This year, the University Libraries welcomed its fourth class of Incubator Award recipients, with a cohort of seven students. Students received financial and research support to spend the spring semester engaging with historical and rare library materials as inspiration for their artistic work.
They will present artists’ talks about their experience during this year’s Incubator Awards Showcase on April 9 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. The event will be held in Wilson Library’s Pleasants Family Assembly Room and will be free and open to the public.
Congratulations to this year’s recipients!
Boatemaa Agyeman-Mensah
Boatemaa Agyeman-Mensah
Agyeman-Mensah believes that an unexpected byproduct of racism in the Black community is a fortified relationship with flowers. Her project explores the legacy of someone whose name and career play greatly on this idea: the late opera singer and Carolina’s first Black professor of music, Martha Flowers. Boatemaa used the Wilson Library archives to explore the personal life of Ms. Flowers, consider the physical flowers she received during her career as a performer, and discuss the metaphorical flowers she ought to receive posthumously. By writing and performing a chapbook collection of poetry largely inspired by the life of Martha Flowers, Agyeman-Mensah hopes to show how urgent it is for Black artists to create works centered around flowers.
John Felix Arnold
John Felix Arnold
Arnold created a series of drawings that confront and rethink the purpose of monuments, particularly in light of their violent and oppressive histories in North Carolina. These drawings, along with sculptural elements, are the foundation for site-specific movement/dance work, which will activate a campus space relevant to these intersecting histories.
Samone Jacobs and Sarah Dwyer
Sarah Dwyer
Samone Jacobs
Jacobs and Dwyer are collaborating to center communal printmaking around protest material, community voice and collective action. As two master’s students in library science focused on instruction in academic and K-12 libraries, they are interested in experiential, hands-on, craft-based learning that prioritizes student agency. Through a workshop for the Carolina community, they are providing instruction on historical ephemera of interest and mapping these resources onto a collaborative printmaking session.
Brianna LaRue
LaRue’s project explores the rich history of craft in Appalachia, emphasizing textile work, photographic processes, and ceramics. LaRue grew up in Western North Carolina, and her family frequently took her to local art studio tours, the Penland School of Craft, the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, folk music events, and much more. She utilized these experiences and materials from the archives at Wilson Library to create a series of mixed-media weavings and ceramics pieces influenced by the beautiful place she grew up in.
Anant Malpani
Anant Malpani
Malpani researched works for the violin in the Southern Historical Collection and Wilson archives. As a violinist, he is keenly aware of the lack of diversity in the classical music world. Malpani planned to learn and perform a work by a minority composer for his Junior recital this Spring. He also intends to record the work, contributing a new voice to the canon of recorded violin works.
Fowota Mortoo
Fowota Mortoo
Mortoo’s “Palimpsestic Cartographies” creatively map Carolina’s campus, focusing on the work of the Black bricklayers and stonemasons that built much of campus architecture. The process of creating the maps invokes the idea of a palimpsest, a technique originally used by artisans to reuse scarce material. It involved washing, scraping and resurfacing to add new text. This erasure was most often incomplete, leaving traces of previous writings, a notion paralleling the ‘imperfect erasure’ of these histories on the built environment of Carolina.
