginning of their careers (see article page 6). Some of the Efroymson artists, like this year’s Ruth Leonela Buentello, are having their first solo exhibition in the gallery. The artists are on campus for several weeks, and we arrange for them to talk to the media and to meet students and classes, in addition to the artist’s talk they give in the gallery. I am confident that the institute’s lively exhibition program, funded in part by our donors, helped to make a convincing case for further support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In our newest gallery adventure, we’ve gone online! Because we were not able to organize the group show planned for this summer and supported by The Mellon Foundation, we designed a series of live-streamed visits to artists’ studios called House Calls: Virtual Studio Visits With Michigan Artists in a Pandemic. For House Calls we commissioned Michigan artists to video-conference with the institute’s arts staff about COVID-19 and artistic practice, about the ways in which isolation is or is not changing their work, and about their strategies for survival in uncertain times. The studio conversations aired on Wednesdays at 4 pm through June 17. You can watch the archive online; see page 34 for more information.

We’re thrilled to have received such a generous grant from The Mellon Foundation, but the institute’s continued success depends on your interest, your presence when possible, and your generosity. We remain immensely grateful to you for your support.

With warmest wishes,

–Peggy McCracken, director, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities