Curating community and conversation
seabertson
WSU senior Sidney Murphy, curator of a special six-week exhibit at WSU’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, sees art as a path to a more honest, open, and liberating future.
Standing in front of the four panels of Myriads, Only by Dark by Julie Mehretu, Murphy says of the Ethiopian-American artist, “Mehretu focuses a lot on topology, maps, the connections we have between places—that’s my interpretation. This idea of place is messy, of where we come from, really messy.” She tosses off a small laugh. “You can’t really follow one line.” » More …
Anthropology senior Sidney Murphy thinks it’s important that people of all ethnicities connect with art and that art can help us celebrate culture.
AnnMarie McCracken, a student at WSU Pullman, has been awarded one of only 17 undergraduate research grants from the international scientific research honor society Sigma Xi and its Grants‑in‑Aid of Research program.
The University’s Historic Preservation Committee recently launched a new website that provides the first comprehensive online history of WSU Pullman’s buildings and landscapes.
Rapid global cooling 13,000 years ago challenged early occupants of Alaska to adapt. People used to hunting mammoths and other megafauna with big stone tools suddenly found their weapons shattering in the cold. Access to the stone they used to make them got buried under snow.
Alyssa Sperry’s research for her University Scholars Honors thesis on the history of salt in Jamaica earned her the Library Research Excellence Award for 2018. It also changed her life.
More than 8,500 years ago, a group of people used a rock shelter at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers as a base camp. When rediscovered in the early 1950s, the shelter amazed scientists, including Washington State University archeologist Richard Daugherty, with its wealth of artifacts—and the age of its human remains. Named after the property owner at the time, the Marmes Rockshelter was soon inundated by waters from the recently closed Lower Monumental Dam on the Snake. Although a levee had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the shelter dry, the Corps neglected to take into account the layer of permeable gravel beneath the site. Within three days, it was all under water. 
WSU researchers have determined that Nez Perce Indians grew and smoked tobacco at least 1,200 years ago, long before the arrival of traders and settlers from the eastern United States. Their finding upends a long-held view that indigenous people in this area of the interior Pacific Northwest smoked only kinnikinnick or bearberry before traders brought tobacco starting around 1790.
WSU Vancouver cultural anthropology major Emma Johnson has received a prestigious and nationally competitive Udall Undergraduate Scholarship in its tribal public policy category.