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Senior’s Wriston exhibit shines light on handicrafts project of Great Depression

Communications — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 14:08:18 +0000

When Sarah Matthews came across textiles in the art collections in the Wriston Art Galleries, it sparked a curiosity that led to research for her senior capstone.

The senior art history major from Stoughton, Wisconsin, has now taken it another step, curating an art exhibition being shown at the Wriston Art Galleries now through May 12, shining a light on textiles made by women in Milwaukee during the Great Depression. The exhibition, Lost Identities and Loose Threads: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project, is on display in the Hoffmaster Gallery.

The Works Projects Administration (WPA) was a federal agency that provided Americans jobs during the Great Depression, usually through public works projects. The agency started the Milwaukee Handicraft Project (MHP) in 1935 to employ low-income Milwaukee-area women.

“It was slightly controversial for women to work during the Great Depression,” Matthews said. “A lot of people deemed government roles to be for a husband to fill.”

For government wages, Matthews said these women made objects such as tablecloths, curtains, scrapbooks, toys, dolls, and textiles.

The MHP is also notable for being one of the few desegregated WPA projects during the Great Depression. In total, the project employed more than 5,000 women of multiple races.

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Whether in class, studying abroad, or curating objects in Wriston Art Galleries, you’ll deepen your critical, analytical thinking and refine your writing skills.

For all these positive aspects, however, Matthews said these women’s perspectives are almost impossible to find. There are no known official lists of workers, the project is obscure in scholarship, and scholars who cover it continue neglecting the workers’ perspectives.

“It was pretty common to refer to them in the masses,” Matthews said. “Because of that, there’s this hierarchy that’s been created in the archive right now where the only people who receive credit for the project are usually the director of the program or the head designers.”

Matthews also said while she agrees with other scholars praising the project’s desegregation, there’s no way of knowing how effective it truly was, and if women of color felt accepted and safe at work.

Matthews has been a Wriston Art Galleries intern for a couple of years. This gave her good connections with Beth Zinsli, assistant professor of art history and Wriston Art Galleries curator.

“Sarah’s meticulous research on the Milwaukee Handicraft Project textiles, centered on the women workers who produced them, offers a deeper and more thorough understanding of the WPA’s employment initiatives,” Zinsli said.

Sparking an interest

Matthews’ interest in the project began two summers ago as a Wriston Art Galleries intern. Tasked with creating a mini-exhibition on an item in the gallery’s collection, Matthews was drawn to the obscure textiles.

“The design of these textiles is actually fairly modern, which I think sometimes surprises people,” Matthews said.

Matthews used this topic for her art history capstone paper, but she decided she wanted to know more.

“I came back to this idea for the project but dug a little deeper in terms of, ‘What does the archive look like right now for this project?’ and ‘Why aren’t these women’s perspectives being showcased?’ and ‘Why aren’t these items being displayed more often?’”

Matthews knew she had to do some digging. She consulted Seeley G. Mudd research librarian Antoinette Powell, who helped her search old censuses.

“With Antoinette’s help and assistance, I was able to find 30 potential names of these women, which is a very small number compared to 5,000, but not having any individual identification on these women at the start of this project, that was a big deal for me.”

Matthews admitted she has no way of confirming if these 30 women were workers, but this further emphasizes her point.

“I would like people to know that there’s still very much that remains unknown about this project,” she said. “This serves as an example of how skewed archives can be, and how there are so many hierarchies in archiving.”

Passion on display

“I was a little surprised that I became an art history major…but after taking my first art history class, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” Matthews said.

Matthews said the change from capstone paper to exhibition was all about making it more accessible.

“I didn’t want anyone to get overwhelmed thinking, ‘I don’t know anything about art history, I can’t look at this exhibition,’ because that’s not what an exhibition is for,” Matthews said.

Zinsli recognized Matthews’ interests in curation and hands-on experiences and was able to provide support.

“Her curatorial choices allow visitors to learn about the historical significance of the textiles and delight in the beauty of their patterns and motifs; it is a wonderful visual presentation of her capstone research,” Zinsli said.

From curated exhibitions to the �鶹ӰԺ art collection, there is much to explore within Wriston’s three exhibition spaces.

Matthews said developing the exhibition was a rigorous process involving research—both old and new—designing the exhibit layout, and creating mattes, labels, and displays.

“I think that transition from writing, researching, and reading about these objects to actually displaying them was super intriguing and powerful for me to go through,” she said.

Matthews believes the most important thing about being a curator is taking care of what matters and diversifying archives and museums.

“A lot of times, fiber arts and textiles aren’t displayed in museums as often as other artworks that are considered ‘fine art,’ like oil paintings or even drawings,” Matthews said. “There is this ‘crafts versus fine art’ debate in the museum world that I’m super interested in.”

Matthews said she hopes to work in the museum field following graduation. She’s also considering a graduate degree in art history or museum studies in the next few years.

“I’m really passionate about art, but I think I’m even more passionate about taking care of art,” Matthews said.

Read more about Lost Identities and Loose Threads and other Wriston exhibitions here.

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International Medieval Congress fits well with Joyner’s interdisciplinary teaching

Communications — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 14:50:12 +0000

Interdisciplinary teaching is a mantra for Danielle Joyner. As a scholar of medieval studies, it sort of comes with the territory.

For those who share Joyner’s scholarly interests, there’s no better place to be in mid-summer than the University of Leeds in Leeds, England, where the International Medieval Congress annually gathers to explore, dissect, and debate topics ranging from art to literature to architecture to philosophy, all through the lens of the Middle Ages.

The associate professor of art history at �鶹ӰԺ University was in Leeds for the festivities in early July, presenting a paper, The Migration of Birds Across Late Antique and Early Medieval Arts, and partaking in a panel discussion, The Mediterranean and Southern France, II: Beyond Braudel—The State of Medieval Environmental History, moderated by Harvard University’s Daniel Smail.

“There were more than 2,000 medievalists wandering around,” Joyner said. “It was wonderful.”

The congress drew scholars from 61 countries, with more than 600 sessions presented.

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Whether working in class, studying abroad, or curating objects in Wriston Art Galleries, you’ll deepen critical, analytical thinking and refine writing skills.

It was Joyner’s first visit to the medieval congress held in England—a U.S. version, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, happens each year in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She’s been to that one multiple times, and it’s always robust and interesting, but there was something special about experiencing it in England, where you are immersed in the history, she said.

“Europeans do medieval studies differently than Americans do medieval studies because they live in the ongoing presence of monuments and traditions,” Joyner said. “They are surrounded by all this material culture, architectural remains; their libraries are right there at hand. And because it’s so at hand and so familiar, they tend to ask different types of questions.”

Joyner, who holds a Ph.D. in history of art and architecture from Harvard, and master’s degrees in medieval studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and art and art history at the University of Utah, returned from Leeds ready to share with students her insights and reflections—get your hands on primary sources, if not by traveling then via museums and libraries; history can not only teach us, it can inspire us; and international travel can be transformative.

Not lost in all of that is the interdisciplinary approach that Joyner has been such an advocate for since arriving on the �鶹ӰԺ faculty in 2018.

“To get at any aspect of an object made 1,200 years ago, you have to do history, you have to do literature,” she said. “If it’s a church object, which many of them are, you need to understand the liturgy. I think all of art history is very interdisciplinary, but medievalism especially opens itself up to those different approaches.

“Most people don’t go around thinking about the Middle Ages or medieval art or art history. And, so, the interdisciplinary approach I feel gives students ways of finding connections between the long ago and the now, connections that they maybe never would have thought about.”

Joyner saw her students’ eyes open wide last academic year when she joined with colleagues Sara Ceballos, an associate professor of music, and Madera Allan, an associate professor of Spanish, to team-teach Cantigas de Santa Maria, a course focused on a 13th century songbook from Spain that blended art, music, and history. The collaboration between musicology in the Conservatory and Spanish and art history in the College of Arts and Sciences was exhilarating, she said.

“The class was so much fun,” Joyner said. “The students liked it, we liked it. We got to the end and thought, we have to do this again.”

They’re planning a follow-up class during December Term (known as D-Term), the two-week optional session between fall and winter terms. Joyner, Ceballos, and Allan will take 10 to 12 students to Spain for two weeks. A foundation is helping to organize experiences in Toledo, Cordoba, and Madrid, Spain, where the group will study the Cantigas songbook while analyzing depictions of relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews and visiting surviving medieval architecture.

Meanwhile, in the coming Fall Term, Joyner will join Martyn Smith, associate professor of religious studies, to co-teach a course examining the differences between the travels and lessons of two famous explorers—Marco Polo, a Venetian traveler of the 13th century, and Ibn Battuta, a Muslim traveler of the 14th century.

It’s all part of the interdisciplinary approach that brings Joyner so much joy. It’s about lighting a spark, she said, whether it’s an art history major who wants to be a curator or a biology major who has never given the Middle Ages a second thought.

“My favorite thing is learning new stuff,” Joyner said. “And I love it when the window opens and a connection happens, or I can see something pop in other people. I love that. It is a vicarious thrill. So, whether they decide to do this forever, that’s exciting, or whether they never thought about it, but something made them go, ‘Whoa,’ that is equally as exciting. That’s the joy of teaching. It’s pretty thrilling.”

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Four national grants provide boost for LU faculty, bring more students into research

Communications — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 17:54:41 +0000

Two �鶹ӰԺ University faculty members—Julie Rana in Mathematics and Israel Del Toro in Biology—are the recipients of six-figure national grants that will further their research and bring more �鶹ӰԺ students into the research process.

Two other faculty members—Lori Hilt ’97 in Psychology and Beth Zinsli ’02 in Art History— received five-figure national grants to enhance their work.

Catherine Gunther Kodat, provost and dean of faculty, said bringing in four national grants this fall speaks to the breadth of the high-level work being done by �鶹ӰԺ’s faculty. It comes on the heels of �鶹ӰԺ being .

“It’s wonderfully gratifying to see our faculty receiving national recognition for something we at �鶹ӰԺ have always known—our faculty are gifted, dedicated teachers who are also engaged in ground-breaking scholarship across the full range of the liberal arts disciplines,” Kodat said. “Being able to count such accomplished individuals as colleagues is a true privilege.”

NSF math grant supports research, inclusive pedagogy

Rana, assistant professor of mathematics since 2017, was awarded a two-year grant of $192,905 through the National Science Foundation’s Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) program. It’s a first-time grant, awarded to pre-tenure faculty. It’s a huge accomplishment for Rana, with only 21 grants awarded across the country.

A portion of the grant will allow Rana to work on research in algebraic geometry related to moduli spaces, collaborating with math scholars in Europe, Chile, and elsewhere in the United States. The funding will allow her to hire four students in each of the next two summers to work with her on research in an area of math known as graph theory.

“The best part of this project is that students will join a community of peers working together on fun and interesting math problems,” Rana said. “Mathematics is a very collaborative discipline, and I’m just thrilled that I get to share that joy of collaboration with students over the next two summers.”

In addition, the grant will cover costs of work Rana is doing in developing math curriculum and support mechanisms aimed at making �鶹ӰԺ’s mathematics, computer science, and data science programs more inclusive and accessible. She’s developing two new math courses—Mathematics and Community (developed in collaboration with senior Caitlyn Lansing), debuting in Winter Term, and Modern BIPOC Mathematicians, debuting next year—and organizing inclusive pedagogy reading groups among the faculty.

The grant is covering the costs of bringing two speakers to campus who have been significant voices in improving inclusivity in STEM fields. Both are women of color who have carved out impressive careers as math scholars and have authored or edited works aimed at widening the path into the mathematics field.

Emille �鶹ӰԺ, an associate professor and chair of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of San Francisco, is expected to visit �鶹ӰԺ in Winter Term, Rana said. She is the editor of the American Mathematical Society’s Math Mamas blog and co-edited Living Proof, a collection of essays featuring mathematicians of various identities sharing how they found communities and persevered through professional challenges.

Pamela E. Harris, an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Williams College, is expected to visit during the 2022-23 academic year. She has been a leading voice for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the STEM fields, math in particular. She co-founded Lathisms.org, a platform that features the contributions of Latinx and Hispanic math scholars, and co-hosts the podcast, Mathematically Uncensored. She’s the co-author of two books advocating for students of color in mathematics.

The NSF grant will allow for all of these initiatives to move forward at once.

“I worked hard to get this grant,” Rana said. “I’m really proud that I got it because there just aren’t very many of us who got it.”

Rana said the collaborations with other math scholars who are focused on algebraic geometry will take her research to another level. She’ll have the opportunity to travel to other institutions to work directly with her collaborators, and she’ll be able to bring some of them to �鶹ӰԺ.

“Without this, I wouldn’t be able to go work with them in person,” she said. “It’s a lot easier to do math in person.”

Bee research focus of NSF grant

Israel Del Toro

Del Toro, an assistant professor of biology since 2016, was awarded a two-year, $199,957 EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation to enhance the research he’s doing on bee conservation. The grant will allow Del Toro to supersize his research, including bringing more students into the process.

Over the past five years, Del Toro has done extensive field work on pollinator habitats, advocating for bee conservation not only on campus but across the Fox Valley. This grant will allow him to take that work into a lab, investigating the varied reasons that bees are good pollinators. He’ll be collaborating with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, using microtomography (microCT) technology to take a closer look at the inner workings of bees.

“We are taking a look under the hood of a bee,” Del Toro said. “And really taking a peek to see why the internal parts of the bee allow them to be effective pollinators.”

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Del Toro will be using the microCT technology at UW. He and his students also will be doing experiments in the lab at �鶹ӰԺ that relate to climate change.

“We’ll be doing thermal tolerance, figuring out how bees are affected as we increase and decrease temperature,” he said. “We want to see how increases and decreases in temperatures affect bee behavior and bee restoration and try to make predictions of how these populations would be affected in the future.”

Over the two years of the grant, eight �鶹ӰԺ students will be able to join Del Toro in his research.

“I’m actively recruiting students who have interest in ecology or microscopy or pollinator biology,” he said. “Those are the students I’m looking to take on. We’re going to learn some really cool new things about pollinators, but also how to better protect our pollinators in light of climate change.”

Psychology grant to help build on adolescent rumination research

Lori Hilt

Hilt, an associate professor of psychology, received a subaward for more than $51,000 throughHarvard University from the National Institutes of Health. She will serve as an expert on adolescent rumination on a five-year clinical trial. It follows a three-year $368,196 grant she received from NIH in 2019 to study adolescent rumination and the development of a mobile app designed as a coping tool for young people.

Adolescent rumination refers to a mindset in which someone can’t get beyond the negative things that are happening around them. Where most kids will process something bad that has happened, react to it and then move on, an adolescent struggling with rumination will dwell on the negative information, stew on it until it consumes them, unable to let go.

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“The new NIH grant is a really nice follow-up to my other NIH grant,” Hilt said. “In our previous grant research, we found that using a brief mindfulness mobile app intervention that we developed — known as the CARE app — reduced rumination and mental health symptoms relative to a mood-monitoring control condition. The new grant will similarly recruit ruminative teens and ask them to use a mindfulness mobile app, this time for one month using the Headspace app vs. a control condition.”

The primary study site is at Harvard’s McLean Hospital. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan will be done before and after the teens use the app.

“This will allow us to see whether a brief mindfulness intervention changes brain network patterns that have been associated with rumination,” Hilt said.

This grant will allow Hilt and other participants to take a personalized medicine approach by examining which teens benefit from mindfulness training.

“This is something that we started looking at in our other grant, and it offers a promising new approach to mental health—being able to know if a particular intervention will work before engaging in it,” Hilt said.

NEH grant to provide insights into preserving Teakwood Room

Teakwood Room

Zinsli, assistant professor of art history and curator of the Wriston Art Center Galleries, was awarded a $10,000 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will provide a professional assessment of the Teakwood Room and its contents so that �鶹ӰԺ knows best how to steward the room going forward.

Zinsli called the room “a university treasure and a distinctive piece of global material culture” that needs careful attention.

“The recommendations from the assessment report will allow LU to steward the room and its objects responsibly and expand access to the space,” she said.

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The Teakwood Room, located in Chapman Hall, was originally built by American artist and architect Lockwood de Forest in Alice Chapman’s Milwaukee home. After Chapman died in 1935, the Teakwood Room was placed in Chapman Library on the Milwaukee-Downer campus and used for receptions, poetry readings, and chamber music. When �鶹ӰԺ and Downer consolidated in 1964, members of the Downer community asked that the room be preserved. The room was carefully disassembled and stored in a warehouse until 1968, when it was reassembled at �鶹ӰԺ.

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