Provost Funds Research And Exhibition On Caricature
Seed funding will support events around 2010 Nasher exhibit
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Duke University Provost Peter Lange and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies Susan Roth have awarded funding through the annual Common Fund competition to support the interdisciplinary project “Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature.”
The project will feature an exhibition of contemporary and historical graphic satire at the Nasher Museum of Art in Spring 2010.
The exhibition, developed by undergraduate seniors and graduate students at Duke and UNC will show works from the founding moment of journalistic caricature -- the campaign mounted by Daumier and his contemporaries against French monarch Louis-Philippe (1830-1848) -- and compare them to cartoons of the Clinton and Bush presidencies.
The winning proposal was submitted by Neil McWilliam, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies; James “Jay” Hamilton, professor of public policy studies and economics at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy; and Kimerly Rorschach, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum of Art. Students working on the exhibit are part of McWilliams’ visual studies course, "From Caricature to Comic Strip."
"Through this exhibit, we want to encourage visitors to rethink their understanding of caricature, not merely in terms of its stylistic development, but as a vehicle for political comment, and as a potentially volatile and subversive voice in the marketplace of journalistic opinion,” McWilliam said.
The project will also include complementary programming, such as round-table discussions, symposia and film presentations “to explore the issues around caricature and relate them to debates around the wider public role of print media at a moment of far-reaching economic and technological change,” Jay Hamilton said.
The organizers will engage collaborators from among faculty in Public Policy, Law, Film and New Media, student teams from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, and invited experts from popular media outlets. All of the events will be designed to draw participation from the university community and beyond.
The Provost’s Common Fund provides seed money on a competitive basis for innovative scholarly research and artistic activities that clearly cross the boundaries of departments, schools and centers and institutes. More information about the competition, including winning proposals from this and previous years, can be found at http://interdisciplinary.duke.edu/administration/funding/common_fund.php