Anderson, Hvizdak Receive Fellowships from David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities

WSU librarians Talea Anderson and Erin Hvizdak have received WSU David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities Fellowships for Anderson’s book project on the history of vegetarianism and Hvizdak’s examination of the intersections of race, gender, and art in New Orleans from 1830 to 1940.

According to the center’s faculty opportunities website, the fellowships support larger-scale research, exhibitions, or other major scholarship/creativity efforts that advance applicants’ professional development and university-wide arts and humanities goals or initiatives.

In addition to making a public presentation on their work, faculty supported by Pollart Center fellowships also agree to meet monthly as a cohort. Organized by the center, the sessions offer opportunities for mutual discussion and feedback, as well as mentoring and networking.

Delving into history of meat replacements

Rising rates of meat consumption have raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of food systems worldwide, Anderson said. The United Nations has listed plant-based diets in its Sustainable Development Goals, noting that individuals can reduce their carbon footprints by up to 2.1 tons by cutting out meat. At the same time, the World Health Organization identifies a plant-based diet with decreases in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke.

These findings have inspired a surge of interest in vegetarian and vegan diets with a bevy of meat replacements, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, she said. Intriguing as these products are to some consumers, they also dominate popular press coverage, unfortunately.

“Faux burgers, wings, and hot dogs have been marketed by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Natalie Portman, and Drew Barrymore, no doubt contributing to a popular belief that these foods were created quite recently by a set of wealthy, mostly white Americans,” Anderson said. “Articles in Forbes and The Guardian have only fueled these beliefs by identifying vegetarianism as a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon led by a small number of privileged elites. Lacking in historical grounding, these assumptions can only cause damage to what is, ultimately, a conversation with serious implications for everyone on the planet.”

Tentatively titled Faux: A History of Meat Replacements, Anderson’s book will demonstrate how vegetarianism has evolved from antiquity into the 21st century. Vegetarian recipes traveled from China to France, Ethiopia to Tennessee, Switzerland to southern California.

Often, meat replacements were championed by people who existed far from the upper echelons of society, she said. Many were poor and disenfranchised—suffragists, activists, rebels against colonial power, Black people, Brown people, and women who worked out creative solutions for using limited resources.

“Their names have been forgotten in some cases, and yet they helped translate ideology into material reality, facilitating the transfer of vegetarian thought around the world,” Anderson said. “The documents that they created—recipes—have been largely underserved in the historical record given the critical role they played in communicating ideas about human rights, sacred spaces, and environmental sustainability.”

Race and gender in 100 years of New Orleans art

In Hvizdak’s project, she will illuminate the ways that provenance research reveals not only shifting social dynamics, but also historical erasures that have impacted the recognition of women and people of color in the Southern U.S. art world. She will use her fellowship funds for travel to conduct research in archival repositories primarily in Louisiana and France.

“Specifically, I focus on works of art from New Orleans and other centers of the U.S. South where active, thriving, bourgeois communities of color lived prior to Reconstruction,” Hvizdak said. “I will do this by exploring two interrelated aspects of the art market in New Orleans from 1830 to 1940. First, I will investigate how elite art collectors and curators racialized and gendered connoisseurship and expertise to increase their wealth and status.

“Second, I will analyze how these figures drew on these claims to control narratives on race and gender, the impact of these narratives on historical scholarship, and how this has complicated efforts to fully recognize the contributions of women and people of color in the Southern art world,” she added.

One aspect of the research investigates portraits of women of color, including those misattributed to Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, and explores how these attributions reflect broader biases in art history and museum practices, she said. More on Laveau is described in A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau by Carolyn Morrow Long, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Ina J. Fandrich, and Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau by Martha Ward.

During the fellowship year, Hvizdak will revise an already-drafted article related to portraits long thought to be of Laveau and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal; she will also draft a book chapter and book proposal for eventual submission to a university press.

“My overarching aim is to explore how lost artwork provenance, especially in depictions of people of color, impacts historical understandings of race, gender, and class,” she said. “The misattribution of the Laveau portraits have obscured an important story in the history of women of color. I am excited to share my findings with the wider art community, as I hope they inspire additional research in this area.”

Hvizdak said she sees future potential in collaborating with history and library professionals to integrate digital tools into methods that can build archives for women whose histories are underrepresented.

“After spending this coming year gathering data in traditional archives, my hope is to share these fragments widely and collaborate with others in building new collections,” she said. “A dream is to create a database of portraits of women—who were likely clearly identified at one point—and encourage crowdsourced contributions to identify patterns and enhance research on their biographies and representations.”