Nine faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at New Mexico State University are the recipients of a second round of arts and humanities seed funding provided by the NMSU Office of Research, Creativity and Strategic Initiatives.

The funding not only helps faculty projects get off the ground, but better positions them for success when they submit applications and proposals for funding from foundations and agencies off campus to further their activities and investigations. This year marks the second year seed funding has been awarded to arts and humanities faculty.

“This initiative is very significant for two reasons. First of all, it provides highly needed resources to NMSU disciplines where we have incredible talent but not the benefit of accessible extramural funding; this will help our faculty to pursue more ambitious scholarly work. The second reason is the potential to position these scholars to pursue external funding avenues, like foundations, and thus make a profound contribution towards the institutional goal of achieving Carnegie R1 status,” said NMSU College of Arts and Sciences Dean Enrico Pontelli.

Faculty who received funding are:

• Art department: Brita d’Agostino, Joshua Clark and Motoko Furuhashi.
• Creative Media Institute: Connie Voisine.
• English department: Richard Greenfield and Justine Wells.
• Languages and linguistics department: Glenn Fetzer.
• Government department: Sabine Hirschauer.
• Geography and environmental studies department: Eric Magrane.

Magrane’s project, “Representing Nature & Culture: A Study of U.S. Public Lands Artist-in-Residence Programs,” is a multi-sited research project that studies public lands artist-in-residence programs. Magrane, who is an assistant professor and a poet, said the seed funding will allow him and Ph.D. student Hardt Bergmann to expand their research and seek additional funding from outside sources. The project was sparked by an interest in artist-in-residence programs and how artists draw from several factors, including climate change and indigenous histories, to influence their work.

“I’ve been an artist-in-residence at three different parks as a poet, but as a geographer I think a lot of how artists and writers represented public lands,” said Magrane, who earned an MFA and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. “Artists play an important role in influencing how we view national parks. Historically, people like Ansel Adams and John Muir are credited with influencing momentum toward creating national parks, but there’s much more happening.”

Nationwide, there are more than 50 active artist-in-residence programs at public land sites, and another 40 to 50 more that have been active at some point in the recent past. For now, the project is focusing on an artist-in-resident program hosted by the Organ Mountain-Desert Peaks National Monument, with the goal of developing a grant proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities to expand the research to various national parks with artist-in-residence programs. Bergmann said he also hopes to base his dissertation on the project.

“There has been a lot of research on art and public lands in a historical context, but not very much research on how artist-in-residence programs inform and shape how we understand nature and public lands in a modern context,” Bergmann said. “These programs could be a window into how the paradigms around public lands management and public outreach are changing in these times.”