KAVAH Fermata

The KAVAH Fermata is a two‑year fellowship at the Gray Center that gives an invited artist full latitude to experiment alongside faculty, dissolving the usual boundaries between creative practice and academic research. Its first partnership unites Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung, known for mapping global displacement, with historian Mark Phillip Bradley, a scholar of transnational modernity; together they will track the 3,500‑year passage of spices, reweaving culinary, economic, and political narratives that span continents. The fellowship’s name combines KAVAH—a family philanthropy committed to the arts as a response to social conflict—with “fermata,” the musical pause that allows improvisation, signaling a program built on spaciousness, play, and interdisciplinary method. Selected artists arrive from outside the university and co‑design every aspect of their project’s scope, schedule, and resources, ensuring that form follows inquiry rather than confining it to an institutional template.

Teaching and public exchange sit at the core of each Fermata. Chung and Bradley will lead an exploratory seminar that invites students, faculty, and staff into their research while modeling collaborative, process‑driven learning. Over two years they will stage conversations, workshops, and other events on and off campus, opening their evolving work to wider audiences. Flexible curatorial support from the Gray Center accompanies every step, maintaining momentum without prescribing outcomes. The fellowship joins a lineage of Gray Center projects that pair artists with scholars yet extends that model by granting even greater formal freedom and duration. Emphasizing attention, improvisation, and humanity’s right to creativity, the KAVAH Fermata positions art not simply as a subject of study but as an engine for new ways of knowing and living together.

Click here to read the original announcement and see more detail about the Gray Center’s newest fellowship program.

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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.