Tag: OAI Updates

A Brief Interview with Dr. Irvin J. Hunt:

What do you find exciting (or vital) about integrating the arts through higher education and our community here in C – U?

The most exciting thing about bringing art into more corners of the university and into our broader community is the connections art helps us make with one another: the community art itself inspires. One of the most beautiful things about artistic practice is how many points of view, experiences, historical contexts, and intellectual insights it combines. It is fundamentally interdisciplinary and thereby creates the conditions through which to extend one of our core campus values: collaboration. And the special the contribution art makes to our goal of increasing collaborative endeavors is its emphasis on the strength of honoring our differences, on the power of harnessing them. As writer Audre Lorde put it in 1980, art is a lifetime practice of confronting human difference (class, identity, background, and so on), not as a cause for “suspicion,” but as a “springboard for creative change within our lives.” The same could not be truer today. What we are talking about when we talk about the integration of the arts is a critical life practice of using our differences, like flint, to spark new forms of creativity, to bring our work into areas of innovation that it otherwise might not reach. 

In what ways do you feel most connected to the arts? And/or how do you feel the arts benefit you and your son/family? 

The poet Louis Gluck famously wrote, “we look at the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory.” The other day, I was driving to Sidney–a bucolic town thirty minutes southeast of here–with my six-year-old son. We were heading down one of those long stretches of road that cut through the farms when we saw a cluster of birds shifting into different shapes, bending, swirling, almost as though they were a single animal. “I see it! I see it!” my son said from the back, when I pulled over to the side and pointed them out. Of course, he was noticing what we know to be a “murmuration,” but he was seeing it for the first time, and it was pure wonderment. Art makes us remember when we looked at the world for the first time and how to look at it that way again, and again–from the point of view of a child. I feel most connected to the arts when I adopt a child’s perspective, or when I let art open me up to that perspective, which of course lives in us all or we wouldn’t be here. The other part of Gluck’s statement, “the rest is memory,” is that art isn’t only openness to wonderment, it’s the encounter with the journeys we’ve taken to get to the wonder, the memory of where we’ve been and the wonder we came from. The next time we took that road, we looked for those birds, which is to say that we saw them again. The sky was more precious, vibrant, I dare, at the risk of sounding dramatic, to say, mesmerizing. 

Going back Gluck’s quote, what is childhood if not play? For a long time, I’ve been incorporating dimensions of play in my classroom: associative writing, reading meaning in the shape of a letter not just the definition of a word, assembling archival material as a collage in a scrapbook, and so on. It is a question of how do we free ourselves up from predefinitions, from assumptions about how we should see things and what is worth seeing–and enter our work from the position of playful imagination? It takes a lot of vulnerability–because it is indeed risky–to shed those structures of belief through which we know we find professional approval or even protection, when in fact they constrain our thinking. Play may have a target–producing new connections between fields of knowledge, new questions and theoretical insights–but no necessary outcome. It may be the closest thing to freedom we have access to at any time. I don’t know what art is, if not an experience of freedom, if not, at least in part, an experience of play.  

What my son and I were doing on the side of the road was sharing attention. Sometimes I think human connection is at bottom about shared attention, whether you’re looking at starlings, at numbers on paper, at the past or the future. How can I attend to the same thing beside you? How can I expand the scope of what I pay attention to? I think art is a practice of paying attention. It is a practice of slowing down to be able to pay attention. In an age of information overload and mounting distractions, a slowdown may be one of the biggest ways art nurtures me and the people I am lucky enough to experience it with.

Could you describe a time when an artistic experience inspired you in your current or previous work? (Something that moved you significantly, or unlocked a difficult idea/project?)

I am writing a book on grief spaces, on spaces black people have carved out in the past fifty years or so to grieve their dead, whether a loved one or a dream. It is called Cartographies of Grief: Mourning Spaces in Modern Black Poetry and it was inspired by certain artistic practices that don’t often get discussed: the ways everyday people make art every day. I was teaching our very own Janice Harrington’s book of poems Yard Shows which in turn is inspired by the veritable exhibitions blacks have made on their lawns for dozens of years, often in homage to their dead: tires turned into archways, chairs decorated with broken glass to evoke royalty and maintain a seat for their loss–all in an a society that often resists such commemoration among marginalized lives. I thought then of my mother’s rose garden, which she tended to almost daily after my father died, as though she were embedding his life into the soil. The same kind of ordinary artmaking occurs inside homes, as well. In gatherings around kitchen tables, in the smell of the food that wraps around them–in all these unspoken places, which are imagined and reimagined in some of the most captivating poetry I have ever read. It is great gift to be writing a book open to inspiration from such a wide swathe of places.