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text and editing: Maia Dauner and Rolien Hoyng final editing: Janet Berlo layout and design: Heather Bischoff cover photography: Aviva Dove-Viebahn VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 a LETTER from OUR DIRECTOR, Joan Saab Greetings! I am writing this from Portland, Oregon where I am attending the fifth annual Cultural Association Meeting. I was invited to participate in a roundtable for Directors of Cultural Studies Programs. It’s the third such program I have been invited to this year. In each case, the story has been similar: our program continues to be a model. And for good reason, this year has been a very exciting and productive one in Rochester. In the Fall Tina Takamoto delivered the Reni Celeste Memorial Lecture, Carole Vance gave the Craig Owens Memorial Owens lecture, and we participated in a number of programs funded by President Seligman’s Humanities Fund. Among these were an exhibit and lecture by Carrie Mae Weems in the Hartnett Gallery and most recently the phenomenal graduate student conference, e Future of the Archive/e Archive of the Future, featuring a keynote exhibit by the Labyrinth Project and a lecture by Marsha Kinder. e exciting intellectual climate of the conference reflected the camaraderie and intellectual exchange that makes VCS so special. It was really impressive. We had a record number of applicants to the Program this year. Next year we will be joined by six exceptional new students: Genevieve Waller has been on a Fulbright in Germany for the past year; she is interested in contemporary art and photography. Sohl Lee is a recent graduate of Smith College. She is interested in the institutionalization of global culture, particularly in Asia. Jessica Horton and Lucy Martin join us from UCSD. Lucy is interested in the production and circulation of artists’ books and Jessica in contemporary Native American Art. Shota Ogawa graduated from the University of Manchester and is currently living in Japan; he is interested in the Asian diaspora particularly in terms of social movements and visual culture. Cesare Wright recently received an MFA from University of Southern California Los Angeles and is interested in ethnographic film and globalization. I think they will all thrive in Rochester and contribute to the intellectual and social life of VCS in very positive ways. I hope you all have a productive and relaxing summer! Best, Joan www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/VCS VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 a look at HARTNETT with, Derek Rushton Derek Rushton is a graduate student in Visual and Cultural Studies. For two years he has been working as the coordinator of the Hartnett Gallery. We have had an exciting program of exhibits this year at the Hartnett Organization and all undergraduate Gallery. Can you tell us a little bit students are welcome to join about how the gallery works? How the student committee assisting can students become involved and in the various tasks involved in what role does the University play? running the gallery. Hartnett also encourages and supports e 2006-07 season marked curatorial projects and exhibitions the 30th anniversary of the proposed by graduate students. Hartnett Gallery featuring a wide range of media, well-attended is year Hartnett was successful public lectures, active student in obtaining a programming grant participation, and interdisciplinary from the New York State Council collaboration. Some major on the Arts. Hartnett also received highlights from the past year supplemental funding from included an exhibition and public the Humanities Project, a year- lecture by celebrated American artist long initiative at the University Carrie Mae Weems, an exhibition of Rochester emphasizing the of AIDS posters from the Edward influence and contributions of the C. Atwater Collection with a public Humanities to academic and civic lecture by artist AA Bronson, and life. As a part of President Seligman’s the widely-publicized exhibition initiative to promote the Arts and Piece Process IV: After Lebanon. Humanities at the University, Hartnett Gallery also received a Hartnett is a professional gallery five-year financial commitment that is run by two graduate from the Venture Fund to assist in student assistants from the VCS future programming, development, program and a committee of and financing the gallery’s undergraduate students guided by efforts to bring contemporary a faculty advisory board. Partial art to the University and the funding and support for the gallery greater-Rochester community. comes from the Student Activities www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/VCS VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 Vision=Life Are you able to give us an idea of what Hartnett has in store for next academic year? triangular gallery space that are unpredictable and absurd. e gallery committee is Incongruent: Contemporary Art very excited about next year’s from South Korea will bring exhibition schedule. An open call together the recent work of seven for submissions was circulated contemporary Korean and Los and the gallery received more Angeles based Korean-American than one hundred innovative artists. e participants include proposals. Highlights from the two artists closely associated with schedule include an exhibition Min Joong (people’s art), a cultural titled Dripping Factory by and political movement of the Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan 1980s. ey will be juxtaposed VanDyke. In this site-specific with five younger artists who work project, VanDyke will build in conceptual and performance- installations in the gallery that based photography, video, and are part laboratory and part Web projects. Also included in stage set. He will juxtapose the schedule is a photography chaotic with organic elements exhibition titled Native by the to establish spaces in the London duo Maslen & Mehra.a www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/VCS VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 Hartnett 2006-07 Highlights Christine Shank She Quietly Considers World AIDS Day 2006 September 5 – October 1, 2006 Vision = Life: Posters from the Edward C. Atwater Collection John Greene November 29 – December 20, Surfaces 2006 October 6 – November 9, 2006 All About Eve Carrie Mae Weems Piece Process All About Eve Piece Process IV: After February 8 – March 9, 2007 Lebanon March 22 – April 22, 2007 Undergrad Show May 3 – May 10, 2007 www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/VCS VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 an INTERVIEW with, JOAN SAAB When I was pregnant with my exclaimed, “the feminists were first child I took a prenatal yoga wrong.” I was flabbergasted and class. I was new in town and infuriated. She worked, she was thought it would be a good way a mother. How could such a hip, to meet some interesting, like- progressive woman have such a minded women outside of the conservative view of feminism? university where I work. e And when did feminism promise class was taught by a woman women that they could do it all? named Deborah, a liberal It must be a fluke I thought, mother of three, who spent until I had a similar experience a most of the class explaining to few months later when my then us how child-birth had become eight-month old son went on overly medicalized and how something all my books called the medical establishment is a nursing strike. Determined to anti-woman. To my husband’s stick it out, I called La Leche dismay, I instantly fell in love League. I wanted a pep talk; with Deborah. She was strong- instead the woman on the hot- willed, opinionated, an advocate line’s response echoed Deborah’s for women and children. I earlier comments. When I would come home from class explained to her that I had invigorated, full of plans: no returned to work and was having pain medication for me… a hard time pumping enough perhaps a water birth…perhaps milk, she dismissed me, “You can’t at home.... en, one day work and breast-feed,” she said, during her regular sermonizing, “You need to get your priorities Deborah said something that straight.” I hung up and let him floored me. While coaxing us wean himself shortly thereafter. all into modified downward at was six years ago. Since dog positions, she explained then, I have had another child that the women’s movement and have so many personal had done a real disservice to anecdotes about my encounters women by leading us to believe with anti-feminism and that we can do it all. “You can’t motherhood that I could write a work and be a mother,” she multi-volume book. And, since www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/VCS VISUAL & CULTURAL STUDIES a Spring 2007 then, a number of books and of something I call the “parental articles blaming “feminism” for public sphere,” which looks at misleading women have also how parenthood has become emerged: Ayun Halliday’s hip- a shorthand for engaged mama zine, e East Village Inky citizenship. I’ve started looking at and hilarious memoir e Big celebrity parents and the market Rumpus, Danielle Crittenden’s for babies and baby goods in hyper-conservative What Other the United States, and abroad. Mothers Didn’t Tell Us, and Amanda Bright@Home, Sylvia ere seems to be widespread Hewlett’s Creating a Life (which interest in the topic. I’ve had a inspired a Sixty Minutes segment couple of editors express interest and Time cover story), and Lisa in the project and have been Belkin’s recent New York Time’s interviewed on MSNBC for a Magazine article, “e Opt-Out segment on Celebrity Babies, and Revolution,” and Judith Warner’s for the Charlotte Observer and e Mommy Myth are just a Canadian Family Life Magazine. few. In each case, the authors As my file for this project grows, present a uniform and often however, I vacillate between highly essentialized notion of excitement and ambivalence feminism, and in each case, they towards the topic.