Author: Michael Chesnick

By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communications

On Tumamoc Hill, hikers climb and descend daily. Animals skitter across the desert floor for years. Saguaros will grow and die over decades, sometimes centuries. But for a millennium, a photographic camera will stand sentinel over Tucson, prompting passersby to stop and think about what the future may hold.

Dubbed the Millennium Camera, the device was dreamed up by the experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, a research associate at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts (CFA).

(The Arizona Institute for Resilience helped fund the camera through the CFA Arts | Humanities | Resilience grants program, with support and guidance from School of Art Professor Ellen McMahon and Associate Professor Carissa DiCindio.)

For a camera to last so long, it must be simple. Through a pin-sized hole in a thin sheet of 24-karat gold, light will slip into a small copper cylinder mounted atop a steel pole. Over 10 centuries, sunlight reflected from Tucson’s landscape will slowly fade a light-sensitive surface coated in many thin layers of rose madder, an oil paint pigment. When future humans open the camera in 1,000 years, they will see an extremely long exposure image of Tucson through all its future iterations.

Keats and a team of researchers from the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill installed the camera next to a bench facing west over the Star Pass neighborhood. The bench invites a pause in the hike and the camera encourages hikers to imagine what the future will hold, Keats said.

“Most people have a pretty bleak outlook on what lies ahead,” he said. “It’s easy to imagine that people in 1,000 years could see a version of Tucson that is far worse than what we see today, but the fact that we can imagine it is not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, because if we can imagine that, then we can also imagine what else might happen, and therefore it might motivate us to take action to shape our future.”

Making a camera – and a city – that will last

Conventional cameras typically rely on quick chemical reactions (or more recently, digital technology) to capture an image. The problem is that future humans might not have the technical knowledge to process images in specific ways nor have the technology to do so.

What’s more, there is no conventional photographic process that is insensitive enough to be able to take a photograph over a millennium, Keats said, which is what led him to the idea of sun-faded pigment. That rose madder will fade at the correct rate is an educated guess on Keats’ part.

“One thousand years is a long time and there are so many reasons why this might not work,” Keats said. “The camera might not even be around in a millennium. There are forces of nature and decisions people make, whether administrative or criminal, that could result in the camera not lasting.”

If the camera does last, however, Keats outlines what we can assume the final image will look like: The landscape’s most steadfast features will appear sharpest (although the land is not completely stable, so there will be some inevitable blur to the image). Conversely, the most dynamic parts will be softest. Sudden changes will result in what will look like multiple images overlapped.

“Let’s take a really dramatic case where all the housing is removed 500 years in the future,” Keats said. “What will happen then is the mountains will be clear and sharp and opaque, and the housing will be ghostly. All change will be superimposed on one image that can be reconstructed layer by layer in terms of interpretation of the final image.”

But as much as Keats hopes to provide the future with a record of the past, he also wants to encourage people of today to plan for the future. Specifically, he thinks we should think through where populations might continue to sprawl on the landscape and reflect on that growth in relationship to the natural environment, something he said we need to be doing urgently.

“By no means is the camera making a statement about development – about how we should build the city or not going forward,” Keats said. “It is set there to invite us to ask questions and to enter into conversation and invite the perspective of future generations in the sense that they’re in our minds.”

Keats is adamant that the camera is not opened before 1,000 years.

“If we open in the interim, then it diminishes the imagining that we need to be doing,” he said.

A global perspective

To determine the best location for the camera – somewhere accessible to the community that looks out over a dynamic part of the city – Keats had many conversations with people with deep ties to the hill, including the Desert Laboratory’s director of operations, Clark Reddin, and community outreach assistant Robert Villa.

“Tumamoc Hill has a very deep relationship with the people of Tucson and the hill has a history to it that has this great vantage metaphorically and literally for looking across generations,” Keats said. “The petroglyphs on Tumamoc Hill, for example, are a record of people looking very carefully at their environment and leaving a trace of what they’ve seen. That is really a form of communication across generations. In the same spirit, the Millennium Camera provides a way to observe and interact.”   

Keats wants to install at least one more camera on Tumamoc Hill looking out in a different direction, perhaps eastward overlooking downtown Tucson. The two views will mirror each other, and reveal the dynamics of human interaction with the environment.

Contingent on funding, he has also identified the Santa Rita Experimental Range as another Millennium Camera site.

Experimental Range director Brett Blum and Keats identified a location “where the future is fascinatingly and deeply uncertain – an interface between the natural and human environments,” Keats said. As on Tumamoc Hill, it is also a place where the public can engage with the camera and think about the future.

He is also looking to install the cameras around the globe. In China, he is planning to put one in Chongqing, as well as in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. In May, he will install one in the Austrian Alps.

“This project depends on doing this in many places all over the world,” Keats said. “I hope this leads to a planetary process of reimagining planet Earth for future generations.”

Background on funding for camera

In 2022, when McMahon heard that Keats was working on Tumamaoc Hill as a research associate, she contacted him and learned that his Millennium camera project was not sufficiently funded to take it to completion.

Knowing that his project would benefit from stronger connections with campus as a whole, and the School of Art in particular, McMahon introduced Keats to DiCindio. Her research centers on art museum education, with a specific focus on museum-community partnerships and creating opportunities for dialogue and connection in art museum programming.

Meanwhile the Arizona Institute for Resilience (AIR) transferred funds to the College of Fine Arts to support five projects that demonstrate how the arts build resilience. McMahon created a call for proposals, which was shared with all faculty in the CFA, College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA), College of Social & Behavioral Sciences (SBS) and the College of Humanities in late 2022.

AIR’s goal was to support scholarly and creative activities in the Arts and Humanities that advance the institute’s mission of supporting interdisciplinary groups, including with off-campus partners, to address resilience in our natural and human communities. Five projects were selected, and all were featured in the “Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being” exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography in October 2023. 

Keats and DiCindio proposed a project which funded the Millennium Camera, three public environmental art workshops and assessment of the impact of the workshops on people’s ecological awareness titled, The Nature of Change: Experiments in Societal Transformation Through Environmental Art on Tumamoc Hill. In addition, McMahon and Jennifer Fields, director of the Office of Societal Impact, received a planning grant from RII to create a proposal for an arts research and integration initiative. This funding supported the “Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being: Arts Research and Integration” exhibition, a related series of workshops guided by Keats at CCP, and assessment of all of the activities.

Jenna Green, a doctoral student in AVCE, and DiCindio conducted a study to better understand how participants continued to think about and engage with ideas from the workshops and Keats’ art — and the effect it had on their own experiences creating art. That involved McMahon, Green and DiCindio conducting focus groups with workshop participants from Keats’ CCP workshops and with the scientist/ artist collaborators who were part of the grant project. 

“It was especially rewarding to see how people engaged with the ideas from Jonathon’s work,” DiCindio said. “Their responses, through the art they created, their conversations in the focus groups, and in the reflective statements they wrote, demonstrated how deeply they considered concepts of local ecology and climate futures and the personal connections they made between these concepts and their own lives.”

Added DiCindio: “Jonathan’s project is a great example of how impactful art can be as part of research in ecological issues. I was especially struck by the ways that the participants engaged with the concepts of Jonathon’s work in the workshops and by continuing on in the study.

“I think the potential in this area is limitless,” DiCindio said. “We focused on workshop participants for this study, but it is also really wonderful that many people will engage with his art as public installations.”

The School of Art contributed reporting to this story.

For University of Arizona Art History Professor Irene Bald Romano, a five-year journey with 15 other international scholars culminated last month when the authors saw their research published as a special online monograph, “The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era.”

The publication — edited and co-authored by Romano — presents for the first time a comprehensive view of the fate of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities that changed hands during the Nazi period from 1933 to 1945 in Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere.

Romano wrote the preface, an extensive introduction and the lead article for the special 2023 issue of RIHA, the journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art.

The scholars’ project, previewed by The New York Times and other news outlets in 2022, was a collaboration with the Getty Research Institute and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, an independent art-historical research institute in Munich.

“I hope this publication will become a standard reference on the subject of the fate of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities during the Nazi era,” Romano said, “with its extensive bibliographic and archival resources, as well as its methodologies, useful to other researchers, including individuals who are hoping to recover collections that belonged to family members who perished in the Holocaust.

“It also would be gratifying if this publication inspires students of art history, history, Classics, archival studies and other disciplines to become interested in provenance research, a growing field that has become indispensable to museums today and will remain so in the future.”

The idea for a publication was born at a meeting in Munich in October 2018. That’s when Romano and a group of German and American museum professionals, archivists and scholars — part of the Provenance Research Exchange Program (PREP) — realized the subject of the fate of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities during the Nazi period had not been sufficiently addressed in the large body of scholarly literature on fine arts.

“Although in the past decades research into Nazi-era looted art has been widespread and provenance research in this field has blossomed, the fate of antiquities has rarely been in the spotlight and is far less systematically studied,” Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, wrote in the publication’s foreword.

“This volume makes a large contribution to filling this void. … It is valuable not just for readers with an interest in antiquities but also for scholars studying the art market and its mechanisms; for researchers exploring the networks and systems by which artworks were dispersed during the Nazi era and studying the history of restitution; and for art historians interested in the history of collecting and taste,” he wrote.

Parzinger went on to thank all the authors, especially Romano, “who not only put the topic up for discussion in 2018 but also persevered in the lengthy task of making this publication happen.”

“Last but not least, at a time when war is once more having a chilling effect on scholarly and scientific cooperation, this publication proves again the value of bringing experts together across disciplines and borders in the interest of scholarship and insight,” he said.

Romano talked more about the RIHA Journal special issue in an interview with the University of Arizona School of Art:

Q: How rewarding – and challenging – was the project?

Romano: I’m very pleased to see this research and publication project finally come to fruition, with the results accessible to scholars and the general public in this open-source, online format. … It was a challenging five-year-long journey for me with 15 other authors from various countries, each with their own work schedules and life issues, not to mention a pandemic that intervened, making visits to indispensable archives, libraries and museum collections difficult for many.

A challenge for anyone working on the Nazi period is that there are mountains of archival materials in many repositories in the U.S. and Europe, some of it duplicative, and only some it available online. In addition, in Nazi-period inventories and in various recent databases that have been created of works of art transferred during the Nazi period, archaeological objects are often not included or are cited in such a general way that they are not identifiable. I outline some of these challenges in the Introduction to the volume.

There was, however, a great deal of enthusiasm for getting this work published, and we had the unwavering support and expert advice of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich to bring it all about. A rewarding aspect of this was the collegiality of the authors, as well as the interest and assistance of a wider group of scholars who offered their expertise on specific issues. We have built a large research team and piqued the interest of some younger scholars who will move this research forward in the future.

Q. Could you sum up the conclusions gleaned from the broader study?

Romano: The first conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that broad conclusions are difficult. There are many individual histories of people, especially of collectors, dealers and Nazi officials, who played some role in the trade in antiquities in this period, as victims or active participants, and these are the most compelling aspects of these studies. We focus first, however, on the “lives” of objects. It is also hard to define broad conclusions because the Nazi period in various parts of Europe was not uniform vis-à-vis the collecting, interest in, confiscations and transfers of ancient objects.

The situation in Greece, for example, was quite different than that in Nazi-occupied France. In Greece there was no official Nazi policy of confiscating antiquities from museums, but we have documented cases of random looting, orchestrated thefts, and illicit excavations. The Jewish population in Greece was mostly in communities in northern Greece and they were not particularly collectors of ancient objects, as we can see from the forced inventories and confiscation of their household goods. In France, however, especially in Paris, there were major collections of wealthy Jews that were targeted for confiscation, and these included at least some antiquities.

For example, Alphonse Kann’s collection of 1,614 works of art, confiscated in October 1940 from his mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, comprised at least 150 ancient objects, including Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, Etruscan and Byzantine objects (in order of numbers), for around 9 percent of Kann’s eclectic collection. In general, however, Egyptian artifacts rank a close second to Greek and Roman antiquities in the collecting practices and transfers during the Nazi period in Europe.

In this publication we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, but our impression is that we have scratched into the surface of the broad subject and there is still much more to be done — details to be uncovered about individual objects, collections, dealers and collectors, as well as perpetrators of crimes, and more data to be mined from the increasing numbers of digitized databases, auction catalogs and dealer files. In addition, scholarly examination of archival documents in many repositories and provenance research in many museum collections remain to be conducted. These will certainly add to our picture of antiquities collecting and trade in the first half of the 20th century in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., as well as the methods and nature of antiquities’ transfers during the Nazi period.

Q. How have you incorporated the project into your teaching here at School of Art?

Romano: My interest in art and antiquities during the Nazi period began as a result of my teaching here at the University of Arizona. In 2013 I created an upper division undergraduate and graduate Art History class called “Art as Plunder: The Spoils of War, the Formation of Collections, and Trade in Stolen Art” in which the Nazi period figures prominently.

Students are uniformly interested in this topic, some of whom are encountering it for the first time. Several Jewish students have come forward to share their own poignant family stories. This class and a seminar I have occasionally offered on provenance research have inspired some outstanding research papers and M.A. theses. One of these contributed critical information about a painting in the University of Arizona Museum of Art that changed hands during the Nazi period.

Q. What are you working on now?

Romano: Among the research projects I’m involved with is one stimulated by this publication on “The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era.” It’s focused on the provenance of 11 Greek and Roman marble sculptures in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva that were collected by Ludwig Pollak (1868-1943) — one of the most important connoisseurs of ancient classical art from the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Pollak was from a Jewish family in Prague and trained in Vienna, but he spent most of his career in Rome. He was an archaeologist and dealer, as well curator and director of the Museo Barracco di Scultura Antica, and highly respected and well-connected in the art world in Rome and internationally.

As a Jew in Rome feeling the increasing pressure of anti-Semitic policies in the 1930s and 1940s, Ludwig Pollak began to disperse some of his personal collection, including by depositing for safekeeping eleven of his ancient sculptures in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in 1940. Pollak remained in Rome, and he, his wife and two children were rounded up with other Roman Jews on 16 October 1943, and shortly thereafter they were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The museum was later given or purchased these objects from Pollak’s heir. Although some of these sculptures in Geneva have been previously published, no one has examined them with reference to the collector and their provenance — their ancient context; how, when and where Pollak acquired them; and their modern transfers.

More about Prof. Romano

• University of Arizona School of Art bio
• New York Times story, “New Research Tracks Ancient Artifacts Looted by the Nazis”
• University of Arizona Communications story, “Telling the stories behind ancient objects: Inside the career of a university archaeologist”

“The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era”: Table of Contents

Forematter

• Foreword: Gail Feigenbaum and Sandra van Ginhoven (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)
• Foreword: Christian Fuhrmeister (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich)
• Foreword: Hermann Parzinger (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
• Preface: Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson; Guest Editor)

Introduction

• “Antiquities in the Nazi Era: Contexts and Broader View,” Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson)

Articles

• “Collecting Classical Antiquities among the Nazi Elite,” Irene Bald Romano (University of Arizona, Tucson)
• “The Role of Antiquities between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Diplomatic Gifting, Legal and Illegal Trades,” Daria Brasca (Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine)
• “Göring’s Collection of Antiquities at Carinhall,” Laura Puritani (Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
• “Stolen and Returned: The Marble Statue of Philippe from Samos,” Alexandra Kankeleit (Freie Universität, Berlin)
• “Export Regulations and the Role of Ancient Objects in the German List of Nationally Important Artworks,” Maria Obenaus (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, Magdeburg)
• “The Annihilation of the German Numismatic Market during the Nazi Era, with Some Observations on the Countermeasures Adopted by Jewish Ancient Coin Dealers,” Emanuele Sbardella (Technische Universität, Berlin)
• “The Patronage of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum by German-Jewish Press Tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) and the Sequestration of His Art Collection during the Third Reich,” Thomas L. Gertzen (Freie Universität, Berlin) and Jana Helmbold-Doyé (Ägyptisches Museum – Georg Steindorff – Universität Leipzig)
• “The Antiquities Trade during the German Occupation of France, 1940–1944,” Mattes Lammert (Technische Universität, Berlin)
• “ ‘Unclaimed’ Artworks Entrusted to French Museums after World War II: The Case of Near Eastern Art and Antiquities,” Anne Dunn-Vaturi (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), François Bridey (Musée du Louvre, Paris; French Consulate, New York), and Gwenaëlle Fellinger (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
• “The Fate of the Antiquities Collection of Izabela Działyńska (neé Czartoryska),” Inga Głuszek (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń) and Michał Krueger (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)

Object Case Studies

• “A Case Study in Plunder and Restitution: Three Ancient Sculptures from the Lanckoroński Collection,” Victoria S. Reed (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• “A Goddess of the Night, a Roman Gem, and the Bachstitz Gallery,” Claire L. Lyons (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Nearly five years in the making, Jeehey Kim‘s new book is the first history of Korean photography in English.

Kim, an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Arizona School of Art, said she did most of the writing for “Photography and Korea” during the pandemic to go along with the book’s striking images.

“As this is the first book on the history of Korean photography from the 19^th century until now in the Western language, I hope it contributes to diversifying the field,” Kim said. “In addition, translation of the book into Korean, Japanese and Chinese is also underway to reach the broader public in Asia.”

The University of Chicago Press recently began distributing “Photography and Korea” for Reaktion Books, which published the 272-page book in the United Kingdom this summer. It features 41 color plates and 93 halftones.

Korean travelers brought photographic technology home from China in the late 19th century.

In her book, Kim presents multiple visions of Korea, including the divided peninsula, and the country as imagined through foreign eyes, key Korean artists and local photographers. Kim also explores studio and institutional practices during the Japanese colonial period, and the divergence of practices after the division of Korea.

“Kim draws on a selection of striking images to bring alive Korean politics, foreign relations and norms, making this both a comprehensive history of Korean photography and a worthy examination of Korean identity,” Publisher’s Weekly said.

Mina Kim, an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Alabama, called Jeehey Kim’s book “a unique contribution to our understanding of photography in Korea.”

“(She) shows how photography began in the region, who adopted and promoted it, and how the role of photography has evolved and diversified over periods since the 19th century,” Mina Kim continued, “as Korea developed through its colonial legacy, occupation and war, and rapid social, political and economic developments.”

Boyoung Chang, a Mellon assistant professor in History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University, called Kim’s work “a pioneering study and a key resource for scholars of photography history, visual culture, Korean studies, and East Asian studies.”

“Not only does this book provide a framework for photo historians focusing on the region, but it also contributes to the decolonization and diversification of the history of photography,” Chang said.

Named an Early Career Scholar by the University of Arizona last spring, Kim is helping the Center for Creative Photography organize an exhibition on Korean contemporary photography in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. It will open on Nov. 17, followed by a one-day symposium on Nov. 18 and a talk with four Korean photographers on Nov. 19.

In 2022, Kim created a three-part symposia centered on the history and practice of photography in Korea, Taiwan  and Southeast Asia.

Kim received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and a B.A. in English Literature from Duksung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea.

Since coming to the University of Arizona in 2019, Kim has established nine art history classes, one of which was created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. She also taught at universities in New York, New Jersey, and Korea and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago.

• Reaktion books web page
• University of Chicago Press web page

From accomplished artists to cutting-edge educators, the University of Arizona School of Art welcomes two full-time faculty members and two visiting professors as the 2023-24 school year begins.

Yana Payusova has rejoined the school as an assistant professor of practice in First Year Experience, while Jenn Liv has been hired as an assistant professor in Illustration, Design & Animation.

Meanwhile, Kate Collins (visiting associate professor) and Shivani Bhalla (visiting assistant professor) have joined the school’s Art and Visual Culture Education program.

Here’s a closer look at the four new faculty members:

Yana Payusova: Received her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and worked full time in the Student Services area of the School of Art here before becoming an assistant professor of painting, area coordinator of painting and assistant chair of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Arlington three years ago. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Epperson Gallery in Crockett, California, and Conduit Gallery in Dallas. She is also in the permanent collection at the Crocker Art Museum and was recently commissioned to create work for the new Meow Wolf location in Grapevine, Texas. Website

Jenn Liv: Is an award-winning Chinese Canadian American illustrator who had been based in Toronto. Among her prestigious clients include The New York Times, Washington Post, Google, Microsoft, All Nippon Airways, AirBNB and NPR. Liv received her Bachelor of Design and Master of Design from OCAD University in Toronto and has taught at both OCAD and Sheridan College. Her personal research interests focus on investigating the intersections between gender studies, feminism, decolonization, and Asian diasporic identity. Jenn also has a keen interest in emerging technology, particularly in mixed reality, searching for new and innovative ways to expand upon her artistic practice through interdisciplinary methodologies. Website

Kate Collins: Received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and spent eight years as assistant and then tenured associate professor at Towson University before joining the Baltimore Museum of Art as director of Learning Communities in July 2022. As a community arts scholar/practitioner/leader, she has been published in the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance and Public: A Journal of Imagining America. Her most recent project, YAAS (Youth Artists and Allies taking Action in Society) provides arts programing to resettled refugee youth in partnership with the BCCC Refugee Youth Project and Patterson High School in Baltimore. Bio

Shivani Bhalla is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Dissertation title: “Visual Autoethnography: Exploring my Disability Experience Through Art Works, Written Narratives, and Conversations”). Prior to that, she received her MFA in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara in India. During her Ph.D. program, she has been teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as well as SUNY New Paltz. Her research exploring art and disability in art education spaces has been published in Art Education and presented at a long list of conferences and professional gatherings, including the Art Education Research Institute (AERI) and National Alternative Education Association (NAEA).

The four professors recently reflected on joining the School of Art:

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO IN YOUR FIRST SEMESTER?

Payusova: I am looking forward to welcoming all the incoming BA and BFA art students in my First Year Experience classes. I love the energy of the new academic year and the usual excitement of seeing both familiar and new faces. I am also quite looking forward to studio time. In June I finished a big project (“The Real Unreal” exhibition in Grapevine, Texas) that monopolized all my time last year and then took a short break to develop new ideas. I am now fully rested and eager to get back to work. I am looking forward to experimenting and working on a few projects that have been sitting on the backburner.

Liv: I’m looking forward to making new meaningful connections and sharing my knowledge about the illustration field with the students. My goals are to help demystify the inner workings of the industry and to help the students to develop their own visual stylistic identity.

Collins: I get to teach TWO community arts courses — one for grads and one for undergrads and both in my very first semester. What a dream! I’m just thrilled that the AVCE program has an emphasis on community and museums. Looking nationally at art education programs, it’s a unique focus and one of the things that made this opportunity so appealing. I’ve been cultivating a passion for community arts since I finished my MFA at Arizona State in 2002, so coming back to Arizona to teach and engage in community arts research is deeply gratifying. One of my initial goals is to become familiar and build relationships with the various community art organizations in Tucson so we can hopefully find some fruitful opportunities to collaborate.

Bhalla: To connect with students, learning from and growing with them. I see teaching as a form of collaboration, and classrooms as community spaces to support, nurture and help each other grow.

CAN YOU RELATE ONE OF YOUR MOST REWARDING EXPERIENCES?

Liv: What I find the most rewarding about being an educator is seeing all the wonderful work that comes out of my classes. It brings me great joy to see students demonstrate growth and development under my mentorship and guidance.  A recent experience as an artist that has been rewarding for me was finally being accepted into the American Illustration 42 Book this year. This is an achievement I’ve been working toward for nearly a decade now, therefore having this recognition means a lot to me.

Payusova: There are so many rewarding experiences in both teaching and doing my creative research that it’s difficult to think of one. The most rewarding experience for me always in teaching is seeing the students’ “light” go on, so to speak. I love helping the students discover their voice, the direction, their passion. It never gets old. In my creative research, I just finished a large sculptural installation for Meow Wolf (which was the big projects I was referring to earlier). The experience has been the most rewarding and challenging (in all the right ways).

Collins: Building and leading an interdisciplinary arts graduate program over the course of eight years at Towson University in Maryland was incredibly rewarding. During that time though, I was able to design and lead a program called YAAAS (Youth Artists and Allies taking Action in Society) and out of that has evolved a highly impactful pedagogical framework that simultaneously supports learning and wellbeing. Creating YAAAS and the research and publications that have followed have made it a truly a transformative experience that I hope to reinvent here in Tucson. The project embraced collaborative artmaking as a vehicle to build a dynamic partnership between working educators and newly resettled refugee youth in high school. It was beautiful in that it evolved into something that was mutually beneficial and valued by all. Partnering teachers expanded their global competency and gained confidence with employing arts-based strategies to support the growing population of English learners in their classrooms in a manner that is culturally sustaining, and trauma informed. Meanwhile our young partners gained a sense of agency and belonging, built critical relationships, expanded their facility with English, and through artmaking, enjoyed a critical outlet for self-expression that isn’t always possible when you don’t speak the language. It’s incredibly rewarding work that I can’t wait to dive into here in Tucson.

Bhalla: While I taught a disability studies course to preservice art education teachers, it was most rewarding when I realized students were already applying the theory that we were studying to the real-life classroom’s settings.  They had become self-critical and reflective of how they were perceiving disability and responding to students with disabilities.

WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU GIVE TO STUDENTS? 

Payusova: Get off social media! No, really. It’s a great tool for networking and showing your work but it can also feel very intimidating to see so much good work. It can feel as if everything has already been done by someone else. It’s important to take breaks from hearing other people’s voices out there so that you can hear your own. Be patient and kind with yourself. It takes time to develop both techniques and ideas. And finally enjoy this time at the university. It’s a fantastic experience to be a part of this great institution; to learn and grow with faculty and students from all over the country and the world.

Liv: My advice for students learning illustration is to identify what are the values that are most important to you as a person. This will be fundamental in helping you to develop your own visual identity as an artist. Illustration is a challenging career that rewards persistence over artistic talent alone. It is more important to strive for continuous growth and self-improvement rather than perfection.

Collins: Get to know Tucson. Go hiking and get out in nature. Got to the local farmer’s markets. See the local art shows and support the local artists. Find every cool mural in the city. Tucson as a city has SO much to offer. Go be a part of it! Bring a friend, bring a group, or go solo. Having been a college student for ELEVEN years of my life, I realize how insular we can be on campuses, often barely ever leaving the immediate vicinity. I know now I missed out by not spending more time getting to know the spaces and places and people around me. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I’d work much harder to get out there, especially here in the Southwest when there’s so much beauty and richness all around us.

Bhalla: Be yourself, and value your experiences. Grad school can be tough, but the fact the fact that you made it here is a proof that you are wonderful and your experiences matter. So never doubt that!