March 24, 2000
RELEASE ON RECEIPT

OBERLIN COLLEGE APPOINTS CURATOR AND AUTHOR LINDA WEINTRAUB AS LUCE PROFESSOR IN EMERGING ARTS

Oberlin Online Front Page (March 27, 2000)

OBERLIN, OHIO -- Oberlin College has selected internationally noted art curator and author Linda Weintraub as its first Henry R. Luce Professor in the Emerging Arts, a new professorship funded for a period of six years by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Weintraub joins Oberlin's faculty on July 1, 2000.

Preparing students to make contributions to the arts in 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 Luce Professorship in the Emerging Arts, by examining the concepts, ethics and aesthetics of the moment, aspires to bridge contemporary art making with academic scholarship.

To that end, Weintraub will offer new interdisciplinary courses designed to explore the historical context and cultural ramifications of the emerging arts. She will conduct seminars with faculty from the various art disciplines and humanities with the goal of developing a shared understanding of--and curricula for--new interdisciplinary arts courses. And the arts community at Oberlin will look to her to invigorate its environment by identifying promising artists and providing an intellectual context for their work.

"A limitless inventory of alternatives is now included within the creative act," says Weintraub. "Participants in any of today's art-related disciplines confront a tumultuous array of options that tease and stretch the traditional constructs of their professions. Artistic possibilities are as bountiful as they are eclectic and chaotic.

"We are living in an era," she continues, " in which artists conceive of 'data babies' that they put up for adoption on the Internet. Composers create multidisciplinary symphonies by improvising with an orchestra of more than 70 musicians, dancers, poets, actors and the members of the audience. Ants have been tracked, boxing has been studied, surveillance tactics have been adopted, DNA has been sold, barricades have been constructed and the Mississippi has been swum--all as forms of art. Vampirism has even been revived and has entered the contemporary cultural arena in its original form as a ritual of love."

Weintraub says "it is a great privilege" to be the Luce Professorship's first representative. "I look forward to working with Oberlin's fine faculty to anticipate the emerging arts, analyze their implications and invent ways to cultivate the talents of those who will soon be their producers--today's students. Oberlin College, distinguished for its commitment to inspiring as well as educating its students, seems like the ideal institution to undertake this unique and timely initiative."

"Linda Weintraub has an ability to penetrate and to explicate with clarity the structures of relevance and meaning implicit in what for many is most perplexing and confusing in contemporary artistic expression," says Robert Dodson, dean of Oberlin's Conservatory of Music. "Her presence at Oberlin will undoubtedly stimulate--even provoke--a new awareness of the protean nature of art, speculation about the import of art in the life of society and the individual, and new scholarship and creative expression."

Clayton Koppes, dean of Oberlin's College of Arts and Sciences, says: "Linda Weintraub is ideally situated, by training and experience, to provide a theoretical and pedagogical basis for students and faculty in the emerging arts. Her range of interest and knowledge is breathtaking --she has published on or curated exhibitions about such diverse subjects as pre-modern art in Vienna, Latin American art, Thomas Hart Benton, Buckminster Fuller, the Russian avant garde and food as art. The work she intends to do at Oberlin over the next three years will culminate in a conference on new issues in the teaching of art that could well have national significance."

Weintraub is currently addressing the challenge of preparing students to define their roles within the emerging arts in a book she is writing titled Creative Options for Contemporary Artists.

Other books she has written include Painted Bodies of the Americas, published by Harry N. Abrams in 1999, and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s, published by Art Insights in 1996 and currently in its fourth edition. She has authored numerous catalogues and articles.

Weintraub's curatorial activities are significant. This year her exhibition The Art or Body Crafting opens an international tour in Santiago, Chile. She served as co-curator and catalogue author of ANIMAL. ANIMA. ANIMUS. an exhibition sponsored by the Pori Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland that toured Holland, Canada and New York. She is currently at work on Exquisite Corpos: The Marriage of Music and Art, both as a touring exhibition and as a book.

She has curated more than 50 exhibitions at Bard College, where she served as director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute from 1982 to 1992; and at Muhlenberg College, where she was director of the Philip Johnson Center for the Arts from 1979 to 1982.

Besides having an established career in the visual arts, Weintraub has studied dance with Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon and Martha Graham--and, as a result, gained a deep familiarity with the experimental music of John Cage, David Tudor and others. She has integrated interdisciplinary components with each exhibition she has organized or curated, and is writing an experimental narrative that traces the relationship between a mythic "curator" and a mythic "artist." She has programmed experimental performance events at a community theater in Rhinebeck, New York, where she currently lives; and, with her husband, Andrew R. Weintraub, she has designed and constructed eight homes based on experimental architectural principles.

"The interdisciplinary possibilities and the potential for cross-divisional cooperation offered by Professor Weintraub's appointment are exciting," says Dean Dodson. "We are very grateful for the assistance of the Henry Luce Foundation in making possible what is certain to be a wonderful enhancement of the College and Conservatory curriculum."

Established in 1968, the Luce Program encourages academic innovation and creativity through integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research in American private higher education.

Media Contact: Marci Janas 3/24/00 #60 mj