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Photo exhibit focus: Ordinary lives of lesbians
Rumpled bedsheets serve to illuminate rather than titilate
Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC)
October 13, 2002
Author: Blue Greenberg Columnist
Estimated printed pages: 3

"Academic Eye III: Reinserting Myself Into a History"
Duke University Museum of Art, through Nov. 7

"Reinserting Myself Into a History" is an exhibition of large-format photographic prints by former UNC Chapel Hill instructor Tammy Rae Carland, who asserts her lesbianism in her choice of themes. Carland is now on her way to California, where she will be an associate professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

As the third show in a series called the "Academic Eye," the Duke museum invited Duke's vice provost and director of interdisciplinary studies, Cathy Davidson, to choose an artist whose work she finds challenging.

"I did not know Carland, personally," Davidson said, "but I thought her work was important." After visiting the artist's studio, Davidson chose photographs from two series, "Lesbian Beds" and "Keeping House."

Lesbian lifestyles have so often been relegated to underground porn that these beds, seen from closely cropped aerial views, empty of their occupants, presents us with a set of complicated layers of meaning.

First of all, Carland writes that they are "formally composed and edited to conceptually resemble abstract expressionist and color field paintings." She emphasizes those who have just vacated the bed with the traces of them and objects that they have left behind.

The beds, which belong to her and to lesbian friends, were photographed as they were found. From across the gallery, formal artistic elements such as curves, straight lines, color and shadow assert themselves as abstract forms within a large frame. Close inspection, however, reveals the abstractions are really mussed and rumpled sheets and comforters with clues to the missing occupants: books, nightclothes, pets and deliberate patterns that suggest the genders of the recent sleepers. In her gallery guide essay, Davidson makes much out of the fact that the bed linen is not fashionably coordinated, but looks more like the odds and ends of a starter household.

Each photograph has some element or touch that makes it hard to believe the photographer didn't change a thing. For example, in "Untitled #10," a turquoise sheet has been bunched in such a way that it looks like the ribbon loop that honors breast cancer victims. In "Untitled #8," a sock lies in a corner like a needless phallic symbol, and in "Untitled #13," a slit in a pillow suggests the vaginal opening.

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Duke panel debates freedom, politics
Student paper ad citing political ties of dept. personnel set off discussion
Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC)
March 2, 2004
Author: HUNTER LEWIS hlewis@heraldsun.com; 419-6651

EXCERPT

Joining Van Alstyne on the panel were University Counsel David Adcock, political science Chairman Michael Munger, Vice Provost Cathy Davidson of the English department and Bill Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School for the Environment and Earth Sciences.

Schlesinger, a longtime member of the university's appointments, promotion and tenure committee, defended the university's hiring practices, saying he did not recall ever seeing political affiliation mentioned in the roughly 300 faculty files that have come across his desk.

Adcock called the listing of political affiliations for the humanities professors "an interesting benchmark," but he argued that the affiliations were not meaningful measurements of political ideology.

Speaking about the scarcity of registered Republicans in academia, Davidson joked that universities should strive to recruit Republicans to the humanities earlier in life by offering "programs for affluent, gated communities, so baby Republicans can learn the joy of the classics."

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