12 minute read
Beyond the Classroom
By Julia May
Four College of Arts and Media faculty members are demonstrating insight into why, and how, they offer real-life, practical knowledge to coursework and the classroom, so that their students will be more familiar with professional expectations when they complete their academic journeys.
In the past year, Dionne and Andy Noble in the Department of Dance have presented work at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland; art history professor Melissa Mednicov’s book on Pop art and Jewish American identity has been published; and the work of Master of Fine Arts graduate coordinator and art professor Jody Wood has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times.
It also allows us to demonstrate that the arts and sciences can co-exist and learn from one another with great impact. - Dionne Noble
Dionne and Andy Noble
A unique blend of dance artistry, music, and neuroengineering provided the opportunity for Andy and Dionne Noble to present research at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland on May 31, 2024.
Dionne is a professor of dance and directs the Sam Houston State University dance graduate program. She also teaches modern technique, choreography, research methods, and dance and technology. Andy is a professor of dance and associate chair of the dance department. Both are directors of NobleMotion Dance, a non-profit dance company recognized for their intense physicality and unique collaborations.
The research was a groundbreaking collaboration with SHSU, Rice University, and the University of Houston and produced “Meeting of Minds,” a program choreographed by the Nobles and performed by SHSU dance alumni and adjunct professors Lauren Serrano and Tyler Orcutt. Among other things, the dance explores what occurs in the brain during expressive movement in a social context. The dancers wore brain caps with computer interface technology that projected their brain movements onto a screen as they performed.
The theme of the dance piece emerged from two angles, Dionne explained.
“From the artistic side, the team wanted to create a work that feels relevant to the times,” she said. “It is no secret that there is a lot of dissension in the world — disagreement, misunderstanding. Artistically, we wanted to show how two individuals could start in a divided place and slowly move towards cooperation and healing.
“From the scientific side, this theme provided rich avenues for study and clear strategies for studying synchrony between brains,” she said. “For example, if you create a section of a dance with absolutely no eye contact and then create a section with extended eye contact, what will the data show? The early findings show that the answer to that question is fascinating; eye contact apparently creates a significant amount of brain synchrony.
“Through the collaboration specifically, we are finding that the benefits of dance for brain health are significant,” she said. “This reframes the way that we talk about dance to our students and provides great insights for us as teachers into the learning process.
Through the collaboration specifically, we are finding that the benefits of dance for brain health are significant. - Dionne Noble
The collaborative effort included work by Anthony Brandt, the artistic director for Musiqa — a Houstonbased arts organization that focuses on the creation of new music, and Jose Contreras-Vidal, UH Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Houston IUCRC BRAIN Center. As directors of NobleMotion Dance, Andy and Dionne have co-produced several evening length programs for Musiqa, but this was their first collaboration directly with Brandt.
“In December 2023, Dr. Contreras-Vidal was invited to present research on brain-computer interfaces (BCI) at the United Nations AI summit,” said Dionne. “As the artsscience team was steeped in creating 'Meeting of Minds' at that time, it was decided that it would be the perfect presentation to bring to the summit based on its blending of the arts, science and application of AI for good.”
The original work was 35 minutes in length and 10 sections long. For the summit the team was allotted 15 minutes for the presentation.
“Many of the presentations were 10 minutes or less, so our allotment was on the longer side,” Dionne said. “Additionally, the stage was non-traditional, much wider and narrower than the typical stage. Therefore, we had to choose the right combination of sections that would tell the story and demonstrate the scientific experiment.”
The presentation of the performance is just one of a number of prestigious accomplishments the SHSU dance program has achieved through the years.
“It certainly puts SHSU dance centerstage at an international venue engaging in important conversations about the trajectory of AI,” Dionne said. “SHSU has one of the strongest dance programs in the country. The students and faculty are highly talented, and SHSU regularly impresses audiences wherever they perform.
“A special performance like this deepens the feeling of pride for the whole SHSU dance family—from faculty to students to alumni,” she said.
Jody Wood
In addition to her work as the Master of Fine Arts graduate coordinator and assistant professor of art at Sam Houston State University, Wood is an artist working in mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance. She teaches in the Master of Fine Arts degree program in art and social practice.
Through her art, she advocates for increased social support systems and interconnection across different socioeconomic positions. She is particularly interested in finding ways to expand social support for people who have fallen through the cracks in society such as those living in homeless shelters.
One of her most recent solo exhibitions, “Collecting Health," was featured and reviewed in The New York Times earlier this year. The exhibition included new artwork entitled “How to Sleep in Cape Town, New Jersey, and Sweden.” This piece is the first of a new series of wall installations, each devoted to remedying an ailment or system that was explored through one of her earlier pieces, “Social Pharmacy.”
“Consequently, the project proposes public health as a collaborative performance scripted and enacted by strangers living in proximity of one another,” she said. “The project was initiated in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and has traveled to Cape Town, South Africa; Brooklyn, New York; and throughout Sweden.”
Her latest piece displays home remedies that were contributed by individuals who participated in “Social Pharmacy,” making it art with an anthropological interest. In “How to Sleep in Cape Town, New Jersey, and Sweden,” home remedies for insomnia are displayed, including Kina’s Remedy drinking water infused with iceberg lettuce which contains trace amounts of a sedative,
Janet’s Remedy adding cinnamon and honey to warm milk to subconsciously trigger memories of drinking breast milk, and Abby-Gail’s Remedy burning white sage at night for its calming effect.
My favorite thing about seeing the project operate is that it gets people who didn’t previously know each other into deep conversations about personal health journeys and healthcare experiences pretty quickly. -Jody Wood
The piece was exhibited in her solo show entitled “Collecting Health” at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn alongside “Social Pharmacy” and other related works. She is currently working on a second wall installation which focuses on beauty and fertility.
Some might consider “How to Sleep in Cape Town, New Jersey, and Sweden” a continuation of “Social Pharmacy” which was initiated during Wood’s artist residency with CoLab Arts and Elijah’s Promise, an anti-poverty agency alleviating food insecurity in New Brunswick.
“I started out by engaging in casual conversation with constituents picking up food from the soup kitchen, and I was struck by how many people suffered daily with chronic illnesses yet avoided hospitals either due to lack of access or mistrust,” Wood said. “From some of my past projects, I was already aware that poverty is a cause and consequence of poor health, and this was further confirmed by the stories I was hearing.
“My additional research uncovered that New Brunswick is dubbed ‘Healthcare City’ because of its many nationally recognized hospitals, pharmaceutical corporations, and internationally recognized medical research facilities,” she said. “It also had the lowest vaccination rate of any city in New Jersey in 2021 and a 35 percent poverty rate— the highest in New Jersey. This perfectly illustrates the tension between the abundance of healthcare and the lack of access to that care due to the realities of poverty, which is a common story in so many American cities.”
The awareness sparked Wood’s curiosity about what people were using outside of hospitals to remedy their health ailments. She began collecting and compiling the home remedies, made them into objects, and returned them to the same community within a portable case. Thus, the “Social Pharmacy” became the installation component that housed these remedies and made it possible for them to be freely exchanged in a public space.
“As I activated the remedy exchange, it became a hub for community members to share knowledge and advice with one another,” she said. “Of course the project is not meant to be a replacement for healthcare services. The project proposes reciprocal and socially interconnected notions of health in contrast to the reductive approach of allopathic medicine which tends to view symptoms apart from their social, emotional and material context.
“As I activated the remedy exchange, it became a hub for community members to share knowledge and advice with one another,” she said. “Of course the project is not meant to be a replacement for healthcare services. The project proposes reciprocal and socially interconnected notions of health in contrast to the reductive approach of allopathic medicine which tends to view symptoms apart from their social, emotional and material context.
“My favorite thing about seeing the project operate is that it gets people who didn’t previously know each other into deep conversations about personal health journeys and healthcare experiences pretty quickly,” she said.
Wood’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, and The Art Newspaper, and has appeared in national and international solo and group exhibitions. Having “Collecting Health” reviewed in The New York Times has been especially rewarding for Wood.
“In addition to being a personal milestone, it represents a level of recognition that is more widely seen than most of the press coverage I’ve had in the past,” she said. “Even more notable is that The Times is more frequently covering artists working with social practice, which has operated on the margins of the ‘art world’ for decades. In its earlier days, social practice represented an artistic discipline that resisted the lure of the art market, even at times counteracting and disrupting it.
“Now it is a legitimate pathway into the art market, for better or worse,” she said. “Regardless of the recognition that the field does or doesn’t get, I find it to be a deeply meaningful and needed practice with our society at large.”
Melissa Mednicov
In her most recent book, Associate Professor of Art History Melissa L. Mednicov gives readers a look into the work of Jewish artists, dealers, institutions, and collectors in New York City during the ’60s and how their identity was molded so that they would fit into societal expectations.
“Jewish American Identity and Erasure in Pop Art” is Mednicov’s second book. It follows her first book, “Pop Art and Popular Music: Jukebox Modernism,” and was released earlier this year by Routledge, a leading academic publisher.
“As I worked on my first book, I started to see many references without much analysis to the Jewish American identity of many central figures within the Pop art movement in New York City,” Mednicov said. “I began to see many instances of the erasure of identity — Jewish identity was one example — and wanted to pursue further research.”
Both of Mednicov’s books bring together a variety of Pop art themes. Her first book was interdisciplinary, combining traditional art history and music theory, and addressed how music and Pop art can produce better understandings of identity within Pop art. Her second book goes further to focus on how Jewish American identity was often mentioned in relation to ’60s Pop art, but rarely analyzed.
Mednicov received a Getty Library Research Grant that enabled her to spend two weeks in the Getty Library Special Collections researching renowned art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Since the completion and submission of the book she has had the opportunity to speak with artist Audrey Flack, the internationally acclaimed painter, sculptor and pioneer of photorealism.
“Jewish American Identity and Erasure in Pop Art” will have a special appeal to scholars of art history, Jewish studies, American studies, and history.
“There are many forms of Jewish American identity and some, although not all, are represented by figures in my book,” she said.
“The ’60s as a historical moment and Pop art both continue to resonate in contemporary history and art practices/exhibitions, and understanding how identity enters and was, at times, erased from history helps us to better understand both the historical period and the contemporary moment.
There are many forms of Jewish American identity and some, although not all, are represented figures in my book. - Melissa
“It is important to understand the history of a period, in this case the 1960s, in which many virulent forms of antisemitism were present,” Mednicov said. “As I began the completion of my manuscript in January 2022 during my faculty development leave, I was horrified, as a Jewish American, to see the increase in antisemitism in the United States and globally and its continued growth — which has made the book take on further scholarly and personal significance.”
Mednicov’s next book, “Monumental: The Art of David Adickes,” is on Texas artist David Adickes and will release in Fall 2024 from Texas A&M University Press. The book is co-written with Associate Dean of CAM and Professor of Art Michael H. Henderson and includes a photo essay by Department of Art Chair Rebecca Finley. Additionally, Mednicov writes contemporary art criticism for Glasstire.
“Jewish American Identity and Erasure in Pop Art” is available in hardcover and e-book from Routledge.
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