2014-15 Creative Activity Research Grants

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts announced the names of five faculty who are the recipients of its 2014 Creative Activity Research Grants.

The grants will fund a variety of projects, ranging from the production of an architectural prototype capable of visually revealing a thermal environment to a photography exhibit of a historically African-American cemetery.

Established in 2007, the Creative Activity Research Grants program aims to encourage faculty to pursue innovative new projects or to advance ongoing creative activity and research.

The following recipients were chosen by a jury of tenured and tenure-track faculty:

Chandler Ahrens, assistant professor, architecture. The grant will support Klimasymmetry: research that intends to locate spatial qualities of thermal conditions in an attempt to simultaneously share information about the architectural surface and the surrounding thermal environment. The main objective is the production of a unique architectural prototype capable of visually revealing a thermal environment created by a glass fiber-reinforced concrete surface embedded with thermal performance consisting of radiant heating and cooling.

Lisa Bulawsky, associate professor, printmaking. The grant will support The Accident Event Index, a project that explores historical events and their relationships to incidents that occur on their margins. Drawing from her personal archive of newsprint collection from the last 13 years, Bulawsky will contrast the layered and abstracted records of events captured on newsprint with imagery of prominent historical events. The Accident Event Index will capitalize on a variety of print and transform it into commentaries regarding the nature of serendipity. The project will appear in exhibitions at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University winter 2015 and Gallery 406 at Elon University spring of 2015.

Jennifer Colten, senior lecturer, photography. The grant will support the creation of a photography exhibit on Washington Park Cemetery, a historic African-American cemetery located near Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Drawn to the cemetery’s deep cultural significance, Colten began photographing the land—which is the topic of ongoing political, economic, racial, and social controversy—some 20 years ago. The photographs will accompany historical research on the cemetery, family interviews, oral and video histories, and text on the site’s significance. The exhibit is slated for display at the Missouri History Museum in 2017.

Patty Heyda, assistant professor, architecture and urban design. The grant will support the development of the tentatively titled book Rebuilding the American City, coauthored with David Gamble, lecturer in urban planning at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The book marries urban design and landscape architecture considerations with planning, public policy, and private development to examine particularities of urban rebuilding in American downtowns in the last decade. It will present a layered analysis of 15 complete urban design projects in 15 cities across the United States. Routledge Press will publish Rebuilding.

Igor Marjanović, associate professor, architecture. The grant will support the development of the book On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918-1941), coauthored with Jelena Bogdanović and Lilien Robinson. The book aims to further the understanding of art and architecture within diverse cultural geographies, European and cultural studies including modernity and tradition. The authors hope to shed light on previously unpublished material examined by both established and emerging scholars, provide important case studies on Serbian and Balkan cultures, and illuminate the larger topic of modernism by examining its centers and margins. Leuven University Press will publish On the Very Edge.