It’s safe to say that there are many outside the University of Georgia—and many, even, who work, teach or study in her hallowed halls—who are not aware that their state’s flagship university is home to a vibrant, internationally active humanities center. For that matter, many people may not know what a humanities center is.
But the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts is raising its profile on the UGA campus, in the town and far beyond by bringing UGA’s arts and humanities resources into the local community—while at the same time enabling the university to be enriched by Athens’ unique cultural life.
The Willson Center’s mission is to promote research and creativity in the humanities and arts, which it does largely by supporting UGA faculty through research fellowships and grants for visiting artists and lecturers, conferences, symposia and other academic endeavors. But the center also offers an increasing number of its own programs, many of which are designed to establish and nurture connections and collaborations with audiences and partners outside the university’s traditional purview who might nonetheless make valuable contributions in pursuit of the center’s goals.
The Willson Center’s efforts gained national recognition this spring when the National Humanities Alliance Foundation selected the center as the first model program for its Humanities Working Groups for Community Impact Initiative.
Together with Georgia Humanities, the statewide affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Willson Center will lead a state working group for the cultivation of resilient and energized humanities communities. The Georgia working group will coordinate with other groups on a national level.
Humanities Communities
When Nicholas Allen came to UGA from the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2012, he realized that one of his duties as the Willson Center’s new director would be to serve as an ambassador—and in some cases, an evangelist—for humanities scholarship in a public university. Allen, the Franklin Professor of English and an internationally recognized scholar of Irish literature and history, is well-suited to the task.
“For centuries the arts and humanities have been the foundations of the idea of a university as a place of learning, inquiry and community,” he said. “Literature, dance, philosophy, languages, theatre, history and painting are parts of a human tapestry whose threads are part of our tangled contemporary world.”
Allen knew that Athens’ world-renowned music and arts scene could present opportunities for cross-pollination between university and community that simply don’t exist at other institutions, and he and the Willson Center staff began reaching out beyond university borders.
“We wanted to put on a show that would tell a story about how a university and a community can share resources to produce cultural events that benefit everyone.”
In early 2013, the Willson Center began an ongoing partnership with the local education nonprofit Family Connection – Communities in Schools. One of the initiatives it supported was an art show featuring work by middle school students at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. A Willson Center grant paid for transportation of more than 60 students and their families to attend the show’s opening event during UGA’s Spotlight on the Arts festival.
For that same festival, the Willson Center and FC-CIS partnered on another, more ambitious project. Everyday People: The Film, Television, and Video Work of Jim McKay was a four-day, multi-venue festival dedicated to the diverse output of McKay, a director, writer and producer who lived in Athens during the late 1980s and early 1990s and was a frequent collaborator with nationally recognized bands like R.E.M. and Pylon, as well as an activist for local education and anti-poverty initiatives.
The festival featured an in-person interview with R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe by Salon.com editor-in-chief David Daley at the local nonprofit art house theatre Ciné, where most of the screenings were held, and a visit to Clarke Central High School by Stipe and McKay for a conversation with students. The event was co-sponsored by off-campus partners including Salon, R.E.M. and HBO, as well as numerous UGA departments and units. It raised funds to help FC-CIS fight poverty in Athens through support for public education and families, and spread awareness of the nonprofit’s work to local and even national audiences.
“The Willson Center is a model for integrating research, teaching and outreach as the land grant university’s mission,” said Tim Johnson, FC-CIS executive director. “It is an engaged, leading member of the Athens community, allowing the university’s arts and humanities to have real impact with a diverse population beyond the borders of the campus.”
Music for the People
Another 2013 event at Ciné, organized as part of UGA’s Thinc. Entrepreneurial Week, benefited the nonprofit cinema itself. Songs @ Ciné was an intimate concert that featured local musicians including T. Hardy Morris, Thayer Sarrano and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills.
The event launched a major fundraising drive that eventually raised over $140,000 for the purchase of a digital cartridge projection system, enabling the theatre to continue screening current films as studios and distributors converted to the format while phasing out 35 millimeter projection—an evolution without which the community cinema would not have been able to survive.
“Ciné is an arts-based nonprofit venture whose services are irreplaceable not only to the Willson Center and the university, but to Athens,” Allen said at the time. “Thinc. at UGA offers us a chance to support and highlight entrepreneurship in all areas, and the arts and nonprofit sectors are crucial ones.”
While Songs @ Ciné was an artistic and entrepreneurial success, it was only a warmup for the Willson Center’s next music event. In 2014, the center had begun supporting the Slingshot festival of art, music and technology, a springtime three-day event in more than 15 venues in downtown Athens and on campus featuring artists and innovators from around the world. For that year’s Spotlight on the Arts, the Willson Center partnered with Slingshot and the UGA Terry College Music Business Program to produce Spotlight • Slingshot, a free Saturday evening concert of five musical acts with close ties to both Athens and UGA.
“We wanted to put on a show that would tell a story about how a university and a community can share resources to produce cultural events that benefit everyone, and I hope we did that,” Allen said. “We like to think that what’s good for Athens is good for UGA, and putting our combined resources behind something that recognizes and enhances Athens’ unique musical life made perfect sense.”
The show was headlined by the 1970s Memphis band Big Star with a performance of their legendary “Third” album. The lineup that evening included original Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, Mike Mills of R.E.M., Chris Stamey of the dB’s, Mitch Easter of Let’s Active, Pat Sansone of Wilco, and Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of Big Star and The Posies. Much of the event’s promotion and production work was carried out by students in UGA’s Music Business Program, while students in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music filled out the orchestral section for Big Star’s “Third” performance.
An estimated 3,000 people packed College Avenue for the concert, which was co-sponsored by the Athens Downtown Development Authority.
Moving Forward and Farther Outward
The motto of Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative, the signature speaker series it hosts each spring, is “Bringing the world to Georgia and Georgia to the world.” That ethos, which could well be applied to the center itself under Allen’s direction, was front and center when Randy Borman came to UGA as a Global Georgia speaker.
Borman, the son of Anglo-American missionaries, was born and raised among the Cofán people of the Amazon. He has been a leader of the tribe’s resistance and reinvention after decades of incursion by oil companies led to a dramatic depletion of resources that posed a grave threat to their centuries-old way of life. He’s now the Cofán’s Chief of Territories.
He spent the afternoon before a well-attended talk at the UGA Chapel, visiting with students at Clarke and Coile middle schools in Athens, teaching them about the environment, responsible use of natural resources and the connections that bind the world’s people across hemispheres, from American cities to Amazonian jungles.
Such innovative approaches to intellectual and cultural conversation go hand in hand with the direct community involvement that so impresses observers like the NHAF about the Willson Center. Representatives of the organization visited UGA in April 2015 for the launch of the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab and the Digital Humanities undergraduate certificate program, which convinced them that the Willson Center was the right choice to model its humanities communities initiative. They witnessed firsthand the center’s commitment to an inclusive, versatile, hands-on approach to humanities scholarship that also reflects a university-wide prioritization of experiential learning.
The DigiLab, a partnership with the UGA Libraries and the UGA Press, facilitates student participation in digital humanities projects like the Civil Rights Digital Library, CSI Dixie and the Georgia Virtual History Project as part of their academic experience. The GVHP even enlists high school students throughout the state to research, write and publish the histories of their own communities, synthesizing the Willson Center’s dual goals of supporting scholarship on individual levels and promoting the importance of the humanities to audiences beyond the walls of academia.
All of the Willson Center’s outreach to communities from the local to the international is undertaken, at its most basic level, in service of the center’s mandate to support humanities and arts research in the state of Georgia. Its initiatives often attract outside funding, such as the grant awarded to University Librarian and Associate Provost P. Toby Graham by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help establish the DigiLab. And the mission has been joined by the Willson Center Board of Friends, a group of dedicated proponents of the arts and humanities assembled in 2014 to help build private support for the center’s endeavors on behalf of UGA faculty and students.
But Allen, the university’s evangelist for the humanities, remains at the point of the campaign. “The poet William Butler Yeats once asked, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’” he said. “The arts and humanities teach us to see the connections between form and content, event and context, ideas and aesthetics. And they create a space for independent and flexible thought, a capacity our students need now more than ever.”
