New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities

In 2004 Indiana University, which had long prioritized the arts and humanities, was beginning to feel the impacts of a decline in federal funding supporting these important areas.

The situation demanded, as then IU President Adam W. Herbert noted, that the university embrace its conviction that investment in the arts and humanities was “fundamental to knowing oneself, to deepening our understanding of the human condition and to living well.”

Working proactively to ensure the vitality of this longstanding strategic priority, IU leadership -- including current IU President Michael A. McRobbie in his former role as the university’s vice president for research -- crafted an initiative in 2004 that was funded for five years as part of a broader Lilly Endowment effort to recruit and retain the state’s greatest intellectual assets.

That 2004 initiative included IU’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities seed funding program. McRobbie has since renewed the program twice, first in 2009 with an internal infusion of $5 million, and again in Spring 2015 with a third investment of $5 million.

Today, 10 years after a first, select group of artists and scholars was funded through the vision of IU’s leaders and that original Lilly Endowment grant, Indiana University’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program has matured into a leading catalyst for human creativity and intellectual pursuit in the arts and humanities in higher education.

The numbers might speak clearly enough to the reach of the program: more than 750 grants have been awarded to over 450 IU faculty members representing eight IU campuses during the New Frontiers decade. Collectively, the investment tops over $9.4 million in grants to its scholars and artists in fine arts, foreign language, opera, music, dance, world history, religion and literature. IU scholars have traveled the world and back again, from Belgium and Belize to Kazakhstan and Kenya, to Angola, Ireland, Tibet and Wales, all in search of creative inspiration, intellectual achievement and scholarly endeavor.

But resonating more clearly than the statistics of the New Frontiers decade are the voices of the New Frontiers scholars as they speak here to the possibilities and the profits of the program and, more importantly, as they share examples of their achievements: operas and ballets, photographs and videos, novels and plays, exhibitions and installations, new historical perspectives and virtual museums, symposia, colloquiums, speakers’ series, workshops, conferences and more.

New Frontiers was designed to aid arts and humanities scholars in four ways:

• To help them produce innovative works of scholarship and creative activities.
• To provide the seed funding needed for them to venture into new trajectories of work.
• To fund academic events hosting major distinguished thinkers.
• To support national and international travel in pursuit of new, innovative projects.

The program's flexibility within these four funding arms has spawned benefits that reach beyond the scholars themselves.

IU students have been inspired:

IU Bloomington associate professor of Latino studies John Nieto-Phillips, winner of a 2005 New Frontiers grant, said his students received individual training and mentorship that they would not have received otherwise. “The results of this kind of mentorship are probably not quantifiable,” he said.

New external funding has been awarded:

IU Bloomington professor of Germanic Studies Kari Ellen Gade and IUPUI Herron School of Art and Design Dean Valerie Eickmeier both used their successful New Frontiers grant writing experiences to secure new funds that flowed into the university. Gade landed a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant after New Frontiers facilitated a pilot project, and Eickmeier earned three grants collectively worth $190,000 following a New Frontiers-funded public sculpture exhibit. Following her 2007 New Frontiers project analyzing the relationship between radio technology and southern Africa politics, IU Bloomington associate professor of history Marissa J. Moorman received an additional $88,000 in external funding in 2010 to further that work.

Communities have been enriched:

“Thought-provoking theatre.” “A masterful in-the-round staging.” “A provocative new reading.” That’s how the national press of South Africa lauded IU Bloomington associate professor of acting and directing Murray McGibbon’s New Frontiers-supported staging of Shakespeare’s "The Tempest" at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg in 2007. Two years later those same South African and IU student actors performed the work again, this time on the IU Bloomington campus.

According to National Geographic, the avant-garde telematic musical "Auksalaq," co-created by New Frontiers winner and IUPUI music professor Scott Deal, left participants in Kachemak Bay, Alaska, “stunned, speechless, silent and still for long moments before erupting in applause. ... Auksalaq bears witness to a consequential step in our evolution.” The performance about the Arctic and climate change premiered simultaneously at IUPUI and six other venues – from Alaska to Norway – via the Internet.

IU’s visibility has been raised:

The research produced from a New Frontiers grant to William R. Newman, IU Bloomington Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, was used in the documentary "Newton’s Dark Secrets" by the Emmy Award-winning television series "Nova," which airs in over 100 countries. Footage of Isaac Newton’s experiments being replicated was captured in an IU laboratory for the documentary.

Before he became Brooklyn-based artist N_Drew, former IU Bloomington Department of Telecommunications professor Andrew Bucksbarg used New Frontiers funding for technical support to create exhibits and solo shows displayed at the Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles, the Piksel Festival in Bergen, Norway, The Science Gallery in Dublin and the St. Louis Art Museum. “Andrew Bucksbarg’s projects epitomize the way great sounds and images can work together," reviewers wrote in L.A. Weekly.

Evidence of the program's potential came quickly as the first year of funding saw the European premiere and commercial release of a new composition by Claude Baker, Jacobs School of Music Chancellor's Professor of Music. Baker later credited the piece, Lamentations, as the impetus for subsequent commissions for two new works, one performed in Bangkok by members of the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and the other by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. The success of that initial work also led Baker to seek and secure additional New Frontiers funding in 2007 for a project with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and again in 2011 for new compositions recorded with the Indianapolis Symphony.

Baker's success was by no means unique, as other artists had similar successes with the assistance of New Frontiers in the earliest round of funding:

• An exhibition by IU faculty at internationally recognized museums and galleries (Hope School of Fine Arts professor Osamu Nakagawa's Banta series images at the Metropolitan Museum of Art);
• Former professor Matthew Pratt Guterl's publication by Harvard University Press of his biography "Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe," which the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald called "Astute and readable. In many ways, this is cultural studies at its best."
• The reconstruction of the largest collection of New Testament drawings to be rediscovered in modern times, 300 drawings by Domenico Tiepolo (1724-1804), by IU art history professor and director emerita of the IU Art Museum Adelheid M. Gealt. The New York Times called Gealt's effort "heroic" after she organized a 60-piece display of the cycle in 2006 at the New York City's prestigious Frick Collection, where curators noted it as "the largest known New Testament cycle produced by a single artist in any medium."
• Faculty members like Colin Allen, Provost Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of History and Philosophy of Science, received new funding from federal organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities. In this case it was for his work developing a framework for digitally representing concepts within one of the most important reference works in the humanities, the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, which has entries downloaded over 500,000 times each week. That work helped Allen receive funding from four National Endowment of the Humanities grants totaling over $730,000 and led to the creation of the Indiana Ontology Project. That project created a general system for exploring texts topically that is now being used by the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Va., for new work on Thomas Jefferson. Smaller grants from the New Frontiers program allowed Allen to conduct a symposium on the neuroethics of the nature vs. nurture debate and to host a graduate student workshop at IU Bloomington of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology.

Jean Robertson, the Chancellor’s Professor of Art History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’ Herron School of Art and Design, has been a New Frontiers grant recipient and later a member of the IU faculty panel that reviews grant applications. She said receiving the award provided her the support, motivation and freedom to attain new levels of academic achievement.

"As a grant recipient I can say that New Frontiers enabled me to be much more productive in research than would have been feasible otherwise," Robertson said.

"I am an art historian, and I was able to gain extra time for research and writing for book projects through course release and the help of a research assistant. Beyond the practical benefits, New Frontiers funding has given me moral support and strong motivation -- I want to justify the confidence Indiana University has expressed in me by awarding a grant, thus I aim even higher than I would on my own."

Receiving a 2008 New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities grant was instrumental in allowing Indiana University South Bend associate professor of music Jorge Muñiz to bring his remembrance of terrorism victims around the world, "Requiem for the Innocent," to its culmination.

A Spaniard who experienced the horror and cruelty of the Basque terrorist group ETA - the second movement of his Concerto for English Horn is dedicated to a kidnapped murder victim of the ETA - Muñiz was also studying for his doctorate at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City at the time of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Terrorist attacks in 2004 in Madrid and later bombings at the Madrid airport convinced him that unity regarding common human values was a necessity.

"For me, the Requiem was not just another composition, but a work designed to involve our whole community in Northern Indiana. This required the inclusion of many organizations, both religious and civil, choirs and universities. A project of this size needs a large amount of funding to assist in the production of the premiere, which was the end result of weeks of talks and panels around the topic of terrorism, fear and hope," Muñiz said.

"We would have not been able to produce this work without the assistance of the New Frontiers program and today, five years later, I still hear from members of my community about those weeks in 2010, the premiere of the composition, and the impact it made in them. This, to me, is why I believe the New Frontiers program is so important: it supports creative arts that can make a lasting impact in our communities."

Terri Bourus has used New Frontiers grants to bring Shakespeare performances to the IU Kokomo and IUPUI communities beginning in 2005 and couldn't agree more with Muñiz  that broad, lasting impacts are of primary importance.

She first brought Actors From the London Stage, a word-class Shakespearean acting troupe based in London, to Kokomo in 2006 with the help of New Frontiers. A New Frontiers grant the following year brought another world-class Shakespearean troupe, the Blackfriars Stage Tour, to IU Kokomo. She then moved to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as an associate professor of English drama, where she continued to use New Frontiers funding opportunities to educate the community through public workshops and performances for high school students.

"It's been useful beyond my wildest expectations," Bourus said of New Frontiers. "This program gave me the opportunity to learn the ropes, not only for writing grant proposals, but for working within the IU system."

New Frontiers also helped fund Bourus' work as one of three editors for the "New Oxford Shakespeare for the 21st Century," a new edition of the complete plays and poems of Shakespeare, production for which is being directed out of IUPUI's School of Liberal Arts. "It will be the standard-bearer for future generations of scholars, teachers, readers and performers," she said.

Geoff Conrad is a professor emeritus of anthropology at IU Bloomington who managed the New Frontiers program from 2004 until 2009 as associate vice provost for the arts and humanities in the IU Bloomington Office of the Vice Provost for Research. He acknowledges that the New Frontiers grants don't represent large amounts of money - they top out at $50,000 for the Creativity and Scholarship Grants, while other funding mechanisms range from $3,000 to $20,000.

"They are not huge grants, but they make a lot of difference," Conrad said. "I see the program as crucial because funding for the arts and humanities is always under attack." And as IU's former representative on the American Council of Learned Societies Consortium of Humanities, Centers and Institutes made up of about 30 leading universities, Conrad said "people's jaws used to drop when I told them about New Frontiers. They would invariably say, 'We don't have anything like that!' "

Having something like New Frontiers operating within a community has allowed the Bloomington community to especially benefit from the work of grant recipients. In the case of one awardee, Grunwald Gallery of Art director Betsy Stirratt, New Frontiers support was used by Stirratt to curate three exhibits over five years – Human Nature, The Canary Project: Works on Climate Change, and Waveforms – each of which appeared at IU, in addition to other venues.

“The New Frontiers program, which is unique among major research universities, fosters and strengthens the university’s commitment to transformative innovation, outstanding scholarship, and creative and intellectual achievement,” said former IU Vice President for Research Jorge José, who oversaw the program from 2010-2015. “More broadly, New Frontiers helps demonstrate the importance of the arts and humanities in contemporary life while standing as a signature program of the university.”

But you don't have to tell that to the IU arts and humanities faculty who over the past 10 years have submitted nearly 1,400 applications seeking New Frontiers funding. More than half of those applications, 756 to date, were successful, whether to provide a writer or an artist the opportunity to travel to a particular site of inspiration or to seek out transformational information tucked away in some remote corner of the world. Then there is always the ever-important creative space, the breathing room, that is often needed away from the grind of teaching and developing course work.

David Shorter, an assistant professor of folklore and ethnomusicology who is now at University California Los Angeles, called the time away to immerse in his work instrumental. "It's one of the most beneficial aspects of New Frontiers: The time afforded me to focus on my research enabled me to make some critical decisions about where future work is necessary."

As with Shorter, many others have taken equal advantage of the time and space provided through New Frontiers:

IU Bloomington Rudy Professor of History Jeffrey Gould, a specialist in Central American social movements, used New Frontiers to travel six times to Puerto el Triunfo, El Salvador, to research labor movements around the shrimp industry. Those trips, which helped him write a new book, also led to his discovery of two labor union archives in advanced decay that he was able to rescue through digital reproduction.

• Former IUPUI Herron School of Art and Design professor of art Linda Adele Goodine spent four continuous weeks in the Louisiana bayou taking photographs, shooting video and conducting interviews as she advanced her research into the American citizenry's relationship with land and nature, specifically within the context of the Mississippi delta as a contemporary culture in transition.
• Stephanie DeBoer, an associate professor of film and media studies at IU Bloomington's Media School, traveled to four major cities in China - Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou - to develop a book-length project focusing on new media arts and moving image production in those central arenas for new Chinese media creativity. The trip allowed her to view collections and archives, visit artists' collectives and conduct one-on-one interviews with modern artists.

• Jawshing Arthur Liou, a professor of digital art and chair of the art studio at IU Bloomington's Hope School of Fine Arts, was able to take a four-week expedition to Tibet to film around Mount Kailash, considered the most sacred mountain in Asia for four religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Bon and Jainism. With much of his most recent work tied to the human aspect of pilgrimage, Liou was able to delve deeper and with more focus on his meditations on illness, impermanence, nature and spirituality.

IUPUI Herron School of Art and Design associate professor of art Anila Quayyum Agha also examines the human condition in her work. Most recently, she created a large-scale installation project of patterned wood and metal called "Intersections" that explored the intersection of culture and religion, particularly through the motif of geometrical patterning found in Islamic sacred spaces believed to represent certitude. Her work, funded through a 2011 New Frontiers grant, uncovered the contradictory nature of all intersections -- that they simultaneously represent boundaries and points of meeting.

Relying on the purity and inner symmetry common to geometric design, the interpretation of the shadows cast by the installation and the viewer’s presence within a public space, "Intersections" won the two top prizes at ArtPrize 2014, earning a record $300,000 in the international art competition. It marked the first time one entry won both the popular vote grand prize and the grand prize awarded by a jury of international art experts. Her total prize was the highest amount given to one individual in the competition, which awards the world's largest art prize.

"New Frontiers funding allows for a thriving arts and humanities faculty to have a voice, generating experimentation and innovation to ensure research that is current and timely," Agha said. "With my New Frontiers Exploratory grant I was able to make artwork large in concept and scale with the use of new technology. With the resultant project, titled "Intersections," I was able to reach a wide audience bringing long-lasting international critical acclaim that will continue to benefit my own artistic practice as well as IUPUI."

Community outreach is one of the central tenets of the New Frontiers program, but for IUPUI Herron School of Art and Design associate professor Danielle Riede it became a necessity for the success of her 2012 New Frontiers-funded installation, "Sustainable Growths." The associate professor in the Herron School of Art and Design had to reach out to different constituent groups for support and in turn built lasting bridges. 

Reide's project was a 561-square-foot outdoor installation on the roof of an abandoned home near Brookside Park in Indianapolis composed of artificial plants taken from discarded crafts and a swath of discarded fabric from the roof of the RCA Dome demolished in 2008. She said the work could not have come to fruition without the support of a number of communities: residents in the neighborhood, area non-profits and the business community.

"This project ended up being an intensive study in community engagement in one of the most underserved areas of the city," she said. "In order to integrate my installation into the fabric of the neighborhood I held several free art workshops at the site of the home; I also hosted an opening at the site to draw in the broader public."

She also collaborated with a number of community partners, including Recycle Force, Indianapolis Fabrications, and the non-profit Community Alliance for the Far Eastside.

Riede also earned a competitive international artist in residence program award from Arquetopia in Oaxaca, Mexico, as a result of her work and was able to develop additional exhibits that were displayed in Berlin, Budapest, Hungary, San Diego, Prescott, Ariz., and Indiana at the Indianapolis Art Center (Tears and Rain solo exhibit).

Jeffrey Hass, a Jacobs School of Music professor and director of IU's Center for Electronic and Computer Music, has been enabled by New Frontiers incentives to develop new means of performance through the interfaces of music, video and dance using interactive wireless sensor systems for performers and dancers. His tools are 3-D video tracking software, green screens, wireless sensor networks and computerized music, but his topics are deeply historical in nature, referencing World War II, the writings of famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges and the mathematically inspired art of M.C. Escher.

Hass has been funded twice during the first five years of New Frontiers grants - once for a collaborative work with IU Contemporary Dance Program director Elizabeth Limons Shea and IU Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance professor emeritus Robert Shakespeare; and again for an orchestral symphony tied to the writings of historian Shimon Redlich's work about the experiences of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians in Poland during World War II. Hass' most recent multimedia event, "Labyrinths," explores new technical and artistic ground through the design and execution of that unique blend of interactive dance, video and computer music.

In "Labyrinths," Hass is working again with Shea and 2013 contemporary dance graduate Kate Anderson to create a space of free movement for dancer Anderson within an Escherian 3-D maze. In one moment, the maze evokes visual and physical tension and in another recalls the new paths and forks at the intersection of sound, dance and gesture. It specifically reflects on the explanation in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" that an expected path can fold back on itself in potentially infinite regressions. Still to be finalized, the visual elements of the project are striking and are an enticement of what is to come.

Like Hass, IU Southeast Department of Music associate professor Erich Stem still has to complete his New Frontiers-funded work "America By: A Symphony Tour." The undertaking is massive, with Stem working with a consortium of orchestras from West Virginia, the Seattle area, Portland, Chicago and Southern Illinois to present commissioned works that represent the unique attributes and history of the town each orchestra calls its home.

Also the founder and artistic director of New Dynamic Records, a new record label produced by IU Southeast, Stem premiered "Bainbridge" on Bainbridge Island, Wash., early in 2014. By year's end he had debuted a second piece in the tour, "Kentucky By," with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra. His next work will incorporate the styles and elements heard in the folk music of the Portland, Ore., region, considering musical styles of Portland’s prior inhabitants, the Upper Chinook, and its current diverse population that includes immigrants from Vietnam, Latin America and Europe.

"The ultimate musical goal of this work will consist of using a traditional European-established medium, the orchestra, and placing it in a context that will specifically explore the combination of music from the traditions of the people who previously inhabited and currently live in the Portland region," Stem said.

The arts and humanities are about people after all, past and present. As New Frontiers has expanded and enhanced IU's renowned traditions in the creative arts, stimulating and supporting creativity has allowed for experimentation, for new media to rise, and for new intersections between art and other areas of academia to occur. For Stefan Petranek, an assistant professor of photography and intermedia at IUPUI's Herron School of Art and Design, this intersection occurred between his artistic skillsets and the new milestones being reached in the fields of medicine, agriculture and synthetic biology through the manipulation of genes.

The Genetic Portrait Project is Petranek's attempt to explore people's thoughts about genetics. First he asks them to write a message on a poster board about how they think genetic research will affect their future, then he takes a photograph of each member of this culturally, educationally and socio-economically diverse group of people. To date over 400 people have participated. His work is then organized and made available through a dedicated webpage and Facebook page.

Like so many of the New Frontiers projects, "The Genetic Portrait Project" will continue to be a work in progress. Likewise, Erich Stem will continue to travel and create new works for "America By: A Symphony Tour." Jeffrey Hass and his collaborators will finalize "Labyrinths." And the benefits of the New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities programs will continue to evolve, offering new insights and explorations in the human condition.

Continued investment in IU's creative artists and scholars was ensured with the adoption of The Bicentennial Strategic Plan for Indiana University in December 2014, thanks to President Michael A. McRobbie's inclusion of a new five-year, $5 million investment in the New Frontiers program. As the strategic plan states, New Frontiers will "expand and enhance IU's renowned traditions in the creative arts that enrich the lives of Hoosiers and reach around the globe."

On the heels of that announcement, 25 new grants were announced to faculty members for the 2014-15 round of New Frontiers funding.

A new group of religious scholars, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, ethnomusicologists and artists can now move forward with the knowledge that through New Frontiers they have the space, the time and the support to walk their own path toward creativity.

Expectations also rise around faculty members who will complete projects funded through previous grant cycles: Herron School of Arts assistant professor Meredith Setser's "Agricultura Aesthetics" will offer a striking synthesization of agriculture and art by creating sculptural biospheres that identify the remarkable similarities between agricultural patterns and the design aesthetics of a particular geographic region, and IUPUI associate professor of creative writing Mitchell L. H. Douglas will publish the poetry manuscript "Bloodland: Songs From Altamont" as an account of the stabbing death of 18-year-old African-American Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels at a 1969 Rolling Stones concert. 

IU President McRobbie said support for the arts and humanities is a fundamental part of the university's mission and that the New Frontiers program has been an essential way of developing productive, thoughtful participants in a changing world.

"New Frontiers provides freedom for our artists and humanities scholars to pursue opportunities for excellence that expand and enhance IU's renowned traditions in the creative arts -- traditions that enrich the lives of members of the university community as well as citizens across the state of Indiana," he said. "By any measure, the return on our investment in the New Frontiers program has been enormous. The program has helped to strengthen IU's cultural treasures and to identify and establish new strengths in the arts and humanities. It has allowed us to promote the considerable talents of our faculty, to support community well-being, and to enhance Indiana University's reputation in the state, in the nation and around the globe."

The 2014-15 winners represent five IU campuses and include artists using clay and 3D printers, authors and historians writing new books on labor movements and Latino manhood, an anthropologist studying cultural heritage sites and a filmmaker using a participatory framework to address HIV in Kenya. Additional topics IU scholars will focus on thanks to the latest funding cycle include Japanese picture books, Afghanistan and the War on Terror, the history of motherhood in the West, Ebola and music, comic book fandom, and improvisation and teens with autism. 

The newest grants are indicative of the depth and breadth of the work of each year's New Frontiers awardees. This year alone researchers and artists will use the countries of Afghanistan, Japan, El Salvador, Great Britain, Kenya, Chile, South Africa, Liberia, Mexico and Germany as experiential, cultural or historical touchstones for their creative endeavors. And another contingent of awardees will use the United States, including Indiana, as their jumping-off platform. IUPUI anthropology professor Elizabeth Kryder-Reid will be working less than 100 miles away from her home campus to better understand how different stakeholder groups define their own sets of values related to state historical and heritage sites.

"Two sites in Central Indiana, Mounds State Park in Madison County and Strawtown Koteewi Park in Hamilton County, have become the focus of debates that reveal deep divisions among their diverse constituents about the value of heritage sites," Kryder-Reid wrote in her New Frontiers proposal. "This collaborative project of anthropology, education, and tourism faculty investigates the value of the sites and explores how the material remains of the past are perceived and mobilized in the contemporary contexts for a variety of purposes ... as places of sacred cultural patrimony, as unique archaeological resources, and as spaces with recreation, conservation, and economic development potential.

IU President McRobbie, in reiterating support for New Frontiers, pointed out that IU faculty members in the arts and humanities are constantly engaged in the economic, social, civic and cultural development of Indiana, the nation and the world.

"New Frontiers has empowered these scholars and will continue to do so as they refine new methods for giving expression to the human experience," he said. "The work in which they are engaged allows us to better understand our world, past and present, and it enhances our understanding of and appreciation for cultures around the world."