Faculty News
On Friday, May 13th at 7:00 p.m. the Mediapolis High School Band in Mediapolis, IA will premiere a new composition by David Davies entitled, Out of Many, One. The piece is based entirely off of themes composed by the students in the band and the project was done in partnership with 2010 Augustana graduate Brian Kling, who serves as Director of Bands at Mediapolis High School. David has also recently completed a processional and prelude for the opening of the 2011 Baccalaureate service entitled Now All the Vault of Heaven Resounds.
Cathy Goebel presented the Whistler criticism project on American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) last fall at the Art Institute of Chicago and is invited to present it at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution next year. Through Augustana's Centre for Whistler Criticism, in collaboration with Glasgow University Library, art history students have worked with, and catalogued, ca. 1600 archival pages of Whistler's own press cutting scrapbooks housed at the University of Glasgow. This is an unprecedented undergraduate research and publication opportunity which will ultimately lead to an Augustana digital archive site to allow access to Whistler's lifetime criticism, including reviews by Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin. The project will next focus on Library of Congress and Freer Gallery archives, followed by collections at the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Cathy also presented Liberal Arts through the AGES this year at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as on both coasts through two national interdisciplinary conferences: at Westmont College's The Fine Art of the Liberal Arts and at the ACTC conference at Yale University: The Quest for Excellence: Liberal Arts and Core Texts along with fellow Augustana faculty panel members: Tom Bengtson, Ellen Hay, Dell Jensen, Taddy Kalas and Emil Kramer as Ellen has noted. She plans to complete the fifth AGES book in seven years this summer which will include additional artwork and faculty, administrative and student/alumni contributors ranging from the class of 1987 through this year's first-year class of 2014.
The current exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, Celebrating Ideas: Bridging Communities with Augustana's Liberal Arts through the AGES, co curated by Mary Em Kirn, professor emerita of art history, and Cathy, is on exhibit in the third-floor gallery of the Figge Art Museum through May 29th. It features 100 works of art, dating from ancient through contemporary and representing many diverse cultures, exhibited along with didactic panels for each work on display, written by members of Augustana's faculty, students and administration. Admission is free to this exhibition/the Figge in general for all members of the Augustana community. As a member of the Board of Directors of the Midwest Art History Society, Cathy chaired the Outstanding Cataloguecommittee. The Hirshhorn Museum/Walker Art Center received the 2010 award for their collaborative catalogue: YVES KLIEN: WITH THE VOID, FULL POWERS.
Mindi Mull (Psychology) recently traveled to Montreal to attend the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. She presented research conducted last year with students Stacie Ochiltree, Katelyn Wilhelmi, and Megan Wilson. The project was titled, Children's Busy Lives: The Role of Parenting and Child Temperament.