VCU news

By Leila Ugincius

Two Virginia Commonwealth University professors and a local nonprofit with strong VCU ties have been awarded National Endowment of the Arts grants.

VCU professors Sasha Waters Freyer and Ryan Patton received NEA grants worth $20,000 and $30,000, respectively, while the Storefront for Community Design, of which professors Kristin Caskey, John Malinoski and Camden Whitehead and VCU’s Middle of Broad project are partners, received a $20,000 NEA grant.

“VCU School of the Arts is proud to support an extraordinary faculty who conduct research at the highest levels of distinction,” said Sarah Cunningham, Ph.D., executive director of research at the VCU School of the Arts. “Through these NEA awards, arts and design panelists from around the U.S. have acknowledged VCUarts as a source of excellence in producing original creative works, pioneering arts education and championing community-based design. These projects exemplify how the arts develop new knowledge, enriching our world and making it a better place."

Waters Freyer, chair of the Department of Photography and Film, will use the NEA grant to begin filming “All Things are Photographable,” a documentary about the life and work of Garry Winogrand — the Walt Whitman of 20th-century American photography. Winogrand was a visual poet of democracy whose images captured the heartbreak, violence and hope of postwar America, and who, when he died suddenly three decades ago, left behind more than 300,000 images unseen — until now.

“Garry Winogrand was born a first-generation Hungarian-Jewish American in the Bronx in 1928, but his story is vital to our time,” Waters Freyer said. “Because if you take pictures of friends, strangers or celebrities, on the street or at a party, you are creating in Winogrand’s artistic legacy — even if you have never published an image in the pages of a magazine or hung a print on the wall of a major museum. His ‘snapshot aesthetic,’ once derided by the critics, is the universal language of contemporary global image making.”    

Photography today, more than any other medium, shapes how we think about our world, Waters Freyer said. This documentary highlights images of a bygone era — from the New York of “Mad Men” and the early years of the women’s movement to the birth of American suburbs and the glamour and alienation of Hollywood — to discover what Winogrand's pictures say about America in the 20th century, and to reveal how they might help us navigate the flood of images in the 21st.

“Despite the wonderful flowering of appreciation for documentary films in the U.S. in recent years, funding remains scarce and fiercely competitive,” she said. “The NEA funding is a true honor that will both launch the project and, hopefully, inspire additional public and private funders to come on board.”

This is the second consecutive NEA grant for Patton’s CurrentLab Game Design Institute to continue professional development for K-12 art educators to teach digital game design as an art form. The institute will conduct two professional development sessions, recruiting 25 K-12 art teachers from across Virginia, reaching approximately 830 students.

“The project addresses lifelong learning in the arts by using technological tools to facilitate learning and increasing digital media literacy in contemporary art education,” said Patton, assistant professor in the Department of Art Education. “The CurrentLab Game Design Institute aims to expand the knowledge and engagement of art teachers in digital media arts creation through the development of skills in creative code, animation, interactive design and physical computing.”  

CurrentLab has already created a downloadable game design curriculum for others to adopt and modify. The 2015-16 dissemination activities will focus on refining this toolkit and ensuring accessibility and utilization by the art education community.

The third grant was awarded to the Storefront for Community Design, Richmond’s nonprofit design assistance center that partners with Middle of Broad — also known as mOb — a community-engaged design lab operated by VCU’s fashion, graphic and interior design departments.

The grant will help fund Recovery by Design, a series of classes, events and workshops that engages clients in recovery for mental health issues, intellectual disabilities and substance use disorders. The project brings together the VCU School of the Arts design community with clients from the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority to deliver tangible design outcomes that promote a destigmatized image of recovery. RBHA and their clients will receive design assistance in the form of promotional materials focused around destigmatizing mental illness. These may include posters, publications and products for public display and dissemination.

University faculty, staff and student volunteers taught courses for the Recovery by Design pilot program last summer.

“The lasting relationships with RBHA's clients has been one of mOb's best outcomes,” said Caskey, a professor in the Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising and a founding member of mOb. “NEA’s recognition of one of our projects is an acknowledgement that our innovative partnership has something special to offer our clients, students and larger community, and that our programs can make an impact at a national level.”