In the Spotlight: Mary Walling Blackburn
“A site can be productive when it is unresolved, and Dallas is rife with unresolved sites.”
By Andrew Kaufmann
Mary Walling Blackburn, new associate professor
of art, doesn’t teach her Art and Urbanism class
by taking students to museums or galleries.
Instead, she wants her students to look outside
museum walls where they can examine spaces
and the people who inhabit them, and then create
statements. If the terms “spaces” and “statements”
sound vague, it is intentionally so: Her methods
and mediums change, but they consistently provide
inspection of a subject while taking the witness
on a journey of emotions and discovery.
“Mary takes an innovative and deeply thoughtful
approach to art making. Specifically, she directly
engages sites and social spaces and their layers of
political history through her teaching and work,”
says Noah Simblist, associate professor of art.
Take, for example, what she is doing with an Art
Matters grant for a project near the Turkish/Syrian
border. In it, Walling Blackburn asks: What does it
mean to be a stranger? She answers by becoming
a test subject as a Western stranger entering the
Middle Eastern world. And she transforms herself
into even more of a spectacle by asking the local
citizens whether or not they have had any encounters
with the strangest of strangers: extraterrestrials.
“For the first part of the project, I had to go around
and ask, ‘Have you ever seen an alien? Do you know
anyone who has?’” Walling Blackburn explains.
“It was very humiliating. But the humiliation was
central to the project. I couldn’t act as though I
didn’t believe in aliens or as though anyone who
did could only be an object of derision. That meant
accepting others’ derision.”
Always aware of the world around her, Walling
Blackburn stresses to students that art doesn’t
exist in a cultural vacuum. “Site specificity is imperative,”
Walling Blackburn says. “It’s a material,
just as much as paint or clay is. And human subjects
are a part of the site.”
That concept of site is the focus of exploration in
Walling Blackburn’s Art and Urbanism class. Luckily
for artists at SMU, Dallas is a petri dish for the arts.
“One thing that’s imperative in any of the work
I make is that I don’t want people to have a sense
of resolution. A site can be productive when it
is unresolved, and Dallas is rife with unresolved
sites, making it a very generative space,” Walling
Blackburn says.
Students are learning just how unresolved Dallas
can be. One class project was to have community
members perform and discuss a short play by
award-winning poet Amiri Baraka. The subject
matter of the work is challenging, however: racially
tinged police brutality. Even more challenging
were the audiences and sites the students asked to
participate, ranging from a sorority house to area
law enforcement organizations. Most of those who
were asked to participate, perhaps unsurprisingly,
declined. The histories and contexts of the sites the
students approached greatly affected their ability
to find participants.
While Walling Blackburn may be new to Dallas,
she is certainly not new to unresolved spaces.
In a project titled “Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials,”
Walling Blackburn was invited to do a project
on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, in view
of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. She and
more than 25 experts from a variety of disciplines
met with island tourists and held one-on-one
discussions on citizenship, called “tutorials.”
“The site itself is in this constellation of immigration
history, so I decided that we would have to
contend with what citizenship is, and can be,”
Walling Blackburn says. “The way citizenship is
conceived of by government documents is very
shallow. We could have a much richer, nuanced
and individualized American convention.”
The project expanded to the West Coast on Angel
Island near San Francisco, a major immigration
processing center for the West. Meanwhile, selected
tutorials have been recreated at the Tate in London,
and Walling Blackburn’s students have recreated
some in Dallas.
One student chose to recreate a tutorial by playing
an audio loop of a voice saying simply, “I am a
person.” The audio, intended to force the listener
to consider the meaning of humanity, took on a
new dimension because of the site selected for its
performance: the banks of the Trinity River, which
the student had discovered was where the Ku Klux
Klan once disposed of lynched bodies.
“Professor Walling Blackburn doesn’t always
use literal art mediums,” says student Stephanie
Epshteyn (B.A. Psychology, ’13). “We enter into
a space and experience the space itself as art,
through all of our senses.”
Walling Blackburn believes that approach has a
universal application extending beyond the artistic
world.
“Students from any discipline can apply lessons
from a course in art and urbanism toward their
own subject area and expand the approaches they
would take when tackling a problem.”