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| Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis |
Still, Art imitates life often enough. As yesterday, when I stumbled upon a Yael Bartana's 2007 video installation entitled Mary Kozmary translated from Polish as "Nightmares" at the Kemper Art Museum. The installation was one of the several videos you can see as part of this current exhibition which runs through April 20th, 2014: In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations .
In "Nightmares" Sawomir Sierakowski is the voice piece for the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, which as far as I can tell is partially a fictional movement inspired by life and art.
In the video, Sawomir steps into a stadium long abandoned by humans and reclaimed by vegetation. He addresses an invisible audience of jews and compatriots. He makes an argument to reintegrate 3 million jews into Polish society (roughly the number of Polish jews who were massacred during World War II).
My grandfather was not massacred but he was a Polish jew who left Poland to survive before WWII: Art imitates life, score 1 and then even if the artistic intention is partially ironic, the earnest argument made by Sawomir in this small disquieting movie, is one based on diversity: Art imitates life, score 2.
"By only having one color, we can not see" says the faux Jewish Renaissance Movement leader. This is only the 4th time that the topic of diversity has come up in full force in my existence circa last week.
The first time was when I was interviewing Holden Thorp, the new WUSTL Provost, for the Spring issue of AWNings, the quarterly publication of the Academic Women Network. I came away from that interview with the personal conviction that our new Provost truly believes that diversity is a, if not the, crucial ingredient to the greatness of any organization. The second time (later that same day in fact), I was listening to Laura Svetkey, the Vice Chair for Faculty Development and Diversity in the Duke Department of Medicine. Laura had been invited by the WU Public Health Institute as the inaugural Speaker for the new Women Leaders in Public Health Career Lecture Series. Dr. Svetkey's talk was on "Strategies to enhance faculty development and diversity" and she repeated in different ways that idea of diversity as a key ingredient. She mentioned that the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) now considers diversity and inclusion as drivers of institutional excellence and cited a 2011 paper by Marc Nivet, the AAMC Chief Diversity Officer where he classifies diversity in academic medicine from 1.0 to 3.0 where for Diversity 1.0, the diversity mission is possibly mandated but is separate from the academic excellence mission. Diversity 2.0 sees anincrease in the potency of the diversity mission but it remains parallel, not entertwined with the excellence mission. In the Diversity 3.0 universe which I had just heard about from our Provost, diversity is absolutely integral to the excellence of an organization. Finally, about a week later, I listened to a very interesting presentation by Martha Feeback from Catalyst who alluded to the "business case" for diversity...which I am now assiduously reading about.
So...diversity as a moral imperative, a or the key agent of excellence, a profitable proposition and an ironic but earnest artistic statement about life and tragedy. Yours truly who is a citizen of the world (intra-diverse!) is thinking about this more than ever.
Till Later,
Anne
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