COUNCIL: State of the Union |
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Below is the first portion of the recent Council meeting which covered the State of the University on Arts and Culture at Penn. The second portion, on Sexual Harassment and Violence, will be included in next week’s issue.
Provost’s Report 2014 by Provost Vincent Price
Report on the Penn Museum by Julian Siggers, Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Report on Art and Culture by Karen Beckman, the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the Department of the History of Art
Provost’s Report 2014 by Provost Vincent Price
I am very pleased today to present this year’s State of the University presentation on the state of our arts and culture initiatives. As you know, the University is deeply committed to advancing access, integrating knowledge and engaging locally and globally. With an extraordinary array of outstanding departments across several schools, and with equally impressive arts and culture centers at Penn, we have unmatched potential to advance these core University goals through the arts. We have been especially focused on these opportunities over the past five years.
In the 2009-2010 academic year, we dedicated an entire theme year to Arts and the City. As part of this year, we began a number of initiatives, designed to energize arts and culture on campus and engage more of the Penn community in our outstanding arts and culture resources. The theme of Arts and the City deliberately engaged our Philadelphia community and built inclusion in our resources on campus.
To encourage the integration of knowledge through arts and culture, we launched that year an Interdisciplinary Arts Fund. It provides grants to projects that fulfill two criteria: They must explicitly engage students and they must bring together multiple groups on campus, especially collaborations between arts and culture groups and academic departments or centers. The Arts Fund continues to be one of our great drivers of integrating knowledge, and it has generated some very productive partnerships across campus. Our initiatives in art and culture have also gone hand-in-hand with our global engagement initiatives, often in concert with our many strong language and culture programs.
Two years ago, we took a further step to advance arts and culture. We created a three-year Art and Culture Initiative, sponsored by my office and the School of Arts & Sciences. It is led by Professor Karen Beckman from Art History and Cinema Studies, who is here with us today. This initiative formed a faculty steering committee for art and culture, it now administers the arts grants, and it has implemented some highly significant advancements, which Karen will tell us more about in a moment.
The other great drivers of arts and culture on campus are of course our extraordinary arts and culture organizations. The Institute of Contemporary Art has been celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as one of the most important and forward-looking venues for contemporary art in the United States. The Arthur Ross Gallery has become an ever-more vibrant center for art that is both global in scope and closely tied to the work of our art history and fine arts departments. The Kelly Writers House has been a leader in our online Open Learning Initiative, bringing a wider and wider audience around the world to its invaluable programs. The Platt Student Performing Arts House provides a home and a center of energy for our dynamic and talented students.
Representing this entire group of arts and culture organizations and others, Julian Siggers, the Williams Director of the Penn Museum, is with us today. He will tell us especially about the Museum’s exciting new Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials. The Center is a prime example of the way that, in collaboration with the faculty, we can marshal our incredibly rich cultural resources to serve our education and research missions—in this case, drawing from disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and the natural and physical sciences. I will turn the discussion over to Julian and Karen, and we look forward to your questions.
Report on the Penn Museum by Julian Siggers, Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Good afternoon everyone, and thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you about our wonderful Museum. I thought that before I actually talk about the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Material (CAAM) I might just situate the Museum for you because some of you may not be familiar with it. As Provost Price said, we’ve been around for 127 years, and the Penn Museum is in fact the largest university research Museum in the country. By some degree, the only Museum that even comes close to the Penn Museum is the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. We have over one million objects in our collections, and we have been responsible for some of the marquee excavations that have ever occurred by American teams. Here we have our excavations at Memphis and in the basement of the Museum we actually have a good part of an Egyptian royal palace that we have great plans for. Our Egyptian collection in particular is absolutely phenomenal. We have also excavated in the Americas. Here we have this incredible site of a temple complex in Tikal that some of you may remember from a Star Wars movie. We have also excavated in Africa, in the Near and Middle East, in Asia, in Europe and of course all over the Americas. And this legacy continues. We still have 50 projects currently working all over the world.
One of great pride for us is this site at Abydos, in Egypt, where this summer, we discovered a hitherto unknown pharaoh, Senebkay, which is phenomenal. And of course, along with our faculty curators, we had Penn undergraduates and Penn graduate students, so what a phenomenal dig this is. We also continue to work at the site of Gordian, which is in the Anatolian plane in Turkey. This is the mythical site of King Midas, where Alexander the Great cuts the Gordian knot. It is actually also the Phrygian capital and this summer we had a team of 40 people from Penn all working on this central citadel there.
Now, the collections at this Museum are really extraordinary. You’re probably thinking, well of course he’s going to say that. But this is a very good illustration of just how extraordinary they are. Two weeks ago, the publisher DK Books under the Smithsonian Museum brand came up with this very lavish publication, which is their primary publication of the year. It came out here in the states and also simultaneously within Europe and is now being translated into a myriad of different languages. This publication is attempting to tell the history of the world in 1,000 objects. We were initially told that 100 of these objects would be from the Penn Museum but in fact 212 are. So 20 percent of the world’s history is just down the road from you and it is mostly on display. Now what’s even more remarkable about this is that this is a greater number than the Met, a greater number than the Louvre and also, this makes me particularly happy, a greater number than the British Museum.
So, what do these collections mean for students and research at Penn? Well at our heart, we are a research and teaching institution, and so we have always used our galleries as instructional vehicles. But we actually go beyond this and we have facilitated the study of our collections with Penn students and faculty in the storage rooms and also in collection study rooms, of which we now have two. These collection study room are places where faculty can select objects for various classes which can be put in storage in the classrooms for the whole semester so students can work on them and work on their projects. Of course, there are literally hundreds of thousands of potential theses here for groundbreaking work. I don’t know of another university where you could have a freshman seminar like this one being taught here by Dr. Steven Tinney, who is the Museum’s Deputy Director and also in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department (NELC). He’s teaching a class on ancient writing, and his students can actually handle Sumerian tablets of the earliest novel ever written, Gilgamesh and also a tablet that is the earliest record of the biblical flood while also learning about Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan glyphs from one of the only scholars who can really translate them. They are doing this all in the same freshman seminar, and they all have access to this material. It really does put us at the forefront of the study of the ancient world. And this gets us to what I wanted to talk to you about briefly today. This led to a new initiative, which we’re very proud of. To me, it absolutely embodies integrative learning.
Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials
About two years ago, with the Office of the Provost and the dean of SAS, we posed the question to a wide variety of people who use the Museum including various departmental chairs because many of the departments use the Museum, not just anthropology and classics but also art history and NELC among others. So we asked “How can the Museum best serve you?” And the conclusion was a Center to teach archaeological science to all of these departments and to provide them with the tools. Two years later, not only is it fully funded, but the labs are built and they opened last month. They’re in the west wing of the Museum and they are a series of labs and workshops, seminar rooms, conservation areas and analytical areas that teach eight different disciplines all related to archaeological science. Some of them are on the organic material side and include things like human skeletal remains, fauna and botanical analysis. And some are on the non-organic side including ancient metals, ancient ceramics, stone tools and the like. We also do digital archaeology and conservation in these labs, and they’ve been an enormous success. It’s basically providing the building blocks for leadership in all of these disciplines. In order to go into any of these fields you have to understand how all of these techniques work.
Perhaps the most striking room is one of our classrooms that you see here. Dr. Janet Monge is here with the Morton collection of skulls behind her. It is a striking but slightly macabre room because there are 500 skulls there from all over the world. Dr. Monge is here teaching a course on physical anthropology, and at the same time she’s solved a couple of murders for the Philadelphia homicide division.
Here we have one of the ceramics labs where Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau, on the left, is teaching students how to analyze ancient pottery by looking at thin sections from the vessels themselves. What interested me about this class was that there were students from six different departments all working away there. And the incredible thing about this Center is it incorporates the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, which is phenomenal.
Here is a course on food and fire, which includes faunal analysis, and it is also being taught in this classroom. So we’ve really just launched this semester but we have ambitious plans to grow the Center and I really have to thank Dean Fluharty, who has been a phenomenal partner in this, and of course the provost’s office, who have been enormously supportive as well. The Center is led ably by Dr. Steven Tinney who is not only Deputy Director of the Penn Museum but also the Director of CAAM.
And the final thing that we do here, which we will also be teaching students, is conservation, including the conservation of all ancient materials. And built within the center is this very extensive conservation lab with state of the art equipment. There is really amazing analytical gear in here too. There’s a scanning election microscope and a really powerful x-ray machine as well. So we’re pretty well tooled up in the conservation lab.
Unpacking the Past
We were very taken with Penn Compact 2020. The Museum has many audiences and many responsibilities and one responsibility, we believed when we were coming up with our strategic plan, is to the school kids of Philadelphia. We understand the very challenging state that Philadelphia schools are in. And so we reached out to Superintendent Hite and asked him what the obstacles were for school kids coming to this Museum, because it can be a real transformational experience for children. He said, “Well, we can’t even afford the bus.” And so, we’ve come up with a four-phase program where we go to the children in a mummy vehicle and we have our teachers get the kids interested in Ancient Egypt and in Greece and Rome. We target Grade 7 because ancient cultures are in their curriculum that year. We then provide the bus for the kids to come to the Museum and they spend the whole day there. We pay for everything including their lunches and this is all due to a very generous grant from the Annenberg Family Foundation. We also have an online phase for the children to do in the classroom when they get back to school. As Superintendent Hite said yesterday, “They may not remember all the facts but they will remember the experience.” And I think it’s a wonderful way for us to fulfill our obligation as part of this University and part of the local community.
Report on Art and Culture by Karen Beckman, the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the Department of the History of Art
Shortly before his death in 1966, émigré cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer reflected on the state of the humanities in American universities, noting with obvious skepticism the fact that art was increasingly being invoked as an antidote to the educational challenges of that mid-century moment. He writes, “Nearly every university—or college for that matter—now aspires to do something about Art in grand style... A campus without an Art Center of its own will soon be a remote memory.” In recent years, there has once again been a proliferation of arts initiatives and multi-million dollar state-of-the-art centers at our peer schools, all promising an often unarticulated solution to the purported crises in the humanities and in higher education more generally. Penn’s art and culture initiative, however, has been less about fancy real estate—in fact, not at all about fancy real estate—than about heightening awareness, engaging infrastructural challenges, increasing diversity and developing pedagogical opportunities.
I work with graphic designer Brooke Sietinsons, a faculty steering committee and the directors of Penn’s Art and Culture centers.
Advocacy and Planning
Our steering committee, which meets monthly, has identified a series of advocacy and planning priorities: First, to improve communication among faculty, students, the cultural centers and the general public, we have:
• Designed an Art and Culture brochure to distribute to the University community, prospective students and Philadelphia hotels.
• Built and maintained a vibrant Art and Culture website: https://provost.upenn.edu/initiatives/arts where you will find our online magazine, which uses paid student journalists who are mentored in professional cultural criticism, so this is also part of our career development program.
• In collaboration with Platt House, we send out the Art and Culture weekly to 2,300 subscribers. This collates the week’s on-campus art and culture activities into a single email.
• We’re just beginning to develop various social media platforms. Our Facebook following is on a par with that of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton, which pleases us because their budget is much larger than ours!
For students at various stages of their Penn careers, we’ve organized a series of activities, including New Student Orientation walking tours; First-year art and culture receptions and career networking events with alumni, which we hope will also build alumni support.
We have worked to increase, enrich and diversify cultural activity on and off campus with the help of the Provost’s Interdisciplinary Arts Fund. We prioritize collaborations among students, faculty, cultural centers and the city of Philadelphia. The Pig Iron Theater works with the Annenberg Center and students in Theater Arts; Fine Arts students collaborate with the Netter Center, the Mural Arts Program and Lea Elementary students; and Professor Larry Silver with Haida artist Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s most important living artists. They both helped Penn students to curate an exhibition in the Arthur Ross Gallery that combined Haida and Tlingit objects from the Penn Museum’s collection with contemporary works by native artists. This is a good example of how the initiative is fostering collaboration among the cultural centers as well.
Admissions
On the admissions front, we are working hard with Dean Eric Furda—I think of him as Erik the Good—to attract a diverse pool of top applicants who want to come to Penn specifically to make use of our vast and unique cultural resources. Many students have no idea what Penn has to offer in this area, and we are trying to change that fact.
We have designed an Art and Culture prospective student tour as an alternative or supplement to the Kite and Key tour, which is, arguably, a tad anti-intellectual. In one and a half years, 1,400 people have taken our tour, and applications from students interested in studying the visual arts in a variety of departments were up 25 percent in the first year. If, in the past, the study of the arts at research universities has tended to be a white and exclusive thing to do, we are working to change this through building a diverse pipeline of students, through strategic faculty and museum appointments and by critically examining and expanding our curriculum.
We have developed an arsenal of propaganda about Penn’s offerings in this arena for prospective students, including specially-designed tote bags full of information. Eric Furda has also generously funded an art and culture admissions intern, with whom we work closely. And finally, we’ve worked with him to produce a professional art and culture admissions film, shot by Paul McCartney’s cameraman, which, as a Liverpudlian, I have to applaud. The film is just about to be launched, and its role is to introduce prospective students to the people who are responsible for creating the unique opportunities available here at Penn.
Pedagocial Innovation
To increase curricular involvement with the cultural centers and catalyze innovative, multi-sensory and object-based learning, the art and culture initiative has funded and logistically-supported a pilot series of first-year seminars and they are a great success.
In September, we organized a Provost’s Interdisciplinary Seminar, entitled HAIKU: The Humanities and the Arts in the Integrated Knowledge University. It was co-sponsored by five of Penn’s schools; 370 people attended, over 4,000 people visited the symposium website more than 12,000 times, and WHYY covered the event: https://twitter.com/haikuconference/status/510050218616713217 It’s very clear that lots of people are interested in the questions we’re engaging about the role of art, artists and cultural leaders in the research environment, particularly their role in cutting across and opening up the university’s siloed research spaces. Experimental percussionist and composer Robyn Schulkowsky sonified rather than visualized data about social stressors collected by a psychology professor. Museum leaders discussed the civic and pedagogical responsibilities of university museums.
The steering committee has identified the absence of long-term planning across the cultural centers and SAS, as well as other schools, as the single primary impediment to growth in this area for Penn. I was therefore delighted when Steve Fluharty allowed our committee to participate in his strategic planning process. Our key recommendations are:
1) To develop and sustain the infrastructure for optimizing the broad use of our cultural centers;
2) To make Penn a leader in Creative Pedagogy and Object-Based learning through school, center and citywide collaborations; and
3) To use the cultural centers as natural venues for the integration of knowledge, the expansion of diversity in the university, as well as global and local engagement.
From where I stand, the future looks very bright.
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