Artist In Residence Research Articles

Dawit Abebe: Ethiopian Visual Artist

Dawit AbebeEthiopian Visual Artist Dawit Abebe (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph by Michael Tsegaye © 2014 [End Page 45] Click for larger view View full resolution Dawit Abebe at his studio, March 2015. Photograph by Kristin Hjellegjerde © 2015 [End Page 46] Click for larger view View full resolution No.2 Background 32 (2015) by Dawit Abebe. Acrylic and collage on canvas (78 ¾″ × 55″). [End Page 47] Click for larger view View full resolution No.2 Background 16 (2015) by Dawit Abebe. Acrylic and collage on canvas (78 ¾″ × 55″). [End Page 48] Click for larger view View full resolution No.2 Background 5 (2014) by Dawit Abebe. Acrylic and collage on canvas (63″ × 51″). Courtesy of Saatchi Collection. [End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolution No.2 Background 41 (2016) by Dawit Abebe. Acrylic and collage on canvas (78 ¾″ × 94 ½″). Courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery. [End Page 50] Click for larger view View full resolution X-Privacy IV (2014) by Dawit Abebe. Mixed media (55″ × 39″). Courtesy of Saatchi Collection. [End Page 51] Click for larger view View full resolution X-Privacy V (2014) by Dawit Abebe. Mixed media (55″ × 39″). Courtesy of Saatchi Collection. [End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution X-Privacy X (2014) by Dawit Abebe. Mixed media (55″ × 39″). Courtesy of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery. [End Page 53] Click for larger view View full resolution X-Privacy I (2011) by Dawit Abebe. Mixed media (55″ × 39″). Courtesy of Saatchi Collection. [End Page 54] Dawit Abebe DAWIT ABEBE (b.1978), native of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has exhibited his work in the United Kingdom, France, Dubai, Tanzania, the USA, and Ethiopia. He studied painting, sculpture, graphics, photography, and industrial design at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University. Since 2001, he has been a full-time artist in residence at the Habesha Art Studio, which he and a group of artists founded in Addis Ababa. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

On this year's cover

The 2016 cover artist for The Lancet Infectious Diseases is David Kerr, who replaces Justin Gabbard. We thank Justin for his provocative and clever covers throughout 2015. David is from Glasgow, UK; this is also where his studio is based. David has worked as an illustrator since 2006 on magazine editorials, book illustrations, and theatre posters. David also creates his own illustrated stories and comics and participates in many small press festivals and artist residencies. In his free time he enjoys, travelling, hiking and walking in the countryside, and foraging for berries and mushrooms.

Artist Residencies at Historic Sites: Exploring a New Role for Pond Farm

Artist Residencies at Historic Sites:Exploring a New Role for Pond Farm Caitlin Strokosch (bio) Pond Farm, founded in Guerneville, California, in the 1930s by Gordon and Jane Herr, was originally conceived as an artist colony with a faculty composed primarily of artisans forced to flee Nazi Europe. Envisioned by Gordon Herr as a “sustainable sanctuary for artists away from a world gone amuck,” Pond Farm evolved into the Pond Farm Pottery school of ceramic arts under the leadership of Marguerite Wildenhain, an internationally renowned female pioneer in ceramics and ceramics education and a central figure in the studio pottery movement and the emergence of ceramics as an important art form. Wildenhain, an early Bauhaus graduate and Germany’s first female “Master Potter,” was forced to leave her teaching post because of her Jewish ancestry when the National Socialists came to power in 1933. After initially immigrating to the Netherlands, she was forced to once more flee the Nazis in 1940, eventually making her way to Pond Farm in 1942. The site—including a 19th-century livestock barn converted into a ceramics studio and showroom, Marguerite’s modest home, a guest cottage, and cultivated landscape—served for half a century as an important gathering place for artists, students and visionaries to explore art-making, design and critical theory about education and the environment. Owned by the California State Department of Parks and Recreation since 1964 and part of the Austin Creek State Recreation Area, the Pond Farm site has been closed to the public and minimally maintained in a state of “arrested decay” since Marguerite’s death in 1985. In 2012 the National Trust named Pond Farm a National Treasure and joined forces with the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods, the California State Parks Foundation, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation to transform Pond Farm into a preserved, well-maintained and engaging [End Page 19] historic site with strong community support and a sustainable management plan. Click for larger view View full resolution Located in Sonoma County, California, Pond Farm was the home and studio of Marguerite Wildenhain, an internationally renowned female pioneer in ceramics and ceramics education. Pictured here is the barn that she used as her pottery studio. While Pond Farm is situated in a state park and its legacy is steeped in its unique Northern California setting, its significance extends well beyond its local associations. The Pond Farm Pottery Historic District was recently listed in the National Register for its national significance in the areas of art, education, and social history. Pond Farm holds a compelling place in the history of art and arts education, women’s history, Jewish history, and sustainable living, and above all it embodies a universal story of triumph in the face of adversity. In addition to seeking capital investments in site stabilization, the partners are exploring the creation of a small-scale artist residency program along with other arts programming that will engage the public and share the story of Pond Farm. It is in this context that the Alliance of Artists Communities—an international association of artist residency centers—was recently asked by the National Trust to explore how the arts and artist residency programs can offer a path forward in re-envisioning historic sites. WHAT ARE ARTIST RESIDENCIES? Over a century ago, the first artist colonies in the United States were created as places where artists gathered to devote themselves [End Page 20] wholly to their art, typically seeking seclusion, a bucolic natural landscape, and the fellowship of like-minded individuals. Today there are more than 1,500 artist residency centers around the globe, defined as places that provide dedicated time and space to artists of any discipline for the development of new creative work. While artist residency centers take many shapes, they are all guided by the conviction that supporting individuals in the creation of new work and the exploration of new ideas is essential to human progress. Beyond sharing this core value, there are countless residency models. There are programs for one or two artists at a time or 50 creative fellows; programs that focus on a single discipline or bring together visual artists, writers...

Spitballing, slapstick, lazzi and improvisation: The benefits of practising Commedia dell’Arte in secondary schools

Commedia dell’Arte is the 16th century genre of theatre from Italy where characters such as Pantalone, Dottore, Il Capitano and Arlecchino reappear in performances showcasing human frailties in comic ways. The term Commedia was initially used to describe “theatre” and Arte to describe one’s trade or business. Now, commonly referred to as “the art of comedy”, Commedia dell’Arte is often taught within the middle years of Australian secondary schools, where it is explored not just for the understanding of the genre itself, but more importantly to impart a number of theatre and life skills. Sometimes aided by an artist in residence or through viewing live Commedia dell’Arte performances, the slapstick manner and ensemble characteristics of Commedia dell’Arte players can serve as pedagogical tools to enrich the academic and personal lives of 21st century students. This article refers to a devised theatre play, The Marriage of Flavio and Isabella , which was developed as a contemporary Commedia dell’Arte performance and aims to show how the intrinsic characteristics of the genre can be translated to suit a contemporary Australian context. In doing so, the performance targets student-learning outcomes within Australian secondary schools. To devise the performance, I drew on my training and ten years of experience as a Commedia dell’Arte practitioner, the ideas and work of Antonio Fava, a leading expert in the genre, data collected from interviews with five professional Commedia dell’Arte practitioners, and interviews and participant observations with ten secondary school drama teachers. The purpose of drawing on a variety of sources was to explore the place and potential for Commedia dell’Arte in curriculum practice and to determine how Commedia dell’Arte could be better understood in a context where the genre is not part of the day-to-day culture. This article includes a discussion on Commedia dell’Arte’s influence in different genres and encourages a dialogue on how might the mode of performance embodied in traditional Commedia dell’Arte be translated to respond effectively to contemporary contexts, both educational and public.

Judd's Space: A Marginal Absence in the Fight for SoHo Housing

Appearing along the margin of a July 7, 1971 memorandum from the Citizens for Artists Housing is a space once filled by the artist Donald Judd's (1928–1994) name. By preserving the trace of Judd's former involvement with the group, this space signals an opening in the historical record: a starting point from which to consider how artists and organizations asserted often incommensurate courses for New York's Lower Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo in the early 1970s. Documents ranging from public memoranda to private correspondences and formal stationery templates to handwritten notes reveal the under-considered contentious relationships between SoHo's resident artists and their supporters. Rather than a narrative about how artists banded together to protect a culture of loft living against municipally sanctioned programs of urban redevelopment, exposed are wide ideological spaces between members of overlapping art worlds.

A More Sincere Brahms: An Exploration of Widening Expressive Possibilities in the Opus 120 Clarinet Sonatas.

Name: Raissa Fahlman Main Subject: Classical Clarinet Research Coach: Anna Scott Title of Research: A More Sincere Brahms: An Exploration of Widening Expressive Possibilities in the Opus 120 Clarinet Sonatas. Research Question: What might documentary and sounding evidence of the performing styles of Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries reveal to modern performers about amplifying expression via increased tempo flexibility in Brahms’s Opus 120 Clarinet Sonatas. Given this evidence, what ideological and practical factors might inhibit modern performers from incorporating this evidence in their own interpretations today? Summary of Results: The exploration of documentary and sounding evidence relating to the performance style of Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries reveals much to modern performers about the difference in performance styles between the nineteenth century and our own. The documentary and sounding evidence examined in this research project demonstrates that Brahms and his contemporaries played within a much wider spectrum of expressive possibilities, revealing more accelerandi, ritardandi, and independence between voices, than our controlled modern interpretation of Brahms would allow. Ideological and practical factors however discourage modern performers from implementing this evidence into their own performances: pressures of fidelity, authenticity, text-centricity, and the diminished role of performers as compared to composers have all contributed to the constant scrutiny of performers' interpretative choices, and have increased the risks associated with performances viewed as expressively licentious. Practical application of this research via documented performance experiments however shows that modern performers can, when aware of the above historical evidence as well as the ideological pressures they face, implement stylistic tools from the past into modern interpretations of Brahms's works. For my own performances of the Brahms Opus 120 Sonatas, this research project has informed my interpretation, resulting in recordings of increased fluidity of phrasing, a more expansive range of expressive freedom, and an overall stylistic shift towards greater artistic freedom and a natural interpretive flow that is less hindered by societal pressures. My recordings also demonstrate that this research is not only relevant within the Opus 120 Sonatas, but transferrable across all of Brahms’s music. The goal of this research is not only to expand expressivity in my own performances, but to offer this evidence to other performers who may struggle with the question of expressivity when performing Brahms as well. Biography: Raissa Fahlman is a devoted clarinet soloist, chamber and orchestral musician. She has participated in several world premieres as a member of chamber ensembles, large ensembles and as a featured soloist. Recent musical commitments have included two Long Term Creative Music Residencies at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, where she was an Artist in Residence. Raissa is an alumni of the University of Calgary where she graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Music degree, and was awarded for excellence in her musical study by twice receiving the XL 103.1 Newcap Award in Music, as well as numerous scholarships for academic excellence. She is currently a masters student at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague.

A Troubled Vernacular: Legibility and Presence in Indonesian Activist Art

Activist art and political resistance became popular aesthetics in the work of Indonesian artists after the fall of the New Order in 1998. In subsequent years, more art alternatives have emerged in cities and small towns across Indonesia, including diverse and vernacular modes of artistry such as street art and community-based international festivals. Where artists formerly focused their energies on critiquing the state, present art initiatives have become far more diffuse, counter-establishment, and localized in their approach. Local artists started the Jogja mural movement to rebrand Yogyakarta as a city of murals, while Jatiwangi Art Factory, an arts collective founded in a semi-industrialized village in West Java, has become a haven for performance arts and community-based projects for Indonesians and foreign artists in residence. This article looks at such experiments of legibility and presence as a new means of redefining publics and broadening the domain of political participation in Indonesia.

From student to artist: Supporting students’ creative development through place-based work

Abstract This article reports on work emerging from an earlier research project that investigated undergraduate students’ autobiographical experiences of creativity at the University of Brighton. It found that students’ creativity was effectively supported if opportunities were provided for them to reflect on the things within their experiences that inspired their creativity. This research informed the creation of workshops and interview practices seeking to improve postgraduate students’ resilience and self-belief surrounding their place within their discipline. We argue that by offering students opportunities to reflect upon their practice and identify existing skills and experiences that contribute to their development as artists, that they will feel better prepared for place-based creative work. We further suggest that a process of reflection, action and discussion can enhance their personal, vocational and academic development. Our findings indicate that these learning opportunities can help students through liminal spaces in their work. The authors present a case study from a post-graduate Creative Writing MA course at the University of Brighton where students are engaged as artists in residence on a specific core module. We identify our model of best practice as being a fundamental part of the transformation from student to artist.

Leonardo Network News

AFFILIATE MEMBER HIGHLIGHT The Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP) is recognized internationally as one of the eminent artist residency programs. Its mission is to support and enhance the creativity of artists by providing uninterrupted time for work, reflection and collegial interaction in a setting of great natural beauty. DRAP strives to provide the best possible residency experience for artists from a diverse range of backgrounds and geographical locations. As stewards of a unique and beautiful property located in Woodside, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula, DRAP also seeks to preserve the land and use its facilities wisely and efficiently for maximum benefit to the artists and with the least impact on the environment. See .

A Fruitful Inter-contextualisation: Fruitful Inter-contextualisation of Multicultural Music in a Victorian Primary School

In multicultural Australia, the state of Victoria is identified as the most culturally diverse state with a thriving multicultural society. To enhance this cultural diversity, the provision of global and multicultural education for school children is prioritised through current legislative, policy and curriculum frameworks. Music education is recognised as one of the most effective mediums of providing such education. An online survey was conducted targeting Victorian school music teachers (n=100) to investigate and to generate a snapshot of the current situation regarding the provision of multicultural music education. The survey found that, many school teachers do not possess apposite knowledge and resources hence as an alternative strategy, artists in residence are often invited to teach multicultural music in schools. Most participants acknowledged this practice as the most effective and authentic approach to educate students. To explore this further, a research study was conducted in an urban school where a range of strategies were employed to provide multicultural education including music. By witnessing the music program in action, it was found that these strategies answered the Australian governmental policy expectations for the formation of future citizens who are tolerant, caring, compassionate and fair and offered an engaging, effective and valued music education program.

Intertwined artistic practices: critical remarks on collaboration across fields of knowledge

As an artist I pursue a transdisciplinary practice and my process evolves and takes place in time, in different contexts and through distinct materials. The collaboration between artists and scientists is no longer a surprise and is validated as a strategy by many differing authors. However, the proposed inquiry to reflect on the working relationships between artists, scientists and communicators of science, in the process of art production, became a challenging task. Through the analyses of the production of an art installation (The Therapy) developed in the context of my PhD research during an artistic residency in neuroscience laboratories and a hospital, I devised an approach that touches issues of authorship and collaboration, and co-construction of knowledge and meaning in a relational network. In creative terms, the major conclusions are the development of several novel methods of research, the resulting artefacts and the practical materialization of these via the agency of installation.

Une résidence d’artiste à l’école : Enjeux et répercussions

An artist residency in France, integrated within a project opera primary school’s objective is to stimulate student interest and enhance their prospects by offering new learning tracks and developing skills and knowledge in a transversal approach. Our sociological framework articulating the problematic concepts and notions of partnership, worlds, conflict of values and principles initiates the assumption of values from the art world and the world of the school who find themselves in tension. The analysis of these school conflicts allows us to better understand issues ranging from the teacher’s side and the artist’s side. The results reveal an artist residency torn by tension values, highlight the impact of this device on students and reflect the complexity rarely shown human relationships within a school artistic partnership.

Images >> Efraim Racker (1913–1991)

Images >> Efraim Racker (1913–1991) Efraim Racker The art that accompanies this special issue on the intersections of scientific language and humanistic thought features the paintings, drawings, and computer-generated art of a biochemist who never stopped making art, even if his original plan to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna soon shifted to the study of medicine. Efraim Racker spent the last twenty-five years of his life at Cornell University, as the Albert Einstein professor of biochemistry. The path that led him to the United States, and ultimately to Cornell, like that of many of his generation, was in large measure taken in response to political events in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland to Jewish parents in 1913, he soon moved with his family to Vienna, where he played soccer and chess and came to love music and painting. After high school, he passed the admission examination to study painting at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. After a short time, he left the Akademie to study medicine at the University of Vienna. His final medical school exams in 1938 were disrupted by Hitler’s Anschluß, which led to Jews being banned from the university. He managed to take his exams later that year, received his medical degree, and fled to Great Britain where he took a position at the Cardiff City Mental Hospital. It was there that he conducted his first biochemical research working to identify defects that might indicate the biochemical causes of mental diseases. When Great Britain entered the war, Racker, a refugee from occupied Europe, was interned on the Isle of Man, where he practiced medicine for the first time since receiving his medical degree. He emigrated to the United States in 1941 and in time—by way of the University of Minnesota and the Harlem Hospital in New York—he received an appointment in microbiology at New York University College of Medicine, which is where his career as a biochemist began in earnest. There were other appointments at other institutions until in the fall of 1966 he moved with his wife Dr. Franziska Racker and daughter Ann to Ithaca, New York. His appointment at Cornell allowed the university to recruit other top researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology. His research in protein chemistry and molecular biology included the study of a range of proteins that catalyze biochemical reactions. He was considered a leading researcher on energy metabolism in cancer cells. He was named a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1976, awarded by Jimmy Carter. [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution IMAGE: Efraim Racker, QUESTIONING (Variations on EFONE), 1979 Photo: Jon Reis Photography(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolution IMAGE: Efraim Racker, MISCHIEVOUS (Variations on EFONE), 1979 Photo: Jon Reis Photography(Page 3) When he wasn’t working tirelessly in his lab, he was often found in his home art studio overlooking Cayuga Lake. He worked in a range of media: oil, charcoal, ink, acrylics, watercolors, Magic Markers, and an early Macintosh computer with a dot matrix printer. Over the years, he gave paintings to colleagues and friends and also sold his paintings to donate to the Edsall Fund, which he established to support students with financial need. He assembled his smaller works in handmade albums. At the time of his death in 1991, a few days after suffering a stroke, he was planning a leave of absence from his lab at Cornell to do an artist’s residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California (a residency founded by a fellow scientist, the chemist Carl Djerassi). Digital images of his work in eighty albums—made between 1932–1991—can be viewed online: https://efraimracker.library.cornell.edu/. The names of the individual works in this issue are followed by the name of the album in which they appear. The editors of diacritics express their gratitude to Efraim Racker’s daughter, Dr. Ann Costello, for enthusiastically supporting the publication of his images, and to Jon Reis, who photographed the artwork and provided the digital images. Click for larger view View full...

Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago

In the projects of the artist Theaster Gates, social change and transformation is strongly tied to an actual rebuilding and reactivation of vacant architectures across the South Side of Chicago. Opposed to Richard Florida’s analysis of the artist’s role in the processes of gentrification, in Gates’s model, the artist does not upvalue property in a decaying place only to then become victim to the outcome of this valorization, but the artist is a conscious and acting part in the very process himself with a designated long-term goal. Gates started acquiring abandoned houses at South Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’s Grand Crossing area in 2006, and since then included them into an artist-activated ecology. He inserts architectural remainders into works of art that travel around the world, and when sold to collectors, he reinvests the profits into the reconstruction of the buildings and acquisition of further ones. Especially through an involvement and practical reworking and repurposing of architectural structures, Gates is performing a break from a passive emotional attachment to a nostalgic image of the spaces of non-lived memory that is a prevailing trend in photography at the moment as in the works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for example. Gates’s active placemaking includes the investment into the materiality and poetics of space, communal dinners, performances, film screenings and an artist residency program with a focus on sustainable site-specific projects. In Dorchester Projects, Gates’s interests in a history of making, as well as the history of the city cumulate, but despite historical preferentiality, the places have a distinct atmosphere of nowness. He links his artistic practice and social agendas with architectural and aesthetic issues. Gates’s recycling, or also upcycling, an “investment into the care of things” and the permanence of built places is testifying to his interest “to move back and forth between the real, the gestural, and the economic,” all contributing to his “art of staying.”

Disrupters, This is Disrupter X: Mashing up the archive

Abstract This article reflects on the conceptual and aesthetic practices engaged in the development of a performance work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum titled DISRUPTERS, THIS IS DISRUPTER X. Nkosi/Sunstrum liberally describe this multimedia performance work as an ‘anti-opera’. In 2014, the Iwalewahaus African Art Archive at the University of Bayreuth invited Nkosi and Sunstrum to make further developments to an anti-opera they had been conceiving since 2013. The invitation formed part of ‘Mashup The Archive’, an artist residency encouraging contemporary artists from Africa to engage with the Iwalewahaus Archive. The resulting performance was presented at the Schokofabrik, Bayreuth and was a tour through a ‘maquette’ of the anti-opera. It was a ‘living maquette’ in which audiences (termed ‘Safarists’) travelled through stations illustrating sketches of scenes, histories of characters, and other fragments of narrative exposition. The artists illustrated these stations using both ‘relics’ from the Iwalewahaus Archive, and newly generated digital and analogue content. Using a common tactic found in electronic music known as ‘sampling’, Nkosi/Sunstrum recontextualized and reinvented these artefacts to form part of the anti-opera narrative. The world of the anti-opera was created by video projections, sound streamed live to Bayreuth from Johannesburg, handmade replicas of archival objects, original music created from archival instruments, live performers and a professional opera singer. South African literary theorists Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts suggest that the sci-fi genre ‘offers a potential vehicle for expressing the African oral mythical mode and a (re)writing of the continent’s marginalized oral histories in the mythopoeic mode’.1 Nkosi/Sunstrum are interested in the radical implications of this view and are using sci-fi as a tactic for imagining and ‘occupying’ new African futures.

Paper Weight: History’s Legacy in the Work of Mary Evans

Artist Mary Evans has been working in cut paper since the mid-1990s. In her chosen medium, Evans investigates signs and signifiers of the way humans tend to classify certain races and nationalities, particularly in visual terms. Over the course of her career, her work has evolved to reveal the ways in which racism, the history of slavery, and the legacy of the British Empire are embedded in such practices. For over twenty years, Evans has been exploring recurring motifs that resonate not only with her personal biography as a Lagos-born, London-based artist, but also with contemporary identity politics and issues of belonging and alienation. An analysis of Evans’s recent work, including Willow Plate series (2013), Gingerbread (2012), and Held (2012), explicates the ways in which cultural and national ideologies are articulated through an exploration of personal and historical narratives of human experience. Evans’s silhouetted figures evoke racial and sexual stereotypes and thus powerfully communicate humanity’s historical tendency to categorize and prejudge. An investigation of how her early training, experiences abroad, and artist residencies specifically impacted her professional development contextualizes the works. In addition, a comparison of Evans’s work with the well-known oeuvre of Kara Walker highlights striking thematic differences despite intriguing similarities in both form and subject and demonstrates each artist’s unique talents in the medium of cut paper installation.

Book Review: Alternative Medicine by Rafael Campo, Duke University Press: Durham, 2014

After reading through Alternative Medicine a second time, petalling the pages with scribbled on post-it notes, I walked through my own hospital, hoping Campo’s ability to see that which is all around us with a simultaneously laser-like and prismatic poet’s eye, would osmotically enhance not only my sensibilities but also my ability to translate those perceptions into words. Alas, after several prosaic encounters with people seeking directions through the hospital complex, I wound up in the California sun sitting in the memorial rose garden with nary a fresh thought about the sweet scent of the abundant first blooms of spring. My admiration and envy of Campo’s talent thus mounted and leapfrogged to dizzying heights. There is a tribe of physicians with extensive medical careers who also lay claim to a full life in the literary arts. Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Irving Yalom, Dannie Abse and Perri Klass (who holds dual professorships in journalism and pediatrics) aremembers. Sterling poets such as John Stone also belong to this club though some might say it is difficult to extricate his best writing from his impressive medical career. Various physician-writers do not sustain decades of work inmedicine; examples areMikhail Bulgakov and Sir Arthur ConanDoyle, both of whom quit medicine at about age thirty, give or take. Where any given physician-author lies on the spectrum and why woefully few women are included in many of the listings of this tribe are questions for debate. But from my perspective, Campo successfully engages with and navigates through both worlds:medicine and creativewriting. Campo,who teaches poetry in nonmedical settings including the MFA program at Lesley College, has held artist residencies at universities such as Stanford, attracting as much attention from the arts and humanities academy as from the medical enclave. Alternative Medicine is Campo’s sixth collection of poetry and his eighth book (he is an essayist as well). Each of its three sections is named for a poem: “Havana,” “Alternative Medicine” and “Plonk.” The book builds on Campo’s themes of love, his Hispanic and, in particular, Cuban heritage, doctoring, HIV, the socially marginalized, familial ties, poetry/ poetics and gay life. Although he concentrates some themes—for example, the middle section largely coalesces around medically related poems—others, like life’s weavings, web themselves across poems and sections. I focus on a few delights from each section. J Med Humanit (2014) 35:451–453 DOI 10.1007/s10912-014-9292-6

Artist Residencies: Supporting Early Childhood Pre-Student Teachers' Knowledge and Pedagogy to Promote Arts-Based Learning

ABSTRACTUniversity-based artist residencies prepare preservice teachers to integrate the arts in their classrooms.

Alpha

This is a report of an art-research project that started over four years ago. It concerns drawings made by a chimpanzee as part of a scientific experiment conducted in the 1940s. On the first page I summarise the background to my project, the discussion of drawing that provides a context, and the areas of enquiry that are exposed. On three further pages of the exposition I discuss the methods by which I conducted the research. 'Collecting' describes the acquisition of second-hand books dating from the first half of the twentieth century. In 'Tracing' I discuss the retracing of drawings made by the chimpanzee named Alpha. The third of these pages, 'Experimenting', shows the development of this research during an artist's residency at MEANTIME in 2012.

‘More Yuppy Stuff Coming Soon’: Gentrification, cultural policy, social inclusion and the arts

Responding to gentrification has become a key planning issue for many urban municipalities. Local governments need to balance the often-competing agendas of urban regeneration, social inclusion and arts access and participation. This paper argues that arts and cultural units within local government bear the impact of such tensions. More importantly, however, local government policies and their implementation represent a third position in the polarised discussion on the cultural impact of gentrification. The example discussed here is the rapidly gentrifying City of Maribyrnong in Melbourne's western suburbs: a municipality where any potential realisation of the economic benefits of gentrification is balanced against the needs of a significant population of resident professional artists, and the social inclusion needs of socio-economically disadvantaged residents. Maribyrnong's arts and cultural unit, like those within many municipalities in the developed world, has had to develop cultural policies and plans as tools for negotiating complex relationships and diverse needs of community members by considering the economic, social and cultural benefits of the arts for all residents.