Exploring the Farm Security-Office of War Information (F.S.A-O.W.I.) Photography Collection:
An Original Dance Performance in Celebration of the
Yale Photogrammar Project and the Public Humanities at Yale
“The Geneva Project” Description
An inter-disciplinary dance work exploring history, blood memory, and the traces of an ancestral past, The Geneva Project examines what is hidden and what is revealed, by bringing light to that which was once buried.
Searching the Farm Security Administration archives of the Library of Congress, dancer/choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman discovered photographs of her great-aunt, Geneva Varner Clark, and her family on their farm in Depression-era South Carolina. Described as “negro”, “mixed race” and “Indian”, the photographs, taken by New Deal era photographer Marion Post Wolcott, invite inquiry into the politics of subjectivity and personhood by giving face to people marginalized by racial classifications.
Visual imagery, language, and sound are mixed with the physical, creating a ritual of collective remembrance celebrating death, rebirth and ancestral legacy. This original work is a reflection on race, class, sex and radical subjectivity in an ever-changing, uncertain and distinctly American landscape.
The Geneva Project was created in part through The Field’s Emerging Artist Residency program, supported by the Lambent Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation and Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program. The Geneva Project is supported by the National Performance Network Creation Fund
Artist
A New York based dance and theatre artist, Jennifer has worked with Donald Byrd, David Rousseve, Ronald K. Brown, Michael Jackson, The Radio City Rockettes, as well as on Broadway in Saturday Night Fever and Disney’s The Lion King. In work with actors, Jennifer has choreographed for the plays; Bull Rusher, by Eisa Davis; Woman Bomb, by Ivana Sajko; and October in the Chair, adapted from short stories by Neil Gaiman; and several plays at the Yale Cabaret and the Yale School of Drama.
Having studied at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center and The American Dance Festival she holds a BA in Dance from UCLA and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Jennifer has been an artist in residence at The Field, Mabou Mines, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and 651 Arts in New York City.
As a teaching artist, Jennifer has taught dance workshops across the United States as well as in South Africa, China, and Mexico. Her class focuses on classical and modern technique with an emphasis on performance and expression with a specialization in helping students to create personal work inspired by individual experiences. She is currently on faculty at Central Connecticut State University.
Crew
Justin Hicks : Composer, Performer, Sound Design
Paul Lieber : Projection Design
Alan Edwards : Lighting Design
Christopher Myers
Photogrammar
Photogrammar is a web-based interactive research system for mapping, searching, and visualizing 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Users can explore the relationship between place, time, photographer and thematic content through digital maps, data visualizations and extensive metadata cross-references. Photogrammar is supported by a Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. We send a special thank you to the Library of Congress for maintaining and cataloguing the collection.
Team
Laura Wexler. Primary Investigator.
Professor Wexler is Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Director of The Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale, and Co-coordinator of the Public Humanities Program at Yale University. She is also Chair of the university-wide Digital Humanities Committee. A historian of race, gender and photography, she is a scholar and theorist of visual culture and has published widely on American photographs. She commissioned “The Geneva Project” by dancer/choreographer Jennifer Newman to celebrate the Yale Photogrammar Project.
Lauren Tilton. Co-Director.
Lauren is a doctoral candidate in American Studies with an M.A. concentration in Public Humanities. She co-directs the Digital Humanities Working Group and Public Humanities Working Group. Her interests include documentary, 20th century U.S. history and visual culture. She was a CLIR Mellon Fellow and is a 2013-2015 HASTAC Scholar.
Taylor Arnold. Co-Director.
Taylor recently received his PhD in Statistics from Yale University and is working currently at AT&T Labs Research. He is the Photogrammar team’s data wizard. His research focuses on computational statistics, predictive modeling, and visualization.
Stacey Maples. Map Expert.
Formerly the GIS Specialist & Instruction Coordinator at the Yale University Library, Stacey is now the Geospatial Manager at the Stanford Geospatial Center. He specializes in all things geo and is more commonly known as the Map Ninja.
Peter Leonard. Implementation Coordinator.
He is the Librarian for Digital Humanities Research at Yale University.
Ken Panko.
Currently the Director of Educational Resources and Technology at Yale-NUS College. He previously served as the Director of Yale University’s Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2) where he served as project manager of Photogrammar.
Trip Kirkpatrick. Project Manager.
He works in Yale’s Instructional Technology Group and previously supported Yale language instruction at the Yale Center for Language Study.
