Season 3 - Ep 1: Ria Cuéllar-Koh, SHARP Fellow: Special Highlights

In this very special episode of “Works in Progress,” we’re revisiting some highlights from the podcast. As part of the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program, research fellow Ria Cuéllar-Koh curated and narrated this episode. With clips from all three seasons of “Works in Progress,” Episode 1 explains how the ArtLab came to be and what opportunities it affords to artistic researchers. We cover the different forms artistic research can take and how the ArtLab enriches the fabric of a campus community. Ria also discusses her thoughts on the humanities, arts, and student life interspersed between segments from previous episodes.

Thanks for joining us for Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity, collaboration, and experimentation happening at ArtLab. To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.

The podcast is recorded in the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hosted by Bree Edwards
Audio by Luke Damroch
Production by Kat Nakaji
Research by Sadie Trichler & Ria Cuéllar-Koh

Design by James Blue & Sonia Ralston

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYING]

BREE EDWARDS: 

Hello and thank you for joining me for Works in Progress. 

I'm Bree Edwards, director of the ArtLab at Harvard, a place where artists, students, and scholars come together to explore, experiment, and create new work. 

The ArtLab is a special initiative of Harvard's Office of the President and Provost, supporting creative research and development across disciplines. 

In this podcast, we go behind the scenes to hear from artists as they grapple with big questions and transform their ideas into art. 

BREE: 

In this special episode, we will hear from our undergraduate Sharp Research Fellow who has curated and produced a special highlight episode from the archives of the Works in Progress podcast. 

RIA CUELLAR-KOH: 

This past summer, I had the pleasure of working at Harvard's ArtLab as a research fellow with the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program, referred to as SHARP. 

This special episode is a compilation of highlights from the past three seasons of Works in Progress, each selected to highlight what role the ArtLab plays in the rich tapestry of arts at Harvard. In particular, how the engagement of professional artists at the university can both push boundaries of artistic creation and enrich campus life. 

RIA: 

The ArtLab is a multidisciplinary incubator for the arts at Harvard. In Season 3, we will hear from Assistant Provost for Arts and Culture Lori Gross, as well as Professor and Former Dean of Arts and Humanities, Robin Kelsey—two key supporters and developers of the ArtLab during its inception. 

Here's Dean Kelsey explaining how the ArtLab came to be. 

ROBIN KELSEY: 

The origins of the Art Lab go back to the presidency of Drew Faust, who was very interested in transforming Harvard as a place for the arts. She wasn't alone among university presidents trying to enhance the arts at universities. It was in the water, so to speak, but she certainly was a visionary leader in this regard.  

One of the first things she did when she became president was to convene a task force on the arts and asked the great scholar Stephen Greenblatt to chair it. And that task force produced its report in December of 2008, which was a bit of a fateful time given the stock market crash that occurred in October. So the vision of the task force was expansive and ambitious, but the means that we had to carry out its recommendations were much more limited.  

One of the recommendations of the task force was to create a committee on the arts that Lori and I have both worked on pretty much since its inception. I took a year or two off. Lori's been a constant presence. And one of the other recommendations was to create something that the task force called a hothouse, which was a place for experimental art activity that would cross the usual boundaries of art form and discipline.  

BREE: 

And that's sort of what we see here at the ArtLab? 

ROBIN: 

That is correct. The name “Hothouse” was dispensed with fairly soon after the report came out, but the idea lived on. It was something we regarded as really essential to carry out the vision for this transformed university for the arts. And so we were thrilled when Drew, at a later point, told us that she wanted to go ahead with this and that it would be here in Allston. 

RIA: 

Having now worked in the ArtLab for a summer, I can really attest to how palpable the ArtLab's experimental ethos feels in the space itself. Roaming around the building, you discover a variety of maker spaces and studios all centered around this large space that seems like a blank canvas in and of itself. All these features that are baked into the architecture make the ArtLab an incredible place for artists to do all kinds of artistic research.  

But what is “artistic research”? This phrase can prompt a lot of confusion, which is understandable given the varying approaches to artistic research among artists. Compared to the more straightforward academic contexts in which we use the word “research”, artistic research can take a variety of forms. 

Works in Progress delves into this process frequently, and one of my favorite discussions about artistic research came from Season 2, Episode 4, with choreographers Jessi Stegall and Ilya Vidran. We'll first hear Jessi describe how traditional research is relevant to an artistic product, and then Ilya will elaborate on what artistic research looks like in the realm of dance and movement. 

JESSI STEGALL: 

I'll be excited to hear what Ilya has to say because Ilya taught a course a couple of years ago, maybe even not that long ago, on creative research at Northeastern. And one of the things that really came out of conversations between us when he was developing the curriculum for that course was the difference between research for an artistic product and artistic research. 

For example, you know, I have no shame in saying I don't think I've had any movement research necessarily go into my world premiere this weekend, but I have had a lot of research for this artistic product. My piece is about a woman's life—you know, it is historical. And it was very important to me to do a lot of primary research with her family, to read as much as I can, to watch films, to buy her instrument and try it for myself. 

So Clara Rockmore was a thereminist, which was the world's first electronic instrument, the only instrument still to be played without any touch at all. And I'm very interested in her story, and that's what the Theremin Vignettes, my show this weekend, is really about. 

However, along the way, I had another line of research opened up about a theremin-adjacent instrument called the terpsitone, which was Leon Theremin's lost invention. It was a life-sized theremin that used to be played by the entire body, and it was made for his wife, who was a dancer. Unfortunately, the sensors were so incredibly sensitive that no one could really get it right. It was very difficult to play and sustain real notes, so since the 1940s, no one has tried to rebuild one. And to me, that is an opening for some real movement and technology research.  

Separate from reading on Wikipedia pages and checking out books from the library, but using my body and using space and using technology to ask questions of what might be possible, to be guided by intuitions, to maybe not even go in with a hypothesis, but instead just be gathering information about what happens when I put my body in relationship to this machine. So those are, that's kind of like a distinction that I might draw between research for artistic product and arts-based research.  

BREE: 

And it's interesting to me that you're making a work about an instrument that does not need to be touched, given that we just had this conversation about the partnering. 

ILYA VIDRIN: 

Yeah, that comes up a lot. So I think this question of what “artistic research” is really important, because in some ways, it can be hard to pin down, and pinning it down can flatten the possibilities. So for me, research really begins with inquiry and becomes recursive. If there's one answer, and I'm stuck with one answer, I'm not really doing research, right? 

And one way I talk about it with my students is the difference between asking “what time is it,” and you look at a clock, and saying, “what is time”, right? Shifting that question around, suddenly, we have to think more critically about what time means to us, and what we try and express through our time with others or in relationship to our environment. 

RIA: 

Aside from the building itself, the ArtLab provides artists with access to Harvard's extensive collection of archives. These archives help a variety of artists doing residencies all over the university, as tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel discusses in season one.  

This episode was recorded over Zoom during the pandemic, so the audio quality is very different from the rest of the series. Here, she describes how artistic research can guide you towards underrepresented voices within your own discipline. 

AYODELE CASEL: 

00:08:23 Speaker 5 

To me, and especially in tap dancing, which is traditionally a very, it's oral history. And so a lot of our research is in oral, you know, recountings and storytelling and people's memories, like of what it was like during this time and with this person. Like that was kind of like part of the—not indoctrination—but that was one of the things that I learned very early on as a tap dance student.  

And for me, going into Radcliffe with the intent of researching more about these particular figures that I speak about often, I knew that I wasn't going to find much more than probably I already knew about them, because I feel like I've done a lot of that in my life work and in service of my practice. But I wanted to see if I could find—if I could just place them in history so that then my research sort of expanded from maybe not just the dance world or the tap dance world, but okay, if we're talking about, you know, Jenny Ligon in the 30s,in Hollywood, then it expands a little bit more, and in America. 

So now we're talking about American history, and research of what the communities were like for black people in that time. What was, what were, the laws in this country? What were the—one of the wonderful things I found while I was here at Radcliffe was the slave codes of 1740. Like to find that document and to read it, to get—this is a document that we reference really often, like when the drums were taken away from, you know, black people here. But like we referenced that in tap dance, like stories, like we know that is the origin, but I had never read the full document. And it was astounding, you know, to see all of the laws and the language to put in place to really strip, strip them of, everything, and the, even the wording and be it further enacted and be it further enacted and be it further enacted and be it in like, it was really like, it, yeah, I mean, I was kind of stunned. 

I don't know why, but I was, the magnitude of it, like just the layers and layers and layers, was, I don't know, that was—I was happy to have sort of discovered that, while I was here. But the research looks like expansion. It looks like beyond the dancer, beyond the dance life and into the world, into this country too. 

RIA: 

Artists can also shed light on the painful history that allowed Harvard to acquire such a mass of objects. These collections have the potential to harm those visiting the archive, as well as those depicted and held within its walls.  

For Lakota musician Frank Wan, a shocking personal revelation interrupted his time as an artist in residence.  

FRANK WALN: 

That moment when I met with the curators from the Peabody Museum is a moment I'm going to remember forever. And I feel like it kind of put a pin in my life and kind of shifted the trajectory of not just my art lab residency, but I feel like my path as an artist, because it's also led me to songs and creative practices that I don't think I would have even thought about looking towards if it weren't for this experience. I had the thought, this is my fourth time coming to Harvard University for work. And I was just curious as to why that happened, because I had never gone to someplace that many times. And I was like, why do I keep coming back to Harvard as a native artist from a reservation? Now I know why. 

My ancestor brought me here to connect with her and to help call her spirit home. So I received that news. It was very heavy, but I was grateful that I was given the space to process it. And I didn't even know what I was going to do, or if I could even go forward with my residency, honestly, at that time, because I didn't know how that news was going to affect me. 

I got through the week here at campus, and then I had to go do a string of shows a couple weeks after that. And I remember we spoke—Bree—and I said, “I'm going to need some time to process.” I was grateful that you gave me that time to process. And I think we met again in like January, February—maybe we met via Zoom.   

BREE: 

Maybe six months at least later. 

FRANK: 

I took that time to process, to pray about it. And I knew that during that process and during my time of prayer, I would be given an answer or an idea of how to move forward. Once the dust settled, then the fuzziness from the trauma kind of subsided. I saw a very clear path forward through this residency with the ArtLab.  

RIA: 

Frank would go on to create a participatory healing gathering spotlighting Native peoples at Harvard. This gathering represents just one of the ways that the ArtLab gives back to the campus community. 

Returning to Robin and Lori's episode on the purpose of the ArtLab, I love how they describe what an artist can do for a campus. 

BREE: 

You both have been really critical in bringing artists to campus in different ways, in visiting artists' capacities, commissions, and as faculty. Why is it so critical to have artists here in that knowledge production and teaching? 

LORI: 

Well, to me, I think it was really important to have models here that were actually in the practice of arts that the students could see because I don't think they were seeing it here so much. And if you don't see it, you don't try to become that. And so I think that was really important in terms of the students, but also to bring it into the actual academic arena was so important. Because if the people that came here, students that already were fantastic in the arts—and we have so many of them every year—that was great for them, and they were going to continue being that. 

But for people who came who didn't have that kind of exposure to the arts or to the practice of arts, having people here and having people on the faculty, that was invaluable to get other people really interested in the arts and becoming people, frankly, like Devon Tines. I mean, he came here with not, he wasn't so interested in the arts, and now he's an amazing opera singer who's getting the Arts Medal in a few days. 

So, I think bringing more people into the arts really required that we had faculty artists here that could really be those models and really be able to teach them, have people understand what research in the arts was, which I think was totally not understood. And I would say that the ArtLab plays a critical part in that, and understanding what research in the arts can be, too.  

ROBIN: 

I completely agree with that. I would only add that the relationship between arts activity within the curriculum and the more traditional scholarly activities is not a zero-sum game by any stretch of the imagination. That in fact, to study the history of art, the history of literature, the history of culture generally, requires understanding that it's a living entity and that one is living through one's own historical moment in which decisions are being made that will have lasting consequences. 

So, I see this as something that has not only enhanced the experience of our students who are choosing to go into the arts, but actually enhancing the curriculum across its entire breadth. 

RIA: 

On-campus artists can also help enrich classroom activities. When Professor Claire Chase commissioned professional musician Lee Harris to compose an original piece collaborating with students, both saw how much their exercises helped incoming students to open up to one another. Here's Lee describing how she got students to open up and create. 

LEE HARRIS: 

Yeah, sure. Well, we asked the students to write, yeah, to write me a letter. We had a few prompts in the letter last year, really thinking about, like. asking them “what do they do to chill?” And I talked to Claire for a while about wanting to do something with the kids after— with the kids, with the students—after talking to them just in this crazy time and being in the Zoom sphere, like, how can we like optimize more relaxation? 

How can we think about practices of relaxation as well, you know? And so that's what they wrote me in the first letters, what they do to chill and a wide array of things, anecdotal, personal. But then there was a lot of common ground. So I thought, wow, a lot of you, a lot of us, including myself, we do the same things. Like we have basic human needs and experiences and really kind of human practices that we might think are super unique and at times feel unique to ourselves, but really we share in community.  

So how can we verbalize this to expose. Like, a sameness within ourselves and in our group that actually will aid in our relaxation experience? And that's how we started. 

RIA: 

In a similar vein, season three guest and ART associate artistic director, Dayron J. Miles, recounted the experiences of theater-making that actually helped bring together disparate groups of people. 

DAYRON MILES: 

I had already been practicing theater while I was at the performing arts school. And so I started to think about how the theater could amplify aid and serve that because it was already core to theatrical practice and what the theater was sort of invented to do. And that never left me.  

So, I got my degree in theater, and I went to a theater in Atlanta for a fellowship, the Kenny Leon Artistic Fellowship. And the artistic director at the end of that fellowship looked at me and was like, I want to investigate community engagement with you. And I was like, “yes, what is that?” And she was like, “I'm actually not entirely sure, but we're going to figure it out together.”  

The assignment became thinking about how the shows on our stage served a larger purpose in connecting our community and how we could take that program, amplify it in communities, and use it to bring people together. And the first show, actually, that we sort of experimented with and tried that on was this incredible play called Tennis and Nablus by a Palestinian playwright named Ismail Al-Khalidi. It examined the moment right before Israel became a country and spoke about how the ethnic Palestinians on that land and the Jewish immigrants were working together and were weaving together this beautiful community that then was disrupted by external geopolitics. 

I think about that often because we were able to work with the large Jewish community in Atlanta, the Jewish Federation—incredible people. And we worked with this mosque, Al-Farouq Majid, and the way that these communities came together and had generative conversations and shared was something I had never experienced before. It showed me and was proof that, like, the theater could be used for these larger opportunities for us to think together and to imagine differently together. 

RIA: 

I love these last two clips because they emphasize just how community-centered the artistic development process can be. Especially with the performing arts, it's easy to conceive of the public performances as the only way that the piece can interact with the surrounding community, when in actuality the making process itself can be an incredible vehicle for community engagement. 

Expanding out a little bit, I want to conclude with this clip from 2024 Loeb Art Lab Fellow, Joseph Seal Henry's, episode. Joseph Zeal Henry is a designer, curator, and urbanist, currently serving as Boston's Director of Cultural Planning. Let's listen to him explain one of the core principles behind his work, cultural infrastructure. 

BREE: 

I think that's such an exciting idea. I want to also just unpack a little bit of phrase that you use a lot that I find really interesting, “cultural infrastructure”, which is something that I've heard you say you build, you work in the realm. 

What is cultural infrastructure and what does it mean to do it, to implement it, to plan for it? 

Joseph Zeal Henry: 

Yes, it's a funny term because we've been using it a lot in London, and it's essentially the spaces for culture or spaces for culture to be performed and made. So, it's not about just the spaces of consumption, but actually in London, we focus mainly on production. I think of cultural infrastructure is mainly about where culture is made and the spaces that you have to create for it. And again, Justine Simons, who is the aforementioned deputy mayor, always used to talk about, “we plan for schools, we plan for transport, why don't we plan for culture?” And there was a way of putting culture in the same conversation as other serious bits of city-making.  

It's kind of branding cultural spaces to put it alongside other things that the city and the public sector are used to funding. In London, the cultural economy was worth one in five jobs in London, and it had the same GDP impact as the banking system, but used to employ way more people. So it was really important for us to place culture alongside other sectors which are used to getting subsidized or preferable tax treatments or whatever. And that term “cultural infrastructure” was just a way of placing it in a much more directly alongside—it made it easier for planners to plan around it.  

So we're back to planning. Since then, it's taken a bit of a life of its own. Other cities now talk about their cultural infrastructure plans. London was the first city to have a cultural infrastructure plan in the world, and lots of cities are now developing similar approaches. I think in part it's because the creative industries are lots of cities' secret weapon in terms of growth, providing employment, and providing a sense of place. And I think it's just taken a while for the Treasury or funders to, or at least government funders to take that seriously. 

RIA: 

I love that Joseph Zeal Henry's entire career embodies how important the arts are, not just to an individual, but to the fabric and structure of our society. As a humanities student, people often ask why I choose to study something that's supposedly frivolous. Skepticism about the arts pervades a lot of our culture, which makes sense when we think of art as limited to the museum or the opera house.  

I love Works in Progress because every episode testifies to the large impact that arts and artistic research can have on a university. There were so many more clips I wanted to include, but I couldn't fit them all into this episode. So I hope that this entices you to listen to the entire series. 

Thank you so much for listening. This is Ria Cuellar-Koh. 00:24:08 RIA 

To end on a personal note, I wrote this episode over the summer when I was working as a Sharp Fellow, and now we're recording it in the fall of my senior year. As I prepare to leave the college and go out into the real world, I feel especially grateful that, in my kind of waning days, I got to spend so much time at the ArtLab learning so much about this incredible place on campus. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

BREE: 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity and experimentation happening here. To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.  

This episode was recorded at the Mead Production Lab at the Art Lab in Boston, Massachusetts, with audio by Luke Damrash, production by Kat Nakaji, research by Sadie Trichler, designed by James Blue, and I am your host, Bree Edwards.