Academics & Ales: An Informal Night of Research Presentations
Heirloom Rustic Ales
March 4
I’ve got 18 years on either side of my college experience. In the last almost two decades, I’ve accidentally retrained my brain to learn outside of the format of higher education. Most days, I’m not listening to someone tell me new ideas from a position of authority unless they made a documentary or put it on the internet. In this way I’ve taken one giant leap for mankind away from mankind, and so have plenty of other people. It takes little to no actual knowledge to seem like you know something anymore, a media literacy blow almost as damaging to the reputation of the institution of college as the cost of such an education. But I, like most thinking types I know, appreciate the specificity of academic study, the idea that passionate humans can spend entire careers in pursuit of enlightenment in specific fields of interest. Very, very specific fields.
So for me, it’s a delight and a treat that the University of Tulsa’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences stages biannual microlectures at Heirloom Rustic Ales, free and open to the public, so anyone can pop in and sip an adult beverage while pondering the literary canon. If you didn’t study liberal arts and have wondered, “What are they even doing in there all day?” then this Bud’s Hand Lantern’s for you. (This season’s symposium also featured Old Dog hawking fried rice and dumplings just outside, in case anyone wanted to ponder the canon while eating Thai curry.)
I, not an idiot, expected some of the topics to be inaccessible to me, not due to their complexities but in a vague “I haven’t done the reading” sort of way (or in some cases, an “I haven’t done the reading in 20 years” way), but this was largely entry-level stuff for anyone willing to listen.
It was standing room only by the time the talks started at 5:40 p.m., with Heirloom full of what Kendall College dean and the evening’s emcee Blaine Greteman called a “lively” crowd who hushed for the duration of each talk and asked thoughtful questions, most of which appeared to come from university colleagues, students and former students. I couldn’t tell if any attendee other than myself had zero connection to TU, and I wonder what, other than venue selection, was done to encourage community attendance outside the sphere of TU’s or Heirloom’s social media reach. I also think they could use a bigger space with more seating.
The first presenter was Michelle Martin, MFA, the director of TU’s school of Art, Design, & Art History. Her talk, “Mystorical Constructions,” was focused on her own body of work. She discussed her desire as an artist to push the boundaries of traditional collage by combining up to 30 or 40 images with content often spanning different centuries into modern prints that detail past, present and future at the same time—collage, but not obviously. The most resonant part was her toying with “the definition of craft,” as she’s a printmaker who often spends several months at a computer manipulating singular pixels before creating a physical work. Is it printmaking if you did a lot of the work on a computer? She says yes.