The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced $24 million in grants for 225 humanities projects across the country, including work by Hallie Meredith, an assistant professor, career track, of fine arts at Washington State University.

Meredith’s project, “Fragmentary and Unfinished Art: Documenting Undocumented Late Roman Art and Process,” is the only project from the state of Washington selected for NEH funding. The $6,000 summer stipend will support her research and writing of a monograph about late Roman carving techniques through the study of incomplete stone sculptures.

“The implications for this project are wide-ranging, extending beyond the central period of study,” Meredith said. “I expect to make a significant interdisciplinary contribution to discourse in archaeology, ancient history, art history, classics, craft history and theory and economic studies, among other fields of study.”

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Hallie G. Meredith, a teaching assistant professor of fine arts at Washington State University, is being honored with two major awards for her research into ancient Roman art processes.

Meredith received the William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art before 1750 from SECAC, a leading national arts education and research organization, for her project “Fragmentary and Unfinished Art: Documenting Undocumented Late Roman Art and Process.” She was also selected to receive a 2021 Clark Fellowship for her related project, “Workshops, Process, and Anonymity: The Roots of Contemporary Craft in Ancient Roman Art.”

“The Roman practice of concealing evidence of carving has led to a fundamental gap in our knowledge concerning production,” Meredith said. “My approach will enable unfinished pieces to take center stage, with the potential for fundamentally important – but obscured – visual information to be accessed, and their wider significance and cross-disciplinary implications to be addressed.”

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From moist, cool clay to wet, drippy paint and dry, smudgy charcoal, visual art is a distinctly hands‑on, sometimes messy, field of practice and study. So, what happens when art education goes online?

“Remote teaching certainly hasn’t slowed us down. In fact, these strange times have helped us reimagine new, more expanded ways to reach out to our students while still having deep and meaningful experiences in the virtual classroom,” said Associate Professor Io Palmer.

She and many of her fine arts colleagues, including Joe Hedges, assistant professor of painting/intermedia, have created their own makeshift media studios where they shoot, produce and edit demonstrations and tutorial videos for their students to watch online anytime.

“Each of our students is really on a personal journey of creative exploration. We are not prescriptive about where that journey leads, so we use frequent one-on-one and group dialogues and critiques to help guide their learning in a highly individualized way, maintaining individual connections with each student wherever they are,” Hedges said.

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