Letter from the Art Department Head, Tom Venner

Thank you for visiting the EMU Art Department web site! It is my hope that what you find will be informative and useful.

The site is designed to help new students find information about undergraduate and graduate art programs, including the bachelor of fine arts degree, the teaching degree (visual arts education), art history degree, and masters programs in studio art, education and fine arts. All this is found under the links: “Degree Programs” (for undergraduates) and “Graduate Studies” (for graduate students).

The site is also a place for former students, friends or friends-to-be to learn more about the department.

You may also find it useful to explore the work of the faculty and students of the Art Department. Click on “Faculty and Staff” and you will find a list of current members of the art faculty and staff. Click on the area after the name (e.g., Photography) and you will be directed to the area page that will give you information about the faculty member’s courses, as well as images of that person’s and their students’ work. In the case of the art history and art education faculty, you will find a list of recent publications.

Winter, 2008 News

The Parsons Center

Way back in the fall of 2000, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Barry Fish, was contacted about an interesting opportunity. Just before her death, a retired teacher, potter and sculptor from the Interlochen Academy for the Arts named Jean Parsons, had created a trust consisting of 86 acres of land located in Lake Ann, Michigan and about $1.7 million in securities to be given to the Michigan college or university that would use her estate to promote an understanding of the relationship between art and science, a willingness to preserve the land, discover the healing effects of nature, and to engage students and the community in learning. Dean Fish asked Robert Neely, then head of Biology, and me to visit the site. When we arrived, were struck both by the property’s beauty and potential.

Upon our return, we enlisted Ken Rusiniak from the Psychology Department to help us write a proposal. In it, we said we would create the Jean Noble Parsons Center for the Study of Art and Science and promised do all the things that Jean had laid out in her estate Trust. We worked hard to sell it to the trustees and in April of 2001, learned that our proposal was accepted from among those presented by other colleges and universities. The understanding was that if we abided by and carried out what we proposed, that on the eighth anniversary of Jean’s death, January 18, 2008, the property and her estate would revert to EMU.

We went to work –  offering classes, preparing the center to house students, cleaning up the property, making repairs, building nature trails, designating an “artist in residence,” Catherine Shinnick, for a summer, even commissioning a Historic Preservation Program study of the property.

By January, 2008 we had met all the criteria outlined in the proposal and the Jean Noble Parsons Center for the Study of Art and Science officially became ours. Plans are now underway to build additional housing, dining facilities and classrooms. We are very excited about the potential of this wonderful place! Here is a link to the web site: http://www.ce.emich.edu/parsons/

I would like to add a huge thanks to the many people who helped with this project: the Parsons Governing Board – Michael Angell, Cathy Bach, Bob Winning, Tammy Greco, Ken Rusiniak, Gretchen Otto, John DeHoog, Dan Gaymer, Shannon Ward; Deans Barry Fish and Hartmut Hoft, Bob Neely, Travis Temeyer, Sunstructures Architects - Robert Black and Wayne Appleyard, and the EMU Foundation staff, especially Jill Hunsberger, Laura Wilbanks and Susan Rink. Special thanks to Ralph Munch, Senior Trust Officer, Huntington Bank, Traverse City, for his guidance, help and support over this long process.

Gifts

We are pleased to announce a major gift to the department designed to support travel-study within the U.S. The new Sandra Braun/Sharon Harrison Art Travel Endowment fund will help defray the cost for students and faculty to travel to museums, galleries and workshops around the country.

Pat Williams

Pat Williams retired from full-time teaching in 2006, but that was only the beginning. She has been very active in her creative discipline, Jacquard weaving. As the founder of the Jacquard Weaving Program at EMU, the only one of its kind in the U.S., Pat has been involved for many years in this highly technical way of creating beautiful woven works of art. This winter, Pat received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and work in Norway to focus on Jacquard weaving. At the center of the certificate program, EMU owns a TC-1 Jacquard loom manufactured by Tronrud Engineering AS. Pat has visited their manufacturing site, met with her friend, Vibeke Vestby, the loom’s inventor, visited other textiles-related sites and visited with a number of Norway’s leading fiber artists. A link to Pat’s fascinating Norwegian Sojourn blog is here: http://norwegiansojourn.blogspot.com/2008/01/arrival-and-settling-in.html

Department Needs

The Art Department has a great number of needs. To illustrate and help you consider how you might help, here’s a list:

Student scholarships
            To enable students to benefit from the excellent art programs at EMU, they need scholarships. At the present time, only a fraction of our students receive help from the eleven art scholarship funds. Money from these awards goes directly to help our students achieve and succeed. Area such as art education, art history, design and studio art are ways to focus your gift.

Tools for learning
Art is a tool-intensive discipline and we need all kinds. The list is virtually endless. In order to maintain the quality programs we offer, we are constantly having to replenish our tools and equipment.

Visual resources
In 2003, with Kodak Corporation’s announcement of the end of production of the classic slide projector, our library of 100,000 transparent slides became obsolete. With the help of  Rachel Cheng from the EMU Library, we have signed on to a service called ARTstor that can provide images in digital form, electronically through the web. It is a great service with many thousands more images than we had, but is still not enough. Many of us use special images not commonly available and these images need to be produced in house. The equipment - scanners and digital storage, can be quite expensive. Funds to support this production process will ultimately help the art historians and all the art faculty teach more effectively.

Faculty support
The Art faculty is very active in their scholarly and creative research, speaking, exhibiting and doing research on a multitude of topics. Our budget must stretch to support their important work. We are looking for help with travel support to make a difference in the quality of what they can do, strengthening them as teachers, artists and scholars.

Speakers and presenters
The Ford Gallery Program, ably run by Larry Newhouse and supported by an art faculty advisory committee, reaches out to thousands of visitors from our local communities in southeastern Michigan. Our speaker series has proven time and again that the community is hungry for what we have to offer. We are seeking an individual or individuals who would consider endowing a lecture series.