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AI: So, before the break we were talking about some of your performance art, and I wanted to ask you, before continuing on with the development of your performance art and installations, about the beginnings of teaching performance art at Kansas, how that came about and some of the significance of that at the time.

RS: It came about approximately a year after I began doing performance myself. We have the option of, at Kansas, to introduce, at any point, what's called a "special topics" course. And this is to keep us from going stale in the courses that we normally teach. So to this date, in any given semester we usually have two to three special topics courses that are being taught by somebody on our faculty. And frequently if these courses are real successful, they're actually introduced into our curriculum as regularly offered courses, which of course changes the whole shape of our program. And I think performance art did that in our department in that it began as a course that had about eight students in it, which is actually about the ideal number, but would vary anywhere from eight to as many as seventeen people in any given semester. And I would teach it just during the fall semester. But it was a course that there always seemed to be a demand for. Every fall there seemed to be a group of people that wanted to take the course and so I kept offering it. And I think after doing it for about five or six years, we felt that the course was important enough to become regularly, it should be regularly offered. And we had also been thinking about a program that we would call "new genre" in our department that would include performance and installation, and, and so we ended up actually advertising and hiring this Spanish woman to teach installation. And those two courses she teaches in the spring, I teach performance in the fall. And so those two courses are sort of the core of this new genre major that we now have. So we have painting, printmaking, sculpture, and new genre. And new genre is rapidly becoming one of the biggest areas in our whole program. And we have supplemented performance and installation with computer art and mixed media and video. So, it's, it's become a real important part of the program.

Right now, because I'm gonna be retiring soon, we're actually gonna be having two very long meetings next week to try to decide how we're going to replace me into the program, and whether we're going to try to find a performance artist to continue to teach under this format, or my, my feeling is that it ought to be integrated with installation art and offered every semester, because it's been really unusual, I think, to be able to offer a performance class every year for the last eighteen years. Whereas performance has sort of come and gone at other schools, we've been able to sustain that for this period of time. And so it's now, the, it's the oldest performance program between both coasts, and beyond that. It's probably the oldest program that's been continuously running in the country. So we have to decide whether or not it's worth preserving as that, or whether there's some other way of looking at it, which I think I would be in favor of.

AI: Well, in an earlier conversation you had started to talk a little bit about the significance of performance art, especially for people of color and women in their art-making. I wonder if you would say some more about that.

RS: Yeah, when we advertise for an installation artist, and it was interesting. We did this at the College Art Association Conference. We were the only job that was being advertised nationwide asking for an installation artist. And we had about 220 people that applied for the job that called themselves an installation artist. And out of those 220 -- if my memory serves me correctly -- over 120 of them were women. And of that group, twenty-five percent of the entire group, of the 220, twenty-five percent were people of color. And that was a really high percentage in both instances, because if we were to have a painting position I would say less than one-third would be women and probably somewhere between five and ten percent would be people of color. And so, it really confirmed what I thought all along, that those were disciplines that, if you look at what's going on nationally, in terms of performance artists and installation artists, it seems like a far greater majority than fifty-five or sixty percent, seems almost like eighty percent are being done by women and people of color. And the reason for it is that up to a few years ago, the art scene was dominated by European male artists. I mean, that's what modernism was all about. And so for the first time, thanks to feminism, primarily, the art arena has become far more inclusive of women and people of color. And what those people bring with them is not some rarefied European idea of what modern art is about, but they bring with them stories that they have to tell. And the only way you can tell those stories is by doing them either in linear fashion as performance art or through using the objects that actually come out of their own family history in installations. And so, it's quite logical that those are two fields that are dominated by those two groups of people.

<End Segment 56> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.