The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce that several graduate students have recently been awarded for innovative, interdisciplinary projects.  

Projects created by graduate students Lisa Novak, and Luka Carter and Annie Simpson were awarded 2020 Paul C. and Margaret Beasley Broun Student Support Funds. This Fund supports innovative, interdisciplinary projects led by faculty and/or graduate students in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Social Work, and Art that will have an impact on interdisciplinary knowledge. The Broun Fund prompts students to engage in research projects or learning experiences that bring together art, social work, and journalism and mass communication. Grants range from $1,000-$3,000. 

Lisa Novak’s proposal titled “Summer Space 2020” was developed as part of her doctoral research on youth-led art education and social practice. Summer Space is a free participant-led arts intensive taking place over two weeks across gallery spaces at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in July 2020. The project was inspired by Novak's interest in self-initiated counter-institutions of art- and meaning-making. Summer Space will provide young people with an opportunity to be part of an exciting collaboration and innovative arts intensive experience that is free and open to all, no matter their socioeconomic, cultural, or creative background. 

Lisa Novak is a PhD Candidate in Art Education. Previously based in London, England, and Vancouver, Canada, Novak is a Vienna-born designer and educator, whose research interests and work focuses on the facilitation of educational spaces, youth engagement in art and social practice, spatial interventions, participatory pedagogies, and creative dissent. She has led workshops, youth arts intensives, and numerous experiments in public pedagogies with institutions including the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, the Vancouver School Board, UNIT PITT Projects, the School for Eventual Vacancy, and the City of Vancouver. 

MFA Candidates Luka Carter and Annie Simpson along with Grady College PhD student Sarah Grizzle were awarded funding for their project, “Strange Boat”.  Carter, Grizzle, and Simpson plan to build a raft on pontoon logs and float for one week on the Savannah River between the Vogtle Nuclear Energy Plant to west and SRS’s K Reactor to the east, a site covering over 500 square miles that is considered to be one of the most toxic sites on Earth. Each day they will make “offerings” to the river, waste, and surrounding affected area; they will teach the river bluegrass music, write it love letters, weave baskets from its reeds, project poems on it at night, host teach-ins about the surrounding geographies marked by racial capitalism, and perform Greek tragedies for the toads, fish, and everything that has been able to survive. The three plan to launch their craft in October 2020 and release a subsequent documentary and book the following February.  

Annie Simpson is a multi-/inter-/un- disciplined artist making work about public history, racial identity, cultural construction of landscape, and memorial culture. She is currently an MFA candidate and Graduate Research Assistant in interdisciplinary arts research with Ideas for Creative Exploration. Simpson's practice spans photography, sculpture, performance/intervention, and print media to question landscape and longing in the American South, specifically landscape as a cultural construction & its place in discourse around public history. 

Luka Carter makes zines, furniture, tattoos, toys, and installations. He is currently an MFA candidate. His research is concerned with the traditional measures of work, productivity, and uniformity, and how these pillars of capitalism can be subverted and incorporated into a daily art practice.