This page is meant as a platform for the Public Art proposal project, summer 2018. The goal of this website is to support work of researching and writing a grant proposal to fund a public art project (2-3 murals and a statue [of the famed American Indian activist Wilma Mankiller]) on the campus of The Ohio State University at Newark.
Representing Diversity and Inclusion at The Ohio State University, Newark:
A “Public Humanities Project” (NEH)
(draft statement — in process – open for comments – complete draft due 8/15 – grant is due 8/29)
People
Dean Bill MacDonald instigated the program and oversees its development.
Associate Professor of English D. B. Ruderman (David) is the primary grant writer and researcher
Associate Professor of Geography Ken Madsen, Professor of English and Rhetoric Elizabeth Weiser, and Associate Professor of Comparative Studies John N. Low serve on the advisory committee.
For more information, please contact D. B. Ruderman @ 734 709 2825.
Background
The Ohio State University at Newark (hereafter OSUN), the first and largest regional campus of OSU, has been serving a diverse and underrepresented Central Ohio population since 1957.[1] In 1967, we occupied our 200-acre campus in Newark. We have been growing steadily ever since. More than merely a “branch” of the Columbus Campus, our campus has the feel and many of the features of a small liberal arts school: small class sizes, a faculty committed to teaching as well as research, increased opportunities for undergrad research, etc. Yet the campus also serves somewhat like a commuter college for returning students and those whose financial and family situations require them to work more and take fewer classes. Because of this unique situation, we have extremely strong ties to our surrounding communities. In 1971, we began sharing the campus with Central Ohio Technical College (hereafter COTC).
OSUN not only features a beautiful campus with gently rolling green lawns, an outdoor amphitheater, a campanile, and a footbridge that bisects a pond with two running fountains, it also evinces our strong commitment to public art. Bronze statuary, part of the “Great Contributors” series by sculptor Mark Lee Price, have been gifted and are strategically placed throughout the campus. These pieces reflect the university’s fidelity to many of the core principles of higher learning: there are statues of Shakespeare, Monet, Mark Twain, etc.
While these images of white men certainly gesture toward important intellectual and aesthetic achievements, ideas, and values, collectively they fall short of capturing and mirroring back the richness and diversity of our student body, not to mention the diversity of intellectual and cultural traditions that inform our research and teaching. Because our campus is a happily diverse place, our goal is to make everyone feel welcome and included. Currently, we have only one non-male statue (Amelia Earhart), and no representations of people of color. To this end, many of us have long desired to have public art that more accurately reflects the diversity not only of our population but of the people and ideas that we study and teach.
While the recent inclusion of Earhart was a step forward, we felt there was much more to be done, not in an attempt to revise, much less erase, our cultural, educational, and institutional history, but rather in order to reflect who we are now, as well as to supplement and diversify the already-existing images.[2] After deliberating for several months, the aggregated faculty agreed that famed civil-rights leader Ella Baker would be the perfect choice for a new statue.[3] This is in part because the Civil Rights Movement was perhaps the most important American social movement of the 20th century, but also because Baker impacted the movement in invaluable ways, a fact which is often overlooked in mainstream histories of the period. One of her biographers described her as a “radical humanist” because she embodied a philosophy of love for all people, while at the same time engaging in revolutionary activism to help empower people to create a democratic and just society. We believe that depicting and celebrating Baker as a representative and leader of civil-rights activism allows us to mirror back to students, faculty, and the community a more accurate reflection of who we are and what we represent. At the same time, it helps to tell a fuller narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, one that recognizes the contributions of people like Ella Baker and Rosa Parks.
Description of Project
Wilma Mankiller
We seek to raise funds in order to commission yet another bronze statue, this time of the important American Indian activist, organizer, and Chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010). To our knowledge, this would be the first statue commemorating Mankiller. Mankiller was influenced by the important American Indian protest movements on the 1960’s (e.g. the American Indian Movement [AIM], and the occupation of Alcatraz Island). She worked as a social worker for American Indian populations in California and Oklahoma before moving up the ranks within the
Cherokee Tribe. In 1986, she became the first woman to serve as the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She was subsequently elected for two more terms, during which she focused on healthcare, education, economic justice, and issues of American Indian identity and indigeneity. During her second term, she wrote an influential and bestselling autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. After her final term as Chief, she returned to activism and also taught as a visiting professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth. Since The Ohio State University in general, and OSUN in particular, has a thriving American Indian Studies program, we believe that a Mankiller statue would be an apt addition to our collection. Moreover, when taken together with the new statue of Ella Baker, we feel that a statue of Wilma Mankiller would go a long way toward making visible our commitment to inclusivity, equality, and social and economic justice.
Murals
However, while it would be a vast improvement to counter the over-representation of white European men with statues of important women and people of color, bronze statuary itself is a primarily Western European mode of public art. Therefore, we propose funding a series of three murals on campus as well. Not only is mural painting a popular form of public art in Mexico, Central and South America, etc. but it also tends to relate more directly to actual lived experience, reflecting and depicting a broader range of the population, and memorializing average working people as opposed to famous or remarkable individuals. Moreover, murals have long been associated with important political struggles in this country, such as the labor movement and the farm-workers and civil-rights movement. Consider for example, the work of Diego Rivera, Thomas Hart Benton and José Clemente Orozco. Finally murals have a rich history on college campuses (City College of San Francisco, Dartmouth, Harvard).
The advisory board and Dean MacDonald have several ideas about where murals might work best on campus. While our primary goal is to support public art, reinforce messages of inclusion, the values of learning, personal development, and civic achievement, we would also like, if possible, to represent the history of Newark, the city and its people. For us, this means the inclusion of images of the Newark Earthworks.
Here is a diagram Possible locations for the murals:
- Above the loading dock of Founders Hall (no mock-up picture)
- East exterior wall of Adena Hall (Figs 1 & 2)
- Above the loading dock of Warner Center (Figs 3 & 4)
- On the exterior wall of Warner Center (Figs 5 and 6)
- Inside Founders Hall (no mock-up picture)
* note: the mock-up pictures are not meant in any way to suggest image content — they are crude renderings by a non-artist.
Figs 1 & 2:
Figs 3 & 4
Figs. 5 & 6
Theoretical Perspectives: The Role of Public Art
Public art “is art which has as its goal a desire to engage with its audiences and to create spaces—whether material, virtual or imagined—within which people can identify themselves, perhaps by creating a renewed reflection on community, on the uses of public spaces or on our behavior within them” (Sharpe, et al, 1003 – 4). As we have noted, the space of OSUN has long striven to be a safe space for people of diverse backgrounds, and to welcome this diversity not with an eye towards normalization, but rather as a way to open up the institution itself to new perspectives and knowledges. As such, we envision the proposed public art project as more than a mere act of reflection, but also as values-based statement of who and what we hope to become. Thus, representing diversity and inclusion takes on a certain prophetic quality.
By suggesting a certain prophetic dimension to the type of public art we envision for the campus, we are not suggesting that the art itself changes the social, political, economic, and educational realities of our many communities. We agree with Harriet F. Senie who points out that, although “public art ideally creates better places and provides enjoyment, insight, and maybe even hope to its participants, viewers, and users,” it cannot “correct deeper [social, political, economic, educational] problems” (49). As Anthony Lee has pointed out, public art can easily have a conservative and even quietistic edge, which works to transform “private interests into the general interest and to displace the issue of public services with that of public art” (Lee 39). In other words, we don’t want to say to our students, “stop asking for lower tuitions, safer university environments, more inclusive faculty, etc. Didn’t we just give you this inspiring mural. We hope rather to hold up a mirror to ourselves and our students, one that reflects both the deep histories and surface pleasures of our shared social and cultural experience, including our struggles. To this end, we have specifically chosen to locate two of the murals, artworks that we hope will emphasize values embedded in our social and cultural mission (e.g. inclusion, collaboration, egalitarianism, etc.), so that the greet our students coming to and from campus housing. It is our hope that the images will reflect back to the students their own possibilities as well as the possibilities of the broader student body and the institution more generally.
We are similarly awake to the power dynamics involved in public acts of representation. The question becomes who commissions the art? Who gets to decide what types of images and narratives it includes? We understand along these lines that public art can be “read in different ways,” and that its attempts at commemoration and even beautification “do not necessarily enjoy universal consensus” (Sharp, et al 1001).[1] This is why we have included all of the faculty in our discussions thus far. Moreover, we plan to bring the student body directly into all aspects of the decision-making process once the new semester begins. While we cannot please everyone, aesthetically or politically, we want to be as democratic and transparent as possible. For us, one of the most profound and unique aspects of public art is its capacity to move beyond motivating people to motivating dialogue and debate. That is, while we have no desire to be purposely provocative or overtly political, we believe that starting a respectful and robust conversation about who we are and what we do, at least insofar as it is or isn’t reflected in our murals and statuary, is at least as important as any monumentalizing or aestheticizing function that they may serve.
(Still in progress…)
[1] Consider for example the recent removal of Civil War statues throughout the former slave states.
Letters of Support
(Forthcoming)
Budget
(Forthcoming)
Works Cited
Celebrating the Journey: Central Ohio Technical College 40th Anniversary 1971-2011. Newark, Ohio: Central Ohio Technical College, 2011.
Curtis, Jerry L, Shirley Curtis, and AARP (Organization). Out behind the Barn: Voices from the Past, Celebrating the Ohio Bicentennial, 2000.
Karasov, Deborah. “University of Minnesota Public Art on Campus Program.” Sculpture 22, no. 8 (October 2003): 26–27.
Lee, Anthony W. Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
“Off The Wall.” Accessed August 7, 2018. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/research/articles-from-enroute/off-the-wall.html.
Senie, Harriet F., and Sally Webster, eds. Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.
[1] The campus was formed to “better respond to filling the university’s primary mission to function as a public, land-grant institution” (Out, 163).
[2] The fact that our institution was largely funded and supported by civic-minded white businessmen and their families is evinced by and enshrined in the names of our buildings (LeFevre, Reese, Warner), which are named for the men who, through their generous donations and legacies, significantly contributed to the success of our campus.
[3] Our administration has been able to budget for and set aside half of our overall budget of 100,000, which includes funds for soliciting and vetting proposals, the artist’s stipend, the costs of production, and installation. We plan on applying for an Ohio State University Civic Space Grant to subsidize the remaining costs (https://oaa.osu.edu/call-applications-2017-18-framework-informal-learning-space-and-civic-space-grants).