Looking for miracles at the ASU Art Museum

Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer are looking for miracles at the ASU Art Museum this January. As the Social Studies artists for the spring, they will be in residence much of January exploring the miraculous through people’s perceptions of it in their lives. Julianne and Ken will interview school children, ASU students and community members of all ages and backgrounds to gather a range of definitions and life experiences. Their findings will be combined in an installation of fleeting vignettes in video and sound playing on all of the Museum’s available equipment.

Andrea Feller, Nicole Herden and I have been doing advance work talking to teachers, faculty and community members about the project. We just received more than 100 student projects back from Tesseract School and ACP (Academy with Community Partners) High School, grades 5 through 12. The written stories, guided by questions from the artists, are heart wrenching and compelling. They include a child telling the story of his great grandmother dancing with the ghost of her late husband in his wedding suit to a child’s story of the miracle of her own birth to teenagers with siblings surviving near-fatal war injuries.

An incredible start to Miracle Report, the eighth Social Studies project at the ASU Art Museum.

—Heather Sealy Lineberry, Senior Curator and Associate Director

For more information, or if you would like to schedule a session with the artists to retell your own miracle, contact Nicole Herden at Nicole.herden @asu.edu.

Here are the dates of the project and the artists’ mission statement:

Artist Residency: December 26, 2011 – January 20, 2012

Exhibition: January 21 – June 2, 2012

Reception: Friday, January 20, 5-7pm; Julianne Swartz will speak at the opening.

Mission Statement:

-We will spend our Social Studies Residency looking for miracles.

-We will locate the miraculous through other people’s perception of it in their lives.

-We will interview many local residents and ask them to “describe a miracle you have experienced”.

– Interviewees will be of varied ages and backgrounds. We will gratefully record anyone who wishes to retell his or her own miracle.

-We will record audio and video from these interviews, but identities will be obscured.

-The recordings will be edited into fleeting vignettes that attempt to establish “the miraculous” through many entirely subjective perspectives.

-We will seek to use all of the available audio and visual equipment in the museum’s possession to display the recordings.

-Our installation will strive to embody some beauty, some hocus-pocus, and some unexplainable magic.