UMaine Art professor Headed to China for Photo Documentary on Chinese Folk Art
University of Maine Professor Laurie Hicks leaves Aug. 27 on a two-week research trip to China to document the folk art of the country as part of an educational effort to make the traditional artforms accessible to the Western world.
Hicks will be one of seven researchers working as part of ChinaVine, a partnership between two universities in the United States — the University of Central Florida and the University of Oregon— and two in China — Shandong University of Art and Design and Beijing Normal University. Since 2007 on its interactive web site, ChinaVine has provided text, photographs and video of the material and intangible culture of China in its mission to educate the English-speaking world.
Hicks is a photographer and art educator whose research focuses on issues of place and memory, and the sociocultural context of art. For more than 20 years, she has collaborated with the two artists who founded ChinaVine in 2006 — Kristin Congdon, a professor of film and philosophy at the University of Central Florida, and Doug Blandy, professor and director of the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy at the University of Oregon.
Hicks and the other members of the research team will interview, photograph and videotape folk artists near Shanghai and Beijing, focusing on the traditional artistic expression that is rooted in community-based practices and often passed from one generation to another.