Emory PCSW Student Writing Award
January 29, 2012 § Leave a comment
I learned this past week that my essay “Mary E. Hutchinson’s Two of Them” won this year’s Student Writing Award presented by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) at Emory University. According to the PCSW, the “annual writing awards are designed to highlight and celebrate outstanding student scholarship on issues of importance to women.”
The essay focuses on Hutchinson’s painting titled Two of Them (c.1933) which has recently resurfaced. It considers the ways in which the limits of art and history have rendered Hutchinson’s engagement with gender and sexuality unintelligible.
A revised version of the essay is currently under review by a women’s studies scholarly journal.
For more information about the Artworks of Mary E. Hutchinson, see my digital catalogue of her work at http://meh.omeka.net .
Omeka Back Up!
December 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
The omeka.net server which hosts my digital catalogue of Mary E. Hutchinson’s artworks is back up and running after an unscheduled Christmas break. Omeka is a web-based content management platform developed by the Public History program at George Mason University. It provides a powerful and reliable (generally) platform for material and visual culture scholarship.
Mary E. Hutchinson’s “The Student”
December 12, 2011 § 1 Comment
I recently added “The Student” (c.1937) to my digital catalogue of Mary E. Hutchinson’s work.
The painting portrays an adolescent African-American girl seated at a student desk. Her pen is poised just above the paper filled with text she is composing – a gesture of reflection and thought within the action of writing which fits Hutchinson’s expressed idea of communication as a “controlled process. . . . caring enough to weigh each word. . .” The globe before the student is not centered on the western world, and the bookshelf to her side bears evidence of practical use with book spines unevenly aligned as though volumes have been pulled from the shelves, read, and returned.
Hutchinson likely painted “The Student” while working out of the Harlem Community Art Center as a supervisor of teachers for the New York Federal Art Project. She first exhibited the painting in 1937 at the Midtown Galleries in New York. She also included it in what proved to be her final solo exhibition held in 1950 at the West Hunter Street Library, the Carnegie Library which served Atlanta’s African-American community. After the exhibition, Hutchinson gave “The Student” to the library. It is now in the collection of the Auburn Avenue Research Library.
For more info on Hutchinson and to see “The Student” go to http://meh.omeka.net
Jae Turner 