Marta Kuzma, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, has announced she will not seek reappointment as dean when her current term ends in June 2021, and will instead join the school’s full-time faculty as a tenured professor of art.
“My experience has been enriching, given the opportunities to lead, to teach, and to befriend some of the most engaging and dynamic young artists — artists who will soon become colleagues, co-teachers, and, most likely, my mentors,” Kuzma said in a message to the School of Art community announcing her plans.
Kuzma, the first woman to lead the School of Art, has encouraged students to place their artistic practices into conversation with society at large and to incorporate various fields of research and study into their work.
“I know how committed Marta is to creating and sharing ways of shaping the world through art, and I am happy that she will continue to teach and engage in scholarship at the school,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in a separate message to the Yale community. “As a scholar, writer, educator, and leader, Marta has contributed immensely to encouraging individuals from all walks of life to engage with the arts to deepen their understanding of the world and to address pressing challenges.”
A renowned curator, writer, and academic, Kuzma arrived at Yale in the fall of 2016 after serving as vice chancellor and rector of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm — Sweden’s leading school of undergraduate and post-graduate study in visual art and architecture.
Kuzma’s emphasis on putting art and social issues in dialogue is embodied in “Diving into the Wreck: Re-enacting Critical Practice,” a mandatory course she developed for first-year M.F.A. students that centers on asking them to examine their artistic practice in relation to society and to reflect on their experiences as individuals and members of dynamic communities.
The course, named after the title of a 1973 poem by Adrienne Rich, introduces students to a diverse range of critical theory and promotes open and critical discourse about complex topics, including sexuality and racial and socioeconomic injustice, and how they relate to making and understanding art.
“The Yale School of Art is a world-renowned institution dedicated to excellence in the study and practice of art,” Provost Scott Strobel said. “It is especially noted for the cultivation of artists who help us experience, interpret, and feel life in its richness and complexity. During her time as dean, Marta has enriched this legacy, adding to it her unique perspective on art education, including her strong commitment to critical practice. We are grateful for her years of service to the school and the university and the influence she has had on a lively and productive environment.”
Poet and writer Claudia Rankine is among the numerous esteemed artists, writers, activists, and scholars who have visited “Diving into the Wreck” as guest speakers.
“I respect Marta’s decision to end her tenure as dean if that’s what she wishes to do. But I hope the art school will continue the critical practice component she put in place in the past few years,” said Rankine, the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale. “My students and I were enriched by her expansion of the program to include access to national and international artists, theorists, and activists, thereby sponsoring an intersectional approach to the discipline of art making.
“The creative process is often reduced to the erroneous and outdated concept of the artist as objective, impartial, and transcendent as well as devoid of critical thinking,” Rankine added. “Marta recognized the need for artists both to be informed by and to inform the political and social landscape we are all negotiating.”
Kuzma established the school’s Art and Social Justice Initiative with an endowment from an anonymous donor. This initiative in turn supported the launch of the Yale School of Art’s partnership with the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Yale’s Dwight Hall, which has provided M.F.A. students opportunities to teach summer courses to people incarcerated at state correctional facilities in Connecticut.
She has worked closely with Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture. They assumed their deanships at the same time and are both the first women to lead their respective schools.
“It has been a pleasure to work with Dean Kuzma to strengthen the long collaboration between the School of Art and the School of Architecture,” Berke said. “We shared an interest both in the history of that relationship and in exploring innovative ways of advancing it into the 21st century.”
Demonstrating her commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration, Kuzma has developed and promoted regular cooperation between the School of Art and the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Management, and the Department of Physics. These collaborations include workshops such as “The Sensitive Machine,” which explored the homology between human and mechanized gesture and was led by Sarah Oppenheimer, senior critic at the School of Art, and Joseph Zinter, assistant director at the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design.
Kuzma has recruited preeminent faculty, scholars, and artists to the school. In 2018, she hired Lisa Sigal and Byron Kim to co-direct the school’s Norfolk Summer Program. She extended the school’s ladder faculty with the hires of Aki Sasamoto as an assistant professor in the Department of Sculpture and Meleko Mokgosi as associate professor in the Department of Painting and Printmaking.
Kuzma established a series of summer residencies for first-year MFA students and developed a regular program of public lectures by prominent artists. Recently, she helped organize the “Speak to Me” series of public discussions on issues of racial injustice in the aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd.
To mark the recent 150th anniversary of the School of Art — the first program at Yale to accept women students — Kuzma has partnered with distinguished alumni to publish a book of essays dedicated to women and gender nonconforming graduates and faculty who have studied and taught at the school.
"term" - Google News
July 15, 2020 at 04:25AM
https://ift.tt/32f1tud
School of Art's Kuzma to join full-time faculty following term as dean - Yale News
"term" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35lXs52
https://ift.tt/2L1ho5r
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "School of Art's Kuzma to join full-time faculty following term as dean - Yale News"
Post a Comment