Month: February 2023

Just weeks after Sama Alshaibi was formally inducted as a Regents Professor, a mid-career solo exhibition of the Iraqi-born artist began in the United Arab Emirates.

The Arizona Board of Regents honored the School of Art professor during the University of Arizona’s Outstanding Faculty Awards Ceremony on Feb. 15 at Crowder Hall.

In large part to Alshaibi’s contributions, the school’s Photography, Video and Imaging program has grown substantially and is ranked No. 3 in the U.S. News & World Report’s list of best photography schools.

“We are in awe of your impact,” said John Milbauer, associate dean for Faculty Affairs for the College of Fine Arts, who introduced Alshaibi at the ceremony.

“Tell it to the River,” a mid-career survey of Alshaibi’s work, started Feb. 27 at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE. The solo exhibition, which runs through June 30, 2023, brings together significant parts of her practice over the last two decades.

The exhibition debuts two commissions, one of them inaugurating Alshaibi’s 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and the other marking the closing chapter of an eight-year long photographic series. The two new projects mark the return of Alshaibi to her homeland of southern Iraq following a 40-year displacement.

Alshaibi’s work “explores the notion of aftermath — the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environments,” Milbauer told the audience on Feb. 15.

In her photographs and videos, Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium.

“Your work is exemplary, as your professional accolades demonstrate: an extensive list of fellowships, exhibitions, publications and awards on both national and international levels,” Milbauer said.

Among those accolades, in addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, are an exhibition at the 2014 Venice Biennale, a monograph published by Aperture (“Sand Rushes In”), a 2014 Fulbright research fellowship to the West Bank city of Ramallah and a 2019 Artpace International Artist Residency in San Antonio.

Regent Larry Edward Penley formally inducted Alshaibi as a Regents Professor on Feb. 15.

Earlier Provost Liesel Folks, senior vice president for Academic Affairs, told the audience that the Regents Professor is “the highest honor the university system can bestow on a faculty member.” The honor is “reserved for faculty scholars with exceptional ability who have achieved national and international distinction while maintaining a robust portfolio of student-facing work,” Folks said.

Alshaibi joined the School of Art in 2006. In her field, she is among the most sought-after presenters, having given nearly 100 presentations, and among the most frequently cited visual artists, with more than 200 citations. Her work has also been featured in recent exhibitions such as “Women in the Face of History and Migration(s)” and “Meaning in Art.”

Four other University of Arizona faculty members were formally named 2022 Regents Professors: Jean-Luc Brédas (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Juanita L. Merchant (Gastroenterology and Hepatology), David Pietz (History) and Donata Vercelli (Cellular and Molecular Medicine).

A group of University of Arizona faculty members and their community partners have launched a public archive containing the stories of asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona.

The DETAINED: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System project is a collaborative effort involving UArizona, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project and Salvavision. The Florence Project provides free legal and social services to individuals in immigration detention in Arizona. Salvavision is a Tucson-based organization that provides aid and support to asylum-seekers and migrants displaced in the remote town of Sasabe, in Sonora, Mexico.

The DETAINED archive is available online.

The archive grew out of School of Art Professor David Taylor’s decades-long focus on the nature and changing circumstances of the borderlands – an interest he developed after moving from the East Coast and thinking about the tropes that make up society’s conception of Western history. A photographer, Taylor said any story he told would not be that of a person who personally crossed the border or someone seeking asylum or work. Instead, he strives to let those people tell their own stories.

“My goal in all of this is to ensure that people’s experiences do not disappear. These are people who don’t get to write history. They don’t usually have their say,” Taylor said.

Taylor worked alongside professor of English Susan Briante, author and translator Francisco Cantú, School of Information graduate student Aems Emswiler, College of Law alumnus David Blanco, former UArizona associate professor Anita Huizar Hernández and staff from the Florence Project to interview a dozen former detainees of the detention centers in Florence and Eloy. Those interviews were recorded, transcribed and translated for the archive. The team also collected images of artwork and memorabilia provided by detainees.

Cantú, who works alongside Briante as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program for the UArizona Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, said detention facilities are the most underreported and least understood facet of border enforcement. A general lack of public awareness creates a need to tell the stories of directly impacted individuals, Cantú said.

“These are places that are very rarely infiltrated and seen, and it’s very hard for stories to come out of these spaces,” he said. “We want people to realize this is happening right now on the scale that it is. The archive has a real pulse, a heartbeat.”

A Digital Borderlands Grant of nearly $60,000 was awarded for the establishment of the DETAINED archive. The three-year, $750,000 Digital Borderlands project was funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. University of Arizona Libraries disburses those funds to projects that “support the integration of library services into data-intensive, humanities-focused research on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”

“The Mellon grant has been really enormous just to get this project going, and our partnership with the Florence Project is fundamental to this work,” Briante said. “Now, we are committed to seeing it continue.”