Faculty

What Does 'Drawing' Mean? Gray Center Exhibition Explores Interdisciplinary Possibilities

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Gray Center’s signature fellowship program, “On Drawing Drawing On” includes artworks such as handmade pencils and a chalkboard that invites visitors to add their own illustrations.

In 2016, artists Amber Ginsburg and Sara Black harvested a tanoak tree on the California coast that was dying from sudden oak death, a disease caused by an accidentally introduced pathogen. After drying the tree in a high-temperature kiln to remove any trace of the pathogen, they gave it new life by turning it into 7,000 handmade pencils: works of art that could be used to produce more art.

Those pencils are now part of “On Drawing Drawing On,” a new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Running through March 13 in the Logan Center Gallery, the exhibition celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Gray Center’s signature initiative: the Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship.

“The show is a riff on the double meaning of drawing,” said Seth Brodsky, director of the Gray Center. “It obviously designates the act of creating art with pencil and paper. But it also involves pulling, dragging, drawing out, selecting too. It speaks to the way Gray Center fellows select each other, draw from and on each other, find things in each other’s work neither knew was there in the first place.”

The Overlooked History of Black Cinema, with Jacqueline Stewart

Prof. Jacqueline Stewart’s career has examined the histories of overlooked Black filmmakers and Black audiences. Last year, the University of Chicago film scholar Stewart won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for “illuminating the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to cinema’s development as an art form.”

Stewart also serves as the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies and is chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, Stewart explores the history of Black cinema and explains how preservation and archiving are not neutral acts, but contribute to how we contextualize and understand Black history.

19 UChicago Faculty Receive Named, Distinguished Service Professorships

Walker Art Museum, the headquarters for the Division of the Humanities

Nineteen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Two of the 19 are professors in the Division of the Humanities: Daisy Delogu in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Christopher Faraone in the Department of Classics.

What UChicago Faculty and Staff Want You to Read Over Winter Break

Catriona MacLeod, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor of Germanic Studies

As 2021 draws to a close, many are looking forward to a well-deserved winter break. It’s a great time to cozy up next to the fire with a book, so we asked University of Chicago scholars and staff what they would recommend reading.

The list includes books that weave together many different threads of human experience—family, history, science, government, nature and more—and one book that explores an intelligent robot’s experience of the human world. From the possibility of transformative justice to the prospect of nature rebounding after a crisis, there is something to match every sensibility.

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