Oberlin Portrait: Linda Weintraub

Photo by Al Fuchs

The Oberlin program established by Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Arts Linda Weintraub integrates, she says, "the intractably avant-garde into the content of courses and explores the manner in which these art works necessitate innovative pedagogical strategies."

Throughout her career as a curator, teacher, and writer, Weintraub has focused on art that challenges cultural norms and the common expectations about what constitutes a work of art. She has sought to illuminate and explain why this kind of art is produced, its material form, and--perhaps most important--its relationship to the audience.

She says that her purpose as an educator is "to guide students toward assimilating this innovative material and identifying ways they might contribute to the future legacy of the arts."

Beyond the classroom--as a curator and as a writer--she seeks, she says, "to expand the role of the arts in the lives of all people." Her most recent book, Art on the Edge and Over, Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society, has found a wide audience among general readers as well as among academics and students.

The Luce Professorship, a six-year post that Weintraub assumed in 2000, is intended, she says, "to prepare students to become maverick artists who serve as society’s free radicals and culture’s forces of dynamic change."

Today's technologically enhanced and genre-crossing environment demands new, interdisciplinary models of arts education--and an exploration of the intellectual framework supporting it. The "bridge" that Weintraub is building integrates academic scholarship with the concepts, ethics and aesthetics of the moment.

"I want to overcome academia’s split personality," says Weintraub. "Higher education is sometimes devoted to preserving the past and sometimes to propelling the future. And it is as intent on cultivating the skills of rigorous methodologies as it is on encouraging imaginative explorations. My goal is to demonstrate that the arts, as they are practiced today, integrate all of these approaches."

Weintraub has been doing just this through the emerging arts courses she has developed, in which she attempts, she says, "to develop seemingly contradictory skills, and to guide students toward their integration."

Her playing field is as diverse as her pedagogy. Her focus is not limited to one art form, but to all. One recent curatorial project was a touring exhibition and publication titled Exquisite Corpus: The Marriage of Music and Art. "My project was designed to transform the fascinating, but typically theoretical, relationship between music and art into a lived experience," she says. "It was based on the observation that many of the aesthetic components of music and of visual art are integral and transferable."

Many faculty members and students have been eager to experience all that Weintraub has been bringing to the community. "Maverick Artists/Visionary Educators," a series of residencies begun by Weintraub last year and continuing this year, provides a showcase for, she says, "distinguished pioneers in diverse art forms to share their remarkable creative processes" with the Oberlin community. Some faculty members have answered her clarion call for "Henry Luce Educators." Tom Lopez, Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts, is particularly excited by the prospect of raising the culture’s consciousness level of emerging technology and its impact on the arts.

"Many of us, as creators of art, are wrestling with these issues, and most everyone encounters them as an audience," says Lopez.

"Our students are experimenting with sophisticated real-time audio and video processing, even creating virtual-reality environments. We are all benefiting from Linda Weintraub’s critical observations and her ability to lead an investigation on the effect of new media on the emergence of art."

A Conservatory Portrait Conversation with Linda Weintraub

What keeps you inspired during discouraging days?
This question implies that inspiration is self-generated, and that it originates in a deep, internal reservoir that needs periodic priming in order to flow. My inspiration tends to derive from necessity. It is continually activated because there are so many opportunities for problem solving. The inspiring problem that Oberlin has assigned me is to develop strategies to help students clarify their intentions, disseminate their insights, and enhance the impact of their endeavors.

If you could not be in an arts-related profession, what other profession would you choose? What would you definitely NOT choose?
I would wish to be a mother and grandmother. This wish has come true. I would not want to join the army.

Do you play an instrument, sing or compose?
My truthful answer is an unconventional one. A friend and I are creating a musical instrument that is approximately 2,000 yards long and four feet wide. It will generate an ever-varying composition that is performed, without human intervention, 24 hours a day. We are creating a "water symphony" by sculpting the stream that runs through my country property in Rhinebeck, New York. By widening and narrowing the banks, stacking and distributing stones, we are able to orchestrate wondrous sounds of gushing, splashing, and trickling at varied tempos, volumes and tones. I would be delighted to have any of the readers of this paragraph visit it.

How have your experiences working with Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, and Martha Graham--and the musicians with whom they collaborated--affected your perspective as an artist, a curator, a teacher, and a writer?
The lesson that they taught resounds more powerfully each day. Each embodied the dictum that there are no pre-determined limits--the arts are infinitely expandable. But they also demonstrated a reverse truth: the exuberance of frontier-blazing explorations rarely survives unless they are accompanied by an equal application of rigor and restraint.

What do you do in your free time?
Build stone terraces, tend to my chickens, weave grapevine fences, make puppets with my grandchildren, write poetic discourse, run a living room arts series, support vanguard performance at a community theater.

What do you read?
My reading falls into three categories: study, scrutinizing, and browsing.

Study is motivated by the artists with whom I am working: Japanese concepts of Nirvana (Mariko Mori), native American cosmologies (Thomas Joshua Cooper), blaxploitation films (Chris Ofili), Harry Houdini (Mathew Barney), gender politics in Islam (Shirin Neshat).

Scrutinizing allows me to keep abreast of emerging trends in the arts and society. I scrutinize journals, newspapers, and reviews of books, films, and performances.

Browsing is a means to detect the subtexts and hidden agendas that abound in society and often determine changes in the arts. I browse through Sky Mall and Wizcom Technologies catalogues. I read the warnings on cleaning products. I look at Presidents’ Day sales copy and advertisements for vacations.