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Supporting Original Scholarship
Collections Engagement Grants Awardees

The J. Willard Marriott Library and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts maintain significant holdings of immense value to researchers. In 2019, funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation helped the Marriott and UMFA initiate a series of three annual grants for “Landscape, Land Art and the American West,” to support University of Utah scholars interested in conducting original research using primary source material from the Marriott’s and UMFA’s holdings. The Library and Museum continue to facilitate original research and strive to identify and increase access to objects that will enhance student learning and foster innovative research and scholarship for University faculty. The following projects were selected to expand collections-based teaching, learning, and research across campus. Watch presentations from the awardees during the Lunch Time Learning series here. 

Learn about scholarly projects sponsored by the Marriott and UMFA with the Collections Engagement Grant: 

Fall 2021 Awardees
Black and white headshot of Michael Abrahamson
Labor in and on the Landscape: Architectures of Organizing in the Western United States
Michael Abrahamson, Visiting Assistant Professor, College of Architecture + Planning

Dr. Abrahamson will conduct research in the UMFA and Marriott collections to lay the foundation for a chapter in a book project that examines the architectural history of organized labor movements in the United States. During the fall semester, Abrahamson will supplement his archival research with a series of field studies at key sites in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana to expand his findings on the union halls and labor lyceums that were constructed across the Intermountain region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Portrait of Sarah Hollenberg on the salt flats
America’s Aliens: Isamu Noguchi and Patrick Nagatani’s Desert Encounters
Sarah Hollenberg, Associate Professor of Art History, College of Fine Arts

With graduate research assistant Kelly O’Neill, Department of Geography, and undergraduate research assistant Alfredo Contreras, Film and Media Studies, Dr. Hollenberg will research the U collections and conduct site visits in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico to consider the desert landscapes that appear in art by Isamu Noguchi and Patrick Nagatani. The project examines how subjects like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, nuclear warfare and testing, and the explosion of popular extraterrestrial narratives as well as “alien” others during the mid-twentieth century intersect in the artists’ work.

Headshot of Jacklyn Wright
Impact | Land | Form
Jaclyn Wright, Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging, College of Fine Arts

Professor Wright will produce a body of photographic work focused on the west desert landscape, including Stansbury Island and the Skull Valley region. Her project is informed by present-day and historical land use issues and early landscape photography’s role in furthering the project of American manifest destiny. Wright will use a large-format view camera and create in-camera collages based on maps, texts, and objects from the UMFA and Marriott collections, fusing archival documentation with present-day site visits to the locations depicted in primary source materials.

Elisabet Curbelo, University of Utah School of Music assistant professor and head of composition
The Creation of New Music to Sonify Landscape, Land art, and the American West
Elisabet Curbelo González, Assistant Professor of Electroacoustic Composition & Music Theory and Head of Composition at the University’s School of Music

This project expands on Dr. Curbelo González’s earlier collaboration with the UMFA in which her students composed music inspired by artwork in the Museum’s permanent collection. In this iteration, doctoral students will conduct in-depth research incorporating the Marriott’s primary source materials to lend context to new compositions. The project will culminate in a series of recordings highlighting not only the finished musical pieces but documenting the artistic process of incorporating the collections into the compositions.

Headshot of Cheryl Rudds
Afrofuturistic Visions of the West
Crystal Rudds, Assistant Professor, Department of English 

This award supports a course collaboration focused on Afrofuturism co-taught by Dr. Rudds and co-investigator Dr. Elisabet Curbelo González. Multimedia artist Alisha B. Wormsley will visit campus for a brief residency to compose an Afrofuturist film set in Salt Lake County incorporating material from the UMFA and Marriott collections. Interested in the narrative and sounds of migration, modernity, and social movements, Rudds and Curbelo González’s project asks how Black Utahns imagined the future for themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries and how they might continue to inject fanciful and strategic ideas into Utah’s culture, policy, and technological landscape to ensure a space for diversity beyond 2021.

Spring 2021 Awardees
Al Denyer portrait
A Sense of Place: Responses to Belonging in the American West
Al Denyer, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, Department of Art and Art History 

MFA Seminar for Painting and Drawing, Community Art, Photography, and Ceramics graduate students will conduct research using material from UMFA and Marriott Library to explore what “A Sense of Place” means in historical and individual contexts, culminating in a campus exhibition of the work produced during the semester. 

Steven Chodoriwsky portrait
The Once Upon a Time State of the School of the State
Steven Chodoriwsky, Visiting Assistant Professor in Multi-Disciplinary Design, College of Architecture and Planning 

The Once Upon a Time State of the School of the State: Constructions and Entanglements of Landscapes, Bodies, and the Arts on the University of Utah Campus, circa 1970

Along with two student research fellows, this project will conduct a performance-centered approach to archival materials using collage, publication, and workshop methodologies that explores the University of Utah during the volatile period of the 1970s.

Ana Carolina Antunes portrait
Utah Immigration Stories: Connecting Past to Present through Art and Photography
Ana Carolina Antunes, Lecturer, Gender Studies and Youth Leadership & Engagement Coordinator, Utah Neighborhood Partners

The project seeks to engage refugee and immigrant youth in discovering the rich contributions and histories of immigrants in Utah by exploring the UMFA and Marriott collections and developing photoshoots featuring community members to relate their own stories, cementing an ongoing partnership between the School of Social and Cultural Transformation and Youth Voices at the University of Utah Neighborhood Center’s Harland Community Center.

Lisa Swanstrom portrait
Inventory of Affects: William Bartram’s Travels and Mark Dion’s “Travels… Reconsidered
Lisa Swanstrom, Associate Professor of English

Highlighting parallels between William Bartram’s 18th-century natural history book and 21st-century conceptual artist Mark Dion’s work, Swanstrom will work with a graduate student assistant to develop a web platform exploring emotional responses that appear in early American writing on the natural environment; the platform will permit users to conduct similar literary searches. 

Jake Fitisemanu, Associate Instructor, Ethnic Studies, and Adrian Viliami Bell, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Illuminating Shared Experiences
Jake Fitisemanu, Associate Instructor, Ethnic Studies, and Adrian Viliami Bell, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology

Building a Method for a Comparative Iconography of Pacific Islanders and Native Americans in Utah: Illuminating Shared Experiences

Comparative cross-examination of symbology and visual motifs in material culture that builds on the unique histories of Pacific Islander and Native American communities in Utah from the late 19th century onwards, culminating in an online platform where representative communities can engage with the collections.

Andy Hoffman with students
Sounds, Sedimentations, and Sanctuaries: An Assemblage Approach
Andy Hoffmann, University of Utah Honors College

Hoffmann’s student-directed project will use multi-disciplinary methodologies inspired by critical thinkers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to probe the American West. The group will produce a limited-edition book and film based on their findings.

Joshua Graham with Durka and Jensen
Unearthing the Future: Experiential Art Education in the Great Basin
Joshua Graham, Adjunct Professor, Department of Art & Art History

Graham will work with Patrick Durka, MFA, Art Department Chair at Stansbury High School, Reilly Jensen, MA History, MFA Community-Based Art Education candidate, Art in the Community T.A., University of Utah ART 3550 and Stansbury High School students to develop a site-specific art curriculum for Stansbury High students, using UMFA and Marriott collections as primary source material for creating artwork and instruction on the cultural ecology of the Great Basin.

Felllows in Collections Engagement ft. Landscape, Land art, and the American West
2019 Collection Engagement Grant

Learn about the awardees in the inaugural round of the Collections Engagement Grant funds. 

University of Utah Salt Lake City Zoo, Arts and Parks

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