International visiting artist-in-residence Garth Erasmus leads children in workshops at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children as part of a UD partnership.

The art of healing

UD international artist-in-residence partners in 'Healing Arts' initiative

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1:28 p.m., April 24, 2015--This year, the Institute for Global Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at the University of Delaware have partnered to launch UD’s first-ever international visiting artist-in-residence program.

Visiting artists-in-residence will bring to campus their unique vision of the world outside of Newark, infusing campus classrooms, laboratories, workshops and performance spaces with a distinctive medium for promoting global understanding and taking on the grand challenges of the age.

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According to Ann Ardis, deputy dean of CAS and director of UD’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center (IHRC), “Developing meaningful ways that the arts can contribute to healing and well-being is an academic priority for our college.”

Strategic partnerships are an important element in the college’s plans. “The international artist-in-residency initiative is the global arts and culture on-campus centerpiece of our partnership with IGS,” Ardis said, “but in this particular case it also involves a very important new partnership, through the arts, with an internationally renowned local children's hospital.”

UD’s first artist-in-residence, South African multimedia artist Garth Erasmus, will engage with the wider community through a UD partnership with Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children’s “Healing Arts” initiative.

During his time at the hospital, Erasmus will interact with patients and families during performances and workshops based on creating art and musical instruments out of non-traditional objects, something that he is an expert at. 

“My artistic life has been full of working with non-traditional materials so the work that I am doing is fitting very nicely in the general philosophy there,” he said.

Working alongside music and art therapists at the hospital, Erasmus will use medical objects including syringes, cups, rubber tubing and the like to create music and art with the children.

“We give them items that are familiar, but transform that familiarity because the familiar attachment is on this level of treatment,” he said. “I guess the idea is to transport them, that these materials and activities have transformative qualities.”

Upcoming performances, workshops

Erasmus performed in the atrium of the hospital on Thursday, April 23, and has several additional events scheduled.

He will give a talk titled "Fixing the Broken String" at noon, Tuesday, April 28, in the facility’s Administration and Research Building auditorium. That will be followed by a meet and greet from 1-2 p.m.  This event is also open to the UD community.

For Erasmus, this experience has become far more than an opportunity to give back to the Delaware community. 

“There’s a further resolve in me that things like art and music, and cultural activities generally, have healing qualities about them,” he said. “I think I’m going to go back to South Africa with a greater resolve with the fact that it is really the case.”

On the UD campus, Erasmus has put on a series of instrument building workshops and seminars on South African art.

During the week of April 27, members of the campus community will be able to enjoy Soundscapes as it plays across campus via the carillon.

According to Julie McGee, UD’s curator of African American art, Erasmus “is creating sounds with contemporary instruments he has built himself that are inspired by instruments played by the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa, the Khoisan, a placeholder name for the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa whose lands were appropriated by and through European colonization.” 

“Reconstructing, re-imagining and sounding out the instruments are palliative, creative healing initiatives to reconnect with indigenous histories that have been marginalized and/or viewed as extinct,” McGee added. “Instructively, it reminds us that South African history did not begin with apartheid or even with the entry of the Dutch into the Cape Colony (now Cape Town) in April of 1652. Rather, its cultural, linguistic, creative and artistic legacies are as old as humankind.”

The instruments used in the soundscapes include blik 'n snaar (tin and string), Madagascan harp, mouth bow, gorha (Khoisan bow) and the kriolophone (bamboo sax), all made by Erasmus.

Erasmus will present a colloquium on the topic of “Intersecting Arts” on Tuesday, April 28. The event will take place at 5 p.m. in 130 Smith Hall and, while a part of the Department of Art’s Foundation Studio Class, is open to the public.

The artist-in-residence is also the launchpad for the University Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center’s “Cape ReSoundings: South African Collaborations and Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Artist Residency with a South African Focus.” 

The goal is to engage “foreground artists as catalysts for dialogues centered on history, race, diversity, civic and communal justice, among other things, but above all, the capacity of the arts to creatively intervene in rehearsed positions and ways of seeing.”

The work Erasmus creates while in residence at the University will be displayed in the Mechanical Hall Gallery this fall, along with the work of artist Siemon Allen, a South African native now living in Richmond, Virginia.

For more information on Erasmus’ residency or to learn more about the IGS-CAS international visiting artist-in-residence program, contact Colin Miller, program director. 

Photos by Patricia Gonzalez, Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children

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