Director’s Letter: Fall 2024

Dear friends of the Curb Center,

Welcome back to campus! We hope your fall semester is off to a wonderful start!

We had a busy summer here at the Curb Center. In May, after students left for the summer, we hosted “Imagining Wholeness: Expressive Art and Well-Being,” an exhibition created by people whose lives have been touched by cancer in collaboration with Gilda’s Club of Middle Tennessee. The exhibition featured nearly 30 artworks created at workshops held at both Gilda’s Club and the Curb Center, as well as poetry and prose written by participants in our long-running Expressive Writing workshops, facilitated by Professor Emerita Kate Daniels. The result was a moving show that engaged with issues of health and community from a variety of perspectives.

This fall, we’ve launched the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative in collaboration with the Science Communication Media Collaborative Grand Challenge Initiative.  We hope that engaging with art around the issue of climate change can prompt and deepen discussion of the environmental future that awaits us. We’ve commissioned four one-act plays on the topic from a diverse and gifted group of young playwrights. These plays, which feature a variety of contemporary perspectives on the environmental crisis, will be produced by Vanderbilt’s Theatre Department using sustainable methods and materials and will feature talented student actors. We hope you will join us at Neely Auditorium September 26–29 and October 17–20 to see the plays.

At the Curb Center, our fall exhibition Extraction/Interaction features the work of three remarkable visual artists who use their artwork to create positive environmental impact—Will Wilson, Eliza Evans, and John Sabraw. Through painting, conceptual art, and photography, these artists demonstrate how artistic practice can galvanize large-scale efforts to halt, remediate, and reverse the effects of extraction on our environment. We hope you come and see this provocative and surprisingly witty work. We welcome courses to the exhibition, and we are excited to work with faculty to align class visits with their curricular goals.

We are already planning for an equally busy spring semester. Next week, Allison Orr, Founder and Artistic Director of Forklift Danceworks, will be visiting campus to begin planning for the Community Engagement Boot Camps happening in Spring 2025. Forklift Danceworks is a community-based dance company that draws upon ethnographic research, job shadowing, and relationship-building methodologies to choreograph the everyday movements of workers and community members into large-scale performances set to live music. Allison visited us last fall, and during her residency, she built relationships with students and faculty of all disciplines through class visits and a book talk. Her visit was such a success that we knew it needed to be the beginning of a longer-term collaboration with Forklift, and we identified the opportunity to partner with Allison and her team to offer training in Forklift’s arts-based community engagement model to the Vanderbilt community. We are excited to partner with the program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership (CAL) and other friends on campus to offer these Boot Camps for undergraduate classes, faculty, and staff. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more or get involved.

Here at the Curb Center, we are committed to elevating art as a mode of inquiry, a way of understanding, and a celebration of the human spirit. The initiatives above are just a small glimpse into what we are doing this academic year—we encourage you to stay in touch by subscribing to our email newsletter, following us on Instagram, and attending our events. We look forward to welcoming you back to school in person as you walk through our big red doors!

With gratitude,

Leah