The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has announced the recipients of its first annual Faculty Creative Activity Research Grants.
Five faculty members from the College of Art and the College of Architecture will each receive $5,000 to support a variety of projects from publications and video documentary to large-scale public sculpture.
Recipients were chosen from 19 submissions, representing almost half of the Sam Fox School’s 39 tenured and tenure-track faculty.
The faculty jury included Sarah Birdsall, associate professor of art; Paul J. Donnelly, the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture; Ron Leax, the Halsey C. Ives Professor of Art; William Wallace, Ph.D., the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History in Arts & Sciences; and Jane Wolff, assistant professor of architecture.
“The Faculty Creative Activity Research Grants are designed to support the professional and creative activities that are distinctive to architecture, design and art,” said Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts.
“The goal was to encourage creative projects and scholarship that assist faculty in pursuing their research interests, whether that results in a book, a film, a building design, a new work of art or a significant exhibition,” Colangelo said.
“These grants are intended to promote faculty research and to help build a culture of support and recognition for creative activity.”
Recipients for 2007 are:
D.B. Dowd, professor of visual communications. The grant will fund preliminary research for “The Graphic Sensibility: A Theoretical Foundation for the Study of Commercial Images.” The book will seek to chart and articulate a new disciplinary approach to images of cultural significance — including illustration, animation, comics and pictorial information design — that are resistant to traditional art historical methodologies.
Zeuler Lima, Ph.D., assistant professor of architecture. The grant will fund the use of new digital media as an analytic tool for studying significant built and unbuilt works by the pioneering yet often overlooked Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. The final materials will be organized into boards for an exhibition at the Sam Fox School in fall 2008.
Igor Marjanovic, assistant professor of architecture. The grant will fund a portion of production costs and image copyrights for “Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City.” The book — co-authored by Marjanovic and Katerina Ruedi Ray, Ph.D., director of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio — examines the history and impact of Marina City, a pioneering modernist development that has become an icon of mid-century Chicago architecture. Publication by Princeton Architectural Press is scheduled for 2009 and will coincide with a major Goldberg retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Arny Nadler, assistant professor of sculpture. Nadler’s recent works hover in scale between monuments and small buildings and typically consist of hundreds of pieces of steel cut and pieced together. The grant will fund fabrication of large-scaled work inspired by the engineering support structures — such as bridges and highway systems — that sustain the contemporary- built environment.
Franklin Oros, associate professor of visual communications. The grant will help fund production of a video documenting St. Louis’ recently announced “10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness.” The initiative was launched by Mayor Francis Slay and is supported by the city’s Homeless Continuum, a system of more than 50 human-service agencies.
The video will include interviews with Slay and other community leaders as well as with both chronically homeless and formerly homeless individuals now in supportive housing.