Indigo plants in South Carolina, image copied from an eighteenth
century South Carolina map.
Courtesy Perkins Library, Duke University.
Prof. Feeser's forthcoming text, Red, White, and Black Make Blue:
Indigo in the Fabric of
Colonial South Carolina Life (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2013.
Print),
focuses on indigo production.
On Monday, April 10, 2013, at the CAAH Honors and Awards Ceremony,
Dean Rick Goodstein, of the College of Architecture, Arts & Humanities,
announced that associate professor
Andrea Feeser was named as one of two Creativity Professors in the college. Dr. Feeser joins Assistant Professor Christina
Hung as the second member of our department to receive this prestigious
distinction.
The Creativity Professorship specifically recognizes
faculty members engaged in exemplary, creative teaching and/or research
activities. António Damásio, professor
of neuroscience and head of the Brain and Creativity Institutes at the
University of Southern California stated, “anytime we produce something new, be
it an architectural drawing, classroom curriculum, or a new approach to a
business problem, the creative process is at work.” The college intends to reward creativity in
the classroom or studio, scholarship, artistic activity and/or
multidisciplinary work. Since creativity can be defined differently according
to each of the college’s diverse disciplines, the definition remains purposely
broad and abstract. Each Creativity
Professorship is a two-year appointment and is non-renewable. Each faculty
member receives a $2,500 salary supplement and a $2,500 professional development
stipend annually for the two-year period.
Prof. Feeser plans to use the award to consult specialized
libraries, notably the Charles W. Moore Center for the Study of Place at UT
Austin, as well as to visit Freud’s House in London and Ireland’s often-idealized
County Leitrim. She said the result of
this research will help her classes to “benefit from what I learn from the
libraries, locales, and colleagues the professorship will enable me to engage.” Ultimately, she noted, that she will return
from her journeys “vitalized as a scholar… [and] as a teacher.”
Professor
Feeser received a B.A. from Williams College in 1984, with a double major
in history and art history. In 1996 she received a Ph.D. in modern and
contemporary art history, theory and criticism from the City University of New
York Graduate Center. Jack Flam and Linda Nochlin supervised her dissertation
on Picasso's art and politics from 1942-1962. Feeser has taught courses at SUNY-Purchase,
at California State University, East Bay and at the California College of Arts
and Crafts. She was assistant and associate professor of art history at the
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa from 1996-2002, and is currently associate
professor of art history at Clemson University. Feeser has published widely on
modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is the editor for the
Parlor Press book series, Aesthetic Critical Inquiry.
In 1998, Feeser and artist Gaye Chan founded DownWind Productions — a
collaborative of activists, artists and educators — to explore the past and
present effects of colonialism and capitalism in Waikiki. DownWind Productions
distributes information through the public art project Historic Waikiki, and
the book Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and
Remembering (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). Historic Waikiki was featured in the 2004 New York
Asia Society exhibition Paradise Now? Contemporary Art
from the Pacific. Her latest
publication, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of
Colonial South Carolina Life (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2013.
Print) is forthcoming in 2013 and may be pre-ordered on Amazon’s and Barnes and
Noble’s web sites.
