Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 24, 2004|Volume 33, Number 4

Yale boasts three MacArthur Fellows

Faculty filmmaker/physician, student archaeological illustrator
and alumna sculptor

Heather Hurst, a graduate student in anthropology, has reconstructed vivid and heretofore lost images of the Mayan past from raw field data and ancient artifacts.

On the other side of campus, Dr. Gretchen Berland, assistant professor of internal medicine, has also been creating images: She combines a career as a physician and a filmmaker to highlight for lay audiences how affliction creates physical and social barriers that may not be apparent to most.

The two women recently received phone calls informing them that they had been selected as MacArthur Fellows, and, as such, would receive $500,000 in support of their work over the next five years. The fellowship is renowned for its "no-strings attached" financial support: Those chosen for the honor can spend the money for their creative pursuits in whatever way they see fit.

Berland and Hurst -- along with alumna Judy Pfaff M.F.A. '73, who is a sculptor and art professor at Bard College in New York -- are among only 23 individuals across the country chosen as MacArthur Fellows in recognition of their "exceptional creativity and promise." The winners were publicly announced on Sept. 28.

The MacArthur Fellowship program underscores the importance of the creative individual in society by providing support for award recipients to engage in creative endeavors over a five-year period. Fellows are selected for their originality, creativity and potential to do more in the future.

Candidates are nominated, evaluated and selected through a rigorous and confidential process. No one may apply for the awards, and no interviews are conducted.

This year's MacArthur Fellows also include a marine roboticist who builds miniature, underwater vehicles that mimic schooling fish; a ragtime pianist who is taking this early 20th-century musical form in new directions; a high school debating coach who has developed debate skills among urban students at his California school; a farmer devoted to finding contemporary solutions to the challenges facing family farms in America; and an inventor who has cobbled sophisticated devices from accessible materials to save lives and reduce labor in remote areas of the world with little access to technology and limited resources.

Each new recipient of MacArthur Fellowships learns of the award in a phone call from the foundation.

"The call can be life-changing, coming as it does out of the blue and offering highly creative women and men the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create and contribute," said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, in announcing this year's winners.

Dr. Gretchen Berland

Prompting questions about health and society

Before she earned an M.D. from Oregon Health and Science University, Gretchen Berland participated for a decade in the production of programs for the PBS television series "Nova" and MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. A member of the Yale faculty since 2001, she now uses her experience in film production and journalism to highlight issues in health care.

Her video project, "Cross-Cover," provides a first-person perspective on the problems faced by young doctors during their internship year. It chronicles the changes in their attitudes toward their patients, and their personal and professional aspirations. For her most recent project, "Rolling," she used the video diary format to document the experiences of several people who require wheelchairs for mobility.

"By placing the camera in the hands of her three subjects, she presents their struggles to maintain independence and dignity in the face of their disabilities from a compelling and informative vantage point," says the MacArthur Foundation biography of Berland.

Berland was also the lead author on a survey of health information resources on the Internet. The study found that health care consumers, particularly those with lower reading skills, have difficulty finding accurate and understandable information about common medical problems.

"Through her efforts, Berland prompts physicians and the public to consider several key questions about health and society: how we learn about our own health, how physicians treat and learn, and how affliction creates physical and social barriers that often pass unnoticed," said the MacArthur Foundation.

Berland said she felt somewhat incredulous about being named a MacArthur Fellow.

"There are no words to describe all of the emotions I felt when I received the phone call," she says. "It's an extraordinary privilege and honor to have been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation. It's humbling and exciting, and I have to keep pinching myself to make sure it's real. I'm grateful to the foundation and I'm grateful that Yale supported my work as a junior faculty member."

Heather Hurst

Bringing the ancient past alive

At age 29, Heather Hurst is the youngest recipient of the award this year. She is an archaeological artist and illustrator who has revived, through reconstruction, ancient paintings and drawings of the pre-Columbian Americas. She uses different kinds of primary materials collected by archaeological collaborators for her reconstructions, and she is particularly noted for her work with the Maya murals of Bonampak.

"Through these reproductions, she conveys a sharp image of the ancient Maya world, retrieving fallen warriors and lost hieroglyphs -- in short, making visible what no eyes have viewed since 800 A.D.," says the MacArthur Foundation in a short biography of Hurst. "She has produced a vivid window into the Maya past, revealing the details of forgotten monuments, their human faces, and their architectonic intentions. Her paintings and architectural renderings not only recover previously lost records, but are works of art in their own right."

Hurst, a graduate of Skidmore College, is working toward her Ph.D. at Yale. She has been an archaeological illustrator at sites in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, and her illustrations have been published in National Geographic and Arqueología Mexicana. They have been exhibited at the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Venturing beyond the traditional

Since earning her master's degree from Yale, Judy Pfaff has been both an art teacher and a practicing artist. In her work, she extends the limits of sculpture by combining two- and three-dimensional elements into large-scale installations, often working with a wide range of materials.

"At the heart of her work is her exploration of how to make painting more three-dimensional and sculpture more painterly," explains the MacArthur Foundation biography of the artist.

"Her dynamic, exuberant, large-scale (and typically site-specific) installations incorporate local materials and combine painting, sculpture and architecture. These works include carefully crafted elements of her own making with found materials, both man-made and natural, to create protean forms of rich complexity."

Pfaff's work has been featured in more than 100 solo exhibitions and installations and in more than 200 group exhibitions. Some are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Including this year's fellows, the MacArthur Foundation has honored 682 people as MacArthur Fellows since the inaugural group was chosen in 1981. Their ages have ranged from 18 to 82.

The MacArthur Foundation is one of the nation's largest private philanthropic foundations. It has awarded more than $3 billion in grants since 1978. Through the support it provides, the foundation fosters the development of new knowledge, nourishes individual creativity, strengthens institutions, participates in the formation of policy and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.

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Reimbursements now available through direct deposit

IN MEMORIAM