Professor of Art Sue Johnson has been awarded a fully funded summer residency fellowship by the Catwalk Institute, which is a retreat for art making, collaborative projects and scholarly discourse in New York State’s Upper Hudson Valley. Resident fellows are selected through a highly competitive process from among the alumni and faculty of four academic institutions: Columbia University School of the Arts, NYU Tisch, Vassar College, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Catwalk was originally the home of Hudson River School painter Charles Herbert Moore. While in residence, Johnson will continue work on an illustrated book project focused on women and consumer culture for which she began background research in summer 2021 at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware.
Archives for 2022
SMCM Southern Maryland Folklife Center Receives Grant from Maryland State Arts Council
The SMCM Southern Maryland Folklife Center received another important grant from the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC), funding activity and growth of the center in Fiscal Year 2021-22. The Southern Maryland Folklife Center is co-directed by three faculty members at SMCM: Assistant Professor of English, Jerry Gabriel; Director of the Boyden Gallery, Erin Peters; and Associate Librarian, Kent Randell. The $38,540 award will be used primarily for the 2022 version of the center’s signature event: an annual set of folklife summer workshops to be held June 3-5, 2022 on the SMCM campus.
The SMCM Southern Maryland Folklife Center was established in 2021 as part of the statewide Folklife Network. These organizations, in the words of MSAC’s Maryland Traditions Program, “support folklife, or community-based living cultural traditions handed down by example or word of mouth.” In summer 2021, the Southern Maryland Folklife Center offered a set of workshops over three days, including making stuffed ham, running a small farm, painting the Southern Maryland landscape, and making wampum pendants. The Southern Maryland Folklife Center is partnering with the arts associations of St. Mary’s, Calvert, and Charles counties, Historic St. Mary’s City, Trinity Episcopal Church, Southern Maryland Traditional Music and Dance, and the Southern Maryland Heritage Area to host the 2022 summer workshops. Serving as a hub for the region, the SMCM-based team is excited to continue to expand partnerships.
Jennifer Cognard-Black Named a 2022 Independent Artist Award Recipient by Maryland State Arts Council
Jennifer Cognard-Black, professor of English and 2020 recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, is a 2022 recipient of an Independent Artist Award presented by the Maryland State Arts Council. Cognard-Black will receive a $2,000 regional grant to recognize promise in fiction writing. This is her second Maryland State Arts Council Award; she received her first in 2013.
Cognard-Black says of this award, “While the Individual Artist Awards honor past writing – in this case, two of my short stories – what I appreciate most is how these awards support artists as they move toward their creative futures. For me, that’s a novel I’m writing fictionalizing part of the life of the novelist Edith Wharton against the backdrop of World War I, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Photo-Secessionist movement. To know that members of MSAC find promise in my current work helps give me energy towards its completion.”
One of her award-winning short stories is included in the forthcoming issue of SlackWater, an occasional journal published by St. Mary’s College of Maryland, featuring the work of faculty, students and members of the Southern Maryland community.
This year’s 69 awardees were chosen from a pool of nearly 300 applicants through a public panel process. With this year’s awards focused on the literary arts, the 2022 awardees represent a wide range of artistic talents – ranging from poets to playwrights, novelists to essayists – from all across the state. Click here for the full list of winners.
Professor King’s Archaeological Work with the Rappahannock Tribe Featured on Podcast
Professor of Anthropology Julia King took part in the pilot episode of “Tribal Truths,” a new podcast series from RadioIQ that aims to debunk myths and legends with facts, teaching about tribal cultures and current issues.
King says in the first episode titled “Ancient cliffs are revealing lost tribal histories” that “there is so much that the land tries to tell us if we just listen to what it has to say.”
Featuring Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson and narrated by tribal member Steven Nelson, the episode focuses on Fones Cliffs, a place along the Rappahannock river in eastern Virginia where the Rappahannock Tribe once lived. King and her team of archaeologists, in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, and the Federally-recognized Rappahannock Tribe, have been working to trace the history and development of the Rappahannock Tribe in early American history.
“[The archaeologists are] digging for traces of our towns and connecting them to our oral histories. And centuries after the Rappahannock Tribe’s removal from this area, they’re reconstructing our ties to Fones Cliffs, looking for three of our towns once located there. It’s a race against time, development and climate change,” Nelson said on the podcast.
The anthropology department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland first began studying the Rappahannock Tribe’s history in 2016 at the request of the National Park Service’s Chesapeake Bay Office, the Chesapeake Conservancy, and the Rappahannock Tribe. The work was undertaken to provide interpretive support for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. Following the NPS-funded project, the Tribe and King and her students have continued their collaboration. The survey of the greater river valley has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service’s Underrepresented Communities Program.
Photo credit: Pamela A. D’Angelo