Arts Institute recognizes excellence across arts disciplines

The UW Arts Institute has selected recipients of several major annual awards.

All awards were presented by the Arts Institute, a unit of the College of Letters and Science, the School of Education and the School of Human Ecology. Governed by arts faculty and staff, it develops, promotes and administers interdisciplinary artist residencies, fellowships and awards, public programming, and outreach for the university and public.

Ann Buechner
Creative Writing Program, Department of English
Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Student Award

Ann Buechner, a senior in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English, is described by a professor as “one of the best poets and fiction writers I have worked with at Wisconsin over the past 25 years.” Buechner has already garnered much-deserved recognition from the university and her department: She was the recipient of a $10,000 academic excellence award for her senior creative thesis, a collection of her original poetry; and she was selected to represent Creative Writing majors at a luncheon with the Board of Visitors.

Buechner’s interest in poetry can be traced back to her childhood. Confronted with the knowledge that her parents could not afford to pay for dance lessons, Buechner decided on a separate means of giving life to her creative energies: “Words were a logical choice; they were free, unlimited and just as expressive as leaping around a stage in a tutu.”

Her writing today retains the stylistic simplicity and cleverness she learned as a youngster from Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein, while the content of her poetry reflects the confessional mode of later influences like Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Buechner says such influences “have given me an appreciation of sound and rhythm, a love for unusual imagery and a plethora of subject matter to draw upon.” Among her work’s recurring themes is the fragility and resiliency of family. Her recent work includes a series of poems addressing her mother’s diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, a sequence praised by her senior thesis adviser as “beautiful and heartbreaking … edged with quiet pain, full of perfectly chosen detail.”

Laurie Beth Clark
Professor, Department of Art
Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts

In keeping with the intent of the bequest, the Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts is open to tenured faculty in art, communication arts, dance, design, music and theater. The professorship has a term of two years, and provides support for activities such as travel, books and equipment.

Laurie Beth Clark, a professor of non-static forms in the Department of Art, has a longstanding record of achievement in creative production in performance, installation work and videography. Her work has been exhibited and archived at universities, museums, festivals and private collections nationwide, and she has received grants from the Graduate School, the Wisconsin Arts Board and numerous other institutions.

Clark has contributed much in the way of service to the university in her tenure at Wisconsin: She has chaired the Art Department since 1998; she has served on the Graduate School and the Arts Institute executive committees; and she has acted as an affiliate for the Women’s Studies Program.

With the support of the Emily Mead Baldwin Bell-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts, Clark will develop a videotape and a complementary essay. The video will address the making of art in the age of digital culture. “This will be a tape about the way an artist’s mind works, in which the multiple windows of the digital environment and the multiple screens of the digital editing studio are allowed to function as metaphors for the creative process,”as Clark notes.

This project will be informed by research into the kinds of work “cyber-artists” are producing and a theoretical interrogation of the relationship between active spectators and nonlinear, computer-based art. Clark’s essay will further engage with such issues, interrogating the subject position of the receiver of digital artwork and “the functioning of desire in the avatar-less environments of visual reality.”

Patricia Boyette
Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Drama
Arts Institute Award in the Creative Arts

Funded by the generosity of the Bassett and Evjue foundations, the creative arts award provides general support for three years to a recently tenured or a mid-career faculty member in the creative arts.

This year’s recipient, Patricia Boyette, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama, is one of the nation’s preeminent theater scholar-performers. Trained at the American Conservatory Theatre, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and the Stratford Festival, Boyette has performed extensively in the United Kingdom and across the United States, attracting critical acclaim in works spanning from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Noel Coward. She has appeared in and directed a number of plays at UW–Madison since 1993, most recently the University Theatre’s production of “Twelfth Night” in 2000.

Boyette plans to use the creative arts award to research, develop and perform a series of Samuel Beckett plays written for female actors. Her investigation into acting methodology in Beckett’s work will be conducted in collaboration with Billie Whitelaw, the renowned English stage player who originated the female roles in the premiere runs of several Beckett productions.

After working with Whitelaw during her residency in 1995, Boyette (under the direction of Phillip Zarrilli) performed two Beckett pieces, “Not I” and “Rockaby,” in Europe and at the Grove Theatre Centre in Los Angeles. The creative arts award will enable Boyette to renew her collaboration with Whitelaw and draw further upon the latter’s recollections of her experiences with Beckett and upon his specific directions. This work will culminate in two programs: performances of the full-length “Happy Days” and the shorter pieces “Eh, Joe” and “Footfalls.”

Dennis Dorn
Professor, Department of Theatre and Drama
Gerald A. Bartell Award in the Arts

The Bartell award recognizes and honors the achievements of UW faculty and staff in the creative arts, in the areas of outreach, public service and/or other activities involving the larger community.

A member of the UW–Madison faculty since 1976, Bartell Award recipient Dennis Dorn is the director of the University Theatre and a professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama. A theater technology specialist, Dorn has lent his expertise to performing arts projects throughout the state. Many projects involved the design or renovation of performing arts facilities in high schools. He has worked on the campus renovations of Music Hall and Morphy Hall. For downtown Madison, Professor Dorn has helped with the renovation of the Bartell Theatre (formerly the Esquire Theatre) as a community playhouse.

As a teacher, Dorn has participated in the Summer Drama Institute run by the Department of Continuing Education in the Arts by introducing high school teachers from across the state to scene design, stage lighting and theater technology. And as director of University Theatre, he has reached beyond the boundaries of the university to institute an acting internship program with the Madison Repertory Theatre and a guest artist program with American Players Theatre of Spring Green.

Dorn has served on the national and regional boards of the United States Institute of Theatre Technology. He has for many years chaired the organization’s “Tech Expo,” an important showcase for technical theater innovations and solutions.

Dorn has served as a Middleton city council member and president, and as a member of other community groups.

Aristotle Georgiades
Associate Professor, Department of Art
H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, Graduate School

Aristotle Georgiades, associate professor in the Department of Art, is this year’s recipient of the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. Throughout his career, the formal components of Georgiades’ sculptural work have consisted of wood, metal and/or mixed media, and his pieces have frequently contained images of common domestic objects such as furniture, toys and tools. His chosen materials are closely connected to his characteristic themes, as the majority of his work is related in some way to labor history and the evolving nature of work. Pieces recently exhibited in shows in Seattle and Port Angeles, Wash., center around the changes in value placed on physical work in a high-tech economy and the resulting effects on male identity.

The artist’s interest in the shifting meanings of physical labor stems in part from his personal history as son of a Greek immigrant and the value he places on traditional yet seemingly outmoded ideas of craftsmanship and beauty. According to Georgiades, physical work is devalued and has become associated with a fetishized “work-out world” type of beauty image: “In today’s high-tech culture, knowledge has replaced physical strength as an instrument of power.”

Many of Georgiades’ recent works refer to the idealized bodies of Greek classical sculpture — fragmenting them to suggest the current-day fetishization of body parts — to critique the accelerated pace of modern living in the age of multi-tasking.

Georgiades plans to use his Romnes fellowship to travel in search of artist-in-residence and exhibition possibilities overseas. Furthermore, he plans to take time off to develop a new body of studio work for commercial and not-for-profit exhibition, and to nurture a community-based public art project.

Rebecca Olthafer
School of Music
David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship for a Woman in the Arts

The David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship for a Woman in the Arts supports and encourages women musicians, dancers, artists, actors and creative writers by providing them with an opportunity to present their work in public. This year’s recipient of the Frank Graduate Fellowship, Rebecca Olthafer, is a first-year graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in vocal performance in the School of Music. Olthafer completed a bachelor of arts degree at Luther College, and she has performed and served apprenticeships at Luther’s Dorian Opera Theatre and the Operafestival di Roma in Rome, Italy, in July.

Olthafer is researching vocal music written about HIV/AIDS with the intent of presenting a performance of several selections from this repertoire. Olthafer’s interest in the subject springs from her commitment to a notion of the performing arts as a vehicle for social awareness and change, and to her curiosity about “the relationship between the performing arts and subjects that seem to have nothing to do with music.”

In a multimedia presentation designed to elicit cathartic responses from spectators, challenging them to confront their suppressed emotions about the HIV/AIDS crisis, Olthafer intends to use spoken autobiographical information about and slides depicting the featured composers and artists between each song.

This combination of biographical material and musical composition will enable Olthafer to fully expose audiences to a type of life experience that is foreign for most.