KU News Release

New technologies to illuminate memory and place public art project by KU professor

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas art professor is preparing a multimedia public art project that blends technology and artistic vision to illuminate a communal memory of the relationship between a university and its community in Bowling Green, Ky.

The exhibit celebrates the 100th anniversary of Western Kentucky University and the 50th anniversary of desegregation on that campus. The exhibition will run Oct. 20-Nov. 20 on the Western Kentucky University campus and in Bowling Green’s Capital Arts Alliance Gallery.

Western Kentucky commissioned KU professor Carol Ann Carter to create a collaborative public work that calls on the past to speak of the future. Carter has titled the work “ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF WKU: Portraits of Memory and Place.”

Carter plans a similar project for the Lawrence Arts Center in January. Much of the work will be beamed onto the exterior walls of buildings each night for public view beyond a gallery.

The two projects “will put creativity and new technologies to work in a more public forum,” said Carter. “I hope this project will demonstrate that art has a place in the public mind as well as in preserving the history and culture of a place.”

“Carol Ann has demonstrated the sensitivity and skills to weave the multiple, sometimes ugly, threads that are our community’s story,” said Kristina Arnold, Western Kentucky University’s art gallery director and faculty member. “As a group we are impressed by her abilities as a visual storyteller, and the seeming ease with which she synthesizes complex information.”

Rather than a conventional canvas, Carter works with computers and cameras and teams with videographers to create montage portrait elements that flow, dissolve, converge, surge and soar. Carter layers, animates, amplifies, contorts and synthesizes both images and sound to create her work, regarded as new media in the fine arts.

Project costs, including travel and materials, have exceeded the budget. Carter is seeking corporate sponsors to provide the high-powered data projectors needed to beam the art onto buildings for nighttime viewing during exhibitions in Bowling Green and Lawrence.

This summer, Carter traveled to Bowling Green to gather material and diverse perspectives of people from the community and campus. Her subjects range from Western Kentucky’s oldest known living graduate, born in 1906, to a local historian and a descendant of the founding family of Jonesville, an African-American community that was dismantled by urban renewal — a site that now houses the campus arena, a stadium and a parking garage.

Carter says she has found tremendous support and enthusiasm among the participating students and colleagues at Western Kentucky and the Capital Arts Gallery. “Their interest and commitment is very inspiring. The more I travel there the deeper and wider we go into their stories. We’re finding that individual lives cross and connect in amazing ways and this will be evident in the final video work.

“The project requires collaboration among those who share space in a culture ultimately to touch a common center and to envision futures together. It has the potential to bring populations with diverse perceptions of entitlement and empowerment and of memory and identity together with the potential for healing.”

The memory and place portraits project emerges from the creative themes Carter has been exploring since 2001. Her recent work includes “MouthPeace,” 1999; “Devices and Strategies for Recovery and Protection,” 2002; “Voices From the Walls,” 2003; “Waiting Room: States of Seeing,” 2005; and “Touch: The Appetite of Skin,” 2005-06.

-30-

The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. University Relations is the central public relations office for KU's Lawrence campus.