Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Interdisciplinary approaches to exploring artistically and scholarly contemporary challenges (climate change, social justice, race, and gender) are still not a given at many American colleges and universities. Often, scholars who combine their research (in my case the humanities) with artistic exploratory work (in my case ekphrastic art via poetry, painting, and composition) experience disbelief, academic arrogance, and ignorance, and have a hard time getting access to the tenure table, let alone that of a full professorship. Add to that the fact of being a female scholar-artist, you see an intersectional “conundrum” playing itself out at its fullest in that the question of becoming a recognized member of an inclusive community, here academia, unfolds itself unsurprisingly in a dominantly male culture of knowledge management that hangs on to (or strongly defends) its partitions in both co-existing and opposing silos. In my two-part presentation, I trace this experience both via a personal narrative and an artistic presentation through a selected number of my painting-poems and poem-paintings (‘Women’s Council,’ Unruly Daughters,’ and ‘When the Muses Are Angry’) which I have set to music. Thus, I aim to show that gender studies, literature, and the arts are deeply integral and immensely appropriate for 21st century scholar-artists who subscribe to the notion that disciplinary interrelatedness is an ethically vital prerogative when it comes to pondering pressing questions of our own time in a way that combines logos and compassion.