Inaugural KAVAH Fermata: Tiffany Chung and Mark Bradley
The University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry Announces Groundbreaking New KAVAH Fermata
Artist Tiffany Chung and UChicago historian Mark Bradley are the inaugural recipients of new philanthropic initiative that pairs an artist and scholar to generate experimental new work in response to social conflicts and challenges.
[Chicago, IL, October, 31, 2024]: The University of Chicago is pleased to announce the inaugural KAVAH Fermata, a new artist fellowship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Named for KAVAH, a family philanthropic initiative founded by Katrine and Harry Gray that engages the arts in response to social conflicts and challenges, the KAVAH Fermata invites a groundbreaking artist into the University community for an intensive two-year collaboration, clearing a space for flexibility, experimentation, and improvisation. The fellowship represents a significant investment in UChicago's vision to create an environment for artists and scholars to explore new modes of knowledge and creativity. The inaugural fellows are artist Tiffany Chung and University of Chicago Professor Mark Phillip Bradley (Department of History).
Chung and Bradley have each built careers around the twin matters of globality and migration and are deep thinkers on passage, displacement, and diaspora. The KAVAH Fermata brings them together to examine a matter new to them both: the trajectory of spices across time and space, from trade routes to recipes, ancient knowledge to contemporary conflicts. During the next two years, Chung and Bradley will approach the global history of the spice trade as a massive fabric, seeking to disentangle and reweave the culinary, economic, and political threads that hold its 3500 years in place.
“I am so honored to be awarded this generous opportunity,” Chung said. “The KAVAH Fermata’s fluidity and the Gray Center’s dedication in facilitating free forms of discovery and experimentation are truly refreshing. This reminds us to pause and breathe—to be curious and open to new possibilities in our intellectual inquiry and approach to art making, which is crucial in continuing the work we do. I am eager to learn from and collaborate with Mark.” Bradley added, “The opportunity to work and collaborate with Tiffany, and to think in interdisciplinary ways about the intertwined histories of migration and the spice trade, is just marvelous.” Bradley stressed the commingling of distinct practices: “As a historian I have learned much from how Tiffany made history an essential part of her own practice. This new project on food cultures promises to produce exciting new methodologies for the ways in which we study the past.”
KAVAH’s mission emphasizes the arts as an essential human right. In early music practice, the fermata denotes a pause in the counting of time, while players improvise within a framework. These two terms, KAVAH and Fermata, guide a singular award that joins the arts’ integral place in society with the imperative that for art to be art, it needs room to play and chart its own identity. The fellowship will go to artists—painters, performers, writers, architects, etc.—from outside the University of Chicago community with an established humanitarian ethos in their practice. Awarded artists will partner with one or more university faculty members on an experimental project that departs from their usual modes of working. There is no set format to the program: the shape of each Fermata remains open, allowing each project to dictate the time, budget, resources, and participants it needs to realize its specific vision.
As a cellist, Katrine Gray was inspired by the concept of the fermata. “Process and creativity,” she noted, “have become diminished in this culture focused on achievement and success. With this fellowship, we invite the community to stop counting time and start inquiring and creating.” Katrine and Harry Gray emphasized their excitement at the new fellowship. “We are honored that this inaugural project aligns precisely with our mission to nourish humanity through the arts. With gratitude, we further the legacy of Richard and Mary in our own way through a shared vision with the Gray Center for an ongoing series of interdisciplinary inquiries."
KAVAH Fermata: Teaching and Creating
A core component of each Fermata is pedagogical. In the course of their own partnership, Chung and Bradley will co-develop and teach an exploratory seminar engaging multiple campus communities including students, faculty, and staff. Co-creation is also key: awardees may make, build, stage, or write, but the ultimate creative shape of each KAVAH Fermata remains unpredetermined, pointing to an open horizon and the possibility of continuing collaboration.
Public Programming for KAVAH Fermata
This open horizon also includes the public: over two years, Chung and Bradley will hold conversations and events for multiple audiences both on and off campus, inviting them into a process of inventing common forms, objects, aims, and languages. Over this time, KAVAH Fermata recipients will receive direct, flexible, and ongoing support from the Gray Center’s curatorial team, helping them at every step to realize their shared endeavor.
Joining an illustrious list of esteemed Gray Center fellows that includes Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Romi Crawford, Theaster Gates, vanessa german, Christopher Harris, William Pope.L, Cauleen Smith, Slavs and Tatars, and Abigail Winograd, among others, Chung and Bradley will receive direct, flexible, and ongoing support from the Gray Center over the course of their fellowship.
“For over a decade, the Gray Center has provided a space for artists and scholars to find new ways of finding—to experience the creativity of problem-making rather than just problem-solving,” said Gray Center Director Seth Brodsky. “For us, collaboration has never just been about ‘fostering new connections’ but intervening in how both practices and universities typically work—how they flow, stream, and create knowledge. Art practices differently, flows differently, creates knowledge differently, which is essential to our interventions. It also teaches differently. Universities teach art, but how and what does art teach? What does it know? These questions are the engine of the KAVAH Fermata.”
Brodsky, a music historian, points to the rich history of the musical term fermata. “In conceiving this fellowship, we all returned again and again to that wonderful word. A fermata is always manifold, enigmatic even. It is never just a break. It is a breaking free, too, an invitation to go off-script, to concentrate in a new way. It is also a breaking down—in this case, of the borders between artists and scholars, academia and community, cultures of working and cultures of living and playing. Harry and Katrine have given us the opportunity to transfigure our approach here. I don’t know of a program anywhere with a comparable synthesis of design and freedom—literally, where you can design the terms of your freedom.”
Catriona MacLeod, Senior Advisor to the Provost for the Arts and Deputy Dean Division of Arts and Humanities, noted, “Working closely with the Gray Center in my role leading University arts initiatives, I was struck by how much the ethics of collaboration that define the Center were already on display in the co-development of the Fermata itself. The Gray team worked with KAVAH in the same way they work with our fellows, and the same way they help their fellows to work with each other. In this case, the result is an especially meaningful marriage of the arts and their philanthropic support. I am excited to see what the KAVAH Fermata will mean for the Gray Center and for the arts more broadly on campus.”
Deborah L. Nelson, Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities, was similarly excited. “The Gray Center so often sets the terms for cutting-edge art and experimental scholarship at this university that I have mused they should create their own dictionary. The KAVAH Fermata is the new culmination of the center’s visionary approach.” Nelson continued, “As we work to make the arts a central pillar of research at the University of Chicago, deepening our engagement with practicing artists today, the KAVAH Fermata marks a singular way forward—not only for the arts on campus but for the way universities engage art to act on our larger world. Recipients of the KAVAH Fermata will join an illustrious group of artists recognized throughout the decades by the University of Chicago, through such esteemed prizes as the Rosenberger Medal. We could not be more delighted that artist Tiffany Chung and our colleague Mark Bradley are the first recipients of this award.”
"The KAVAH Fermata is a visionary initiative,” added Amanda Woodward, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences. “By enriching creative work at the intersection of the arts and scholarly endeavors on our campus, it is establishing a model for the world. I'm delighted the inaugural fellows will have this remarkable opportunity to collaborate and look forward to our community engaging with and learning from the work that they produce together."
“We can’t wait to start working with Tiffany and Mark, and to get into the marrow of things,” Brodsky added. “At its heart, Katrine, Harry, and I all think of the KAVAH Fermata as an adventure in something critical to both humanitarian and artistic work today: attention. How to wake it up, hold it, protect it, and use it to clear a space where something truly new can appear. It’s quite musical, this kind of attention: it moves. We are so honored and excited to be able to host this adventure—to my mind, unprecedented in its formal generosity and flexibility—at the University of Chicago.”
The Fermata [Fellows]
Tiffany Chung is globally noted for her interdisciplinary practice cultivated through rigorous research and qualitative analysis into the history, culture, and topography of different locales, spanning across times and terrain. Tracing complex entanglements of social, political, economic, and environmental processes entwined in landscape archaeology and historical ecology, Chung materializes her findings into cartographic works, embroideries, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and recently, music compositions. Chung’s projects chart the footprint of our material cultures, spatial transformations, climate-related events, trade routes, conflicts, forced displacement, and migrations of peoples, cultures, foods, and languages. Chung’s exhibition Rise into the Atmosphere is currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art and her 1:50 scale model of a floating village presented in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum as part of 2024 Getty’s PST Art. Her commemorative earthwork, For the Living, was part of Beyond Granite: Pulling Together exhibition at the National Mall (DC, 2023). In 2019, Chung presented her exhibition Vietnam, Past Is Prologue at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Chung has exhibited at museums and biennials worldwide including the 56th Venice Biennale, MoMA (NY), British Museum (UK), Nobel Peace Center (Norway), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany), Louisiana MoMA & SMK (Denmark), Sharjah Biennale (UAE), XIII Biennial de Cuenca (Ecuador), Sydney Biennale (Australia), and Gwangju Biennale (Korea).
Mark Philip Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Making the Forever War (2021), Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley's work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent. His current project is an intellectual and cultural history of the global South under contract with Yale University Press. A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Bradley was appointed editor of the American Historical Review in 2021. He has served as the elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, general editor for the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World and coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series, The United States in the World. Bradley is a Senior Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago; and Editor of the American Historical Review.
KAVAH is a family philanthropic entity established by Katrine and Harry Gray. It supports a variety of arts, humanitarian, environmental and educational initiatives around the world. At the core of KAVAH’s mission is the belief that the arts are universal, fundamental aspects of human society and behavior, and that like food and water, they are essential for humanity to survive and thrive. Hence the arts are a basic right and must be available to all. KAVAH strives to nurture humanity through the support and cultivation of healthy ecosystems, with a particular focus around the arts, arts education, and community. Each KAVAH endeavor is an expression of the family’s philanthropic mission.
Founded in 2011, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. The Center seeks to intervene in existing structures that keep scholarship and the arts separate from each other, and to help reimagine new relationships between them. At the Center’s heart are its fellowships involving at least two people, one from inside and outside the university community, who eventually co-teach a course open to undergraduate and graduate students. In past years these fellowships have been primarily supported by the Mellon Foundation and more recently by the Joyce Foundation. The experimental nature of the Gray Center’s work has yielded a wide variety of forms through which past, current, and prospective fellows share their work with diverse constituencies on campus, throughout Chicago and the US, and globally; these include the monthly public conversation series Sidebar; the experimental music/performance initiative Gray Sound; various conferences and symposia; and our biannual journal Portable Gray, published by University of Chicago Press and distributed to over 30 countries on 4 continents. The hallmark of the Gray Center is the creation of a zone of commitment that allows scholars and artists to take risks not otherwise possible given their professional profiles. The Gray Center, in short, is a place for serious play and genuine exploration