Newman Alumna’s Art on Display in the World Language Hall

[FULL STORY]

 

After reflecting on the importance of forging strong relationships with alumni in the Newman community, World Languages Chair Kathryn Gracki decided to reach out to alumni to interview them about their world language experience at Newman and its impact on their college readiness, travel opportunities, and their career options. She also wanted to feature alumni artwork on the walls of the Lemle Building so that members of our community – students, parents, prospective parents, teachers, and other alumni – had a chance to connect with the work of alumni while spending time on the World Language Hall. Newman alumna Olivia Martin ’09 agreed to develop a concept for the World Language Hall and the newly renovated Digital Language Lab. Her paintings have been displayed since the fall of 2012 and will remain on display through the spring semester.

Gracki interviewed Olivia to determine the context for her artistic journey and the importance of the work she created specifically for Newman. We have included a transcript of that interview in the article below. Click here to view a slideshow of Olivia’s work, or stop by the Lemle Building’s World Language Hall to see the work in person.

 

Katherine Gracki: What was instrumental about your connection with the arts while you were an upper school student at Newman?

Olivia Martin: My main interest was in creative writing – specifically in the ways in which poetry can be fused with fiction. My experience in Ms. Suzanne Schneidau’s Capstone creative writing class as a senior in 2008-09 informed the artist that I am today. Ms. Schneidau – both a writer and a photographer – was inspirational to me. She was really the first person who ever told me – and everyone in our class – that being an artist or a writer was even possible. I remember she took our class for a two-day field trip to Prospect.1 at the Contemporary Art Center. Prospect.1 was an international biennial aimed at helping the New Orleans art community get back on its feet after Hurricane Katrina. Those two days were real watershed moments for me. It was my first exposure to the critical contemporary dialogue going on in the art world. More importantly, the conversations Ms. Schneidau facilitated afterward revealed to me for the first time the rich, multitudinous interconnections between the arts.

 

KG: Once you left Newman for Dartmouth College, how did your interests evolve?

OM: I continued to work on my creative writing, and began studying studio art. I also dedicated some of my coursework to medieval studies and was able to work on a research project sophomore year as the team’s Middle English specialist. We examined the culture of marginalia – what monks wrote in the margins – within the context of Dartmouth’s collection of medieval manuscripts. My research team and I ultimately curated an exhibition entitled “Bringing out the Leaves” to showcase our findings during the spring of 2011, which exhibited during Dartmouth’s inaugural Brut Chronicle scholarly conference.

 

KG: Did you continue to paint at Dartmouth?

OM: Yes! I became increasingly interested in and committed to exploring landscape work. In particular, I wanted to explore the culture shock of relocating from Louisiana to New Hampshire. I had always been interested in Louisiana folk art, particularly the “outsider artists” selling their art on the streets of New Orleans, and I had a longing for the swamps that I couldn’t let go. These interests coalesced last summer when I was awarded a grant to use my formal training as an artist to return to New Orleans and to paint Louisiana landscapes on location.

 

KG: Tell me more about what I can only imagine was a pretty intense experience during the summer of 2012.

OM: Since my goal was to document a sense of the psychological and emotional implications of a location, I painted en plein air, leaving the comfort of the city to paint in the swamps. I had a few close encounters with alligators, and the solitude in such an untamed landscape was at times unnerving. But I refused to take photos to work from in my studio – that experience wasn’t good enough, wasn’t close enough to the land.

 

I was acutely aware of the fact that the places I was exploring as a painter were not going to exist in the future. Wetland loss took on a whole new meaning after this summer experience. Hurricane Isaac hit at the end of the summer, and literally, the places I had been painting in June no longer existed just two months later. That feeling of loss left an indelible imprint on me as an artist, and I’ve been grappling with it ever since.

 

When the project got really difficult, when the weather was bad or the mosquitoes and fire ants were out in force, I drew inspiration from the Louisiana landscape artist Alexander John Drysdale. I grew up with one of his paintings in my home, and I remember thinking about how he painted in the swamps 100 years ago – the challenges and discomforts he faced always imbued me with a fierce determination that kept me going.

 

KG: So how did your study of landscape translate into a concept for an alumni exhibit project on the second floor of the Lemle Hall at Newman?

OM: When you contacted me and asked me to come up with a concept, I thought about New Orleans as a place, as a nexus of cultural collision and cultural collaboration. I also reflected upon what language is in a global community. The collages I came up with incorporate well-known architectural and artistic reference points. My guiding principle harkens back to my own culture shock moving from Louisiana to New Hampshire: You bring your culture with you wherever you go, and new space is created from that synthesis. That is what the paintings on the hall speak to. As for the larger landscape paintings inside the Language Lab, those were completed later during the fall of 2012, when I was in New Hampshire and no longer in Louisiana. The purple painting entitled Searching For and the yellow painting entitled Sunshow are about memory. What do we take with us? How does our psychology manifest perception and expression of landscape?

 

KG: What are you currently working on?

OM: I am still exploring the idea of memory and landscape this fall. I’ve just begun graduate work at SMU, so residency in Dallas and the Texas landscape have had a huge impact on my work. On the technical side of things, I’m focusing on the physicality of paint and I am studying the oil painting process in depth. I am fascinated with the “goo” of it all, with the fine-tuned application of oil paint. I find myself using my palette knife to paint, to sculpt the paint. I am also learning how to make rabbit skin gesso, in the renaissance style. The chemistry of paint is really fascinating to me right now, and offers limitless possibilities.

 

KG: To come full circle, since this project for the Lemle Hall also grew out of a desire to showcase the connections between art and foreign languages, please tell me a little bit about the highlights of your education in Spanish at Newman. You reached the highest level of coursework offered in Spanish by taking AP Spanish Literature, right?

OM: Yes, I took AP Spanish Language and then AP Spanish Literature after that. I was exhilarated in AP Spanish Literature. Studying Borges and García Márquez with Doctora Brown in the language that they wrote in, not in translation, was simply amazing for me as a student and as a writer. This level of study would not have been possible without a strong foundation, which I received with three years in a row with Srta. Quimbay. She is a phenomenal teacher. I remember in middle school I was very competitive, and she always played this game with a ball – if the ball was thrown at you, you had to answer. I loved that.

 

Please join us in thanking Olivia for lending the School her multi-cultural landscape paintings for exhibit on the World Language Department hallway and in the World Language Digital Language Laboratory. If you would like to see more of Olivia Martin’s work, please visit her website at http://www.olivialeighmartin.com.