WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- Jill Winder, a senior politics major at Whitman College,
is one of 60 undergraduates from 51 of America's top liberal arts colleges who have received
Thomas J. Watson post-graduate fellowships for the 1998-99 academic year.Whitman students have received eight Watson fellowships in the past three years. No other participating school has received as many fellowships during that time period (click here for Whitman's 1997 winners, here for the 1996 recipients, or here for a complete listing of past Whitman students chosen for post-graduate study through the Watson program).
Each of this year's Watson recipients receives a $19,000 grant to travel outside the United States while engaging in a year-long independent study project of their own devising.
Winder, a 1994 graduate of Murray (Utah) High School, will visit the Eastern European cities of Berlin, Prague, Bratislava and Krakow as part of a study she titles "Avant- garde Renaissance: Eastern European Art and Political Culture."
The framework for her study began taking shape a year ago. As part of a foreign study program in the spring of 1997, Winder took classes in philosophy, modern history and international relations at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Later that summer she traveled for six weeks through France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, visiting numerous museums to further explore her interest in early modern art and the political and cultural climates in which it was conceived.
It was during one of her art history classes at Whitman that Winder "fell in love with the creative history of the first 30 years of this century largely because I discovered the connections and discourse that took place in the great cultural circles of Europe. Politics and art were inseparable. Newspapers suggested change, but works of art demanded revolution."
One of the more "intriguing surprises" of her European museum tour last summer was that ground-breaking avant-garde art from the turn of the century has a modern-day parallel.
"The art that is emerging (today) from the Eastern Bloc is a reflection of its intensely political climate," Winder said. "There is a distinctive hope and urgency in these artists' works. Perhaps more so than anywhere else in the world, the people of this area are in the process of cultural reinvention. The legendary Eastern art communities, some of the most progressive and influential in Europe at the turn of the century, continue to be revived.
"For 45 years, all creative space in these countries was either destroyed or funneled into the state propaganda machine by the Soviet regime," she added. "Thus, many artists understand the right to free artistic expression as a direct result of political change. My exposure to their commitment to integrate change and possibility, hope and reality was both demanding and infectious."
One of the more amazing aspects of today's Eastern European art scene is the intense artistic collaboration taking place among writers, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians and film makers. "The notion of community and the concept of collaboration are prized in large part because the Soviet government officially forbade the free association that artists usually draw from," Winder noted. Her desire to explore these art communities, she said, is strongly linked to her own sense of political activism and the instructive comparison between official rhetoric and artistic expression.
"I am eager to discover how artists in Eastern Europe conceive of 'politics,' how it relates to their work, whether they cite their country's recent political history as inspiration, their opinions about the fall of communism, and their perceptions of the Unites States," Winder said. "How many of these artists completely rejected the socialist principles of the U.S.S.R.? Do they look to the United States as a model of a free and equitable state?"
During her Watson project, Winder plans to immerse herself for three months in each of the four previously mentioned cities, each of which is considered a progressive and lively art center. Her plans include visiting contemporary art museums and galleries, attending poetry readings and avant-garde theatre performances, joining cinema groups and watching screenings, meeting artists and visiting their studios, talking to artists about their work and its connections to the political legacy of their country, and collecting street posters and examples of political graffiti. She also plans to network with artists and students, making connections to student art groups and collectives, as well as discussing and sharing work with other artists in cafes and cabarets.
"Coming in contact with artists and their work and the communities that inspire them will not only give me a clearer understanding of the political and social legacy that informs both," Winder said. "It will provide a space in which to collaborate, write, and share my own cultural and political history. I will be able to both observe and participate."
Winder plans to begin her year-long study in August in Berlin, where the art scene is larger and more public than the other cities. Berlin is home to more than 450 galleries, 200 of which specialize in contemporary art. Because the city has a sizeable amount of politically charged and aesthetic grafitti, she plans to explore that art form as well. "Of particular interest to me is how young German artists feel that their political history has influenced their work, and how reunification has impacted the artistic climate in Berlin itself," she said. "I will also seek out artists from the former West and East Berlin to compare their work and opinions."
In November, Winder will move to Prague, a city whose artists and students led the resistance to Soviet domination for much of this century. "I will be exploring how the Czech tradition of political art has influenced the younger generation of Czech artists and how they feel about that legacy," Winder said.
In February, 1999, Winder will relocate to Bratislava, Slovakia, where art circles are still relatively unknown to outsiders but filled with dynamic artists and writers. She plans to visit Mlynska Dolina, an area where 18,000 students live and collaborate. The city has a significant cafe culture, and a friend has already contacted, on her behalf, the editors of two of the more important avant-garde art and literary journals. She also will attend screenings and meetings of two cinema clubs. "Because these artists (in Slovakia) have lived through two recent revolutions and the radical restructuring of society, my understanding of resistance and change will be enhanced and broadened," she said.
Winder will make her final move in May, 1999, to the city of Krakow in Poland, which she describes as a "fascinating country because of its long history of being invaded and partitioned, as well as culturally liquidated. The artists and work in Krakow will offer another underground perspective on the impacts and legacy of state censorship of art." Her visits in Krakow will include a contemporary artist collective and a large student art club.
Winder traces her interest in the relationships between politics and art to a World Civilization class she took at Murray (Utah) High School from one of her favorite teachers, Keith Wood. "He showed me how the art of an age illuminates the cultural, political and social realities not often found in its official political history," she said. In addition, in one of her English classes, "Mr. Wood was helping me connect my love of art with another passion, writing. He insisted there was a connection that I was missing. If I was inspired to write, I too was an artist. My interest in political theory, my love of studying art, and the challenge to call myself a writer/artist were all born out of that intensely inspiring year."
During her recent studies of art history at Whitman, Winder said she "began to understand the way in which art not only reflects the reality of the present, but functions to illuminate the possibilities of the future. The disintegration of conventional norms in the arts during the first three decades of the 20th century warned of and often predicted the collapse of bourgeois high society in Europe. The art of this era had an intentionally political character and jarred people into reality thinking."
Artists of that time challenged and inspired one another, a circumstance Winder attempted to emulate during her past two years at Whitman. She applied her interest in political action and collaboration by organizing and participating in a number of grassroots activism campaigns on the Whitman campus. By networking and coalition building with students from many disciplines, Winder was involved in issues ranging from writing about the gender politics of date rape to campaigning to revise the Sexual Misconduct Policy to make it more accessible for student use."
Winder, a native of Salt Lake City, is the daughter of Carol and Jim Winder of Murray, Utah. Her future plans include the possibility of earning her Ph.D. in cultural studies, an interdisciplinary field combining political philosophy, art history, sociology and literature. She also ponders the possibility of some day opening a gallery or organizing an artists' collective to exhibit and educate.
"Whatever I do, I hope to have time to eventually write books about trends in the arts from a political perspective," she said.
Dave Holden, Whitman College News Service, (509) 527-5902
E-Mail Address: holden@whitman.edu