Agency of Art Submitted for NEH Summer Stipend Grant

It's been a few months since I updated this site, which is due in part to a major computer crash that occurred in May.  I've also been doing a lot of research work for the ongoing 2 book projects I'm working on in tandem with this one, and this does not include my other art, design and writing projects.  With that said, I've just submitted an application to The National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend.  And during the process of putting the application together, I realized that regardless of the outcome of the grant it was instrumental to the book project for me to organize my ideas so as to create the 3-page "Narrative."

What follows is the first page of the "Narrative" and next year should I receive a Summer Stipend award I'll probably publish the entire document:

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Narrative

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that education absent mindful-inclusion will lead to elitism and insularity, enabling the higher educated to “trample over the masses.”  However, as my proposed research seeks to show, with mindful-inclusion at the fore of higher learning, five 20th century schools in different regions of the Western world— Harlem Renaissance (School), Staatliches Bauhaus, The New School, North Carolina State – School of Design, and Black Mountain College (BMC)—became the chief form givers for art and culture in the modernist age by crafting new manifestos, moral codes, philosophies and pedagogies espoused respectively by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Gropius, Henry L. Kamphoefner, Alain Locke, Albert Einstein, James Baldwin and W.E.B Du Bois.  Others, including many women, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, also made notable contributions. 

Each had their own unique perspective, literary and oratory style, yet all were quite similar in their egalitarian approach to affirming individual liberty and social advancement through creative collaborative activity; often artistic in nature, and always through the humanities.  Some, as in the case of Gropius, who declared in his 1919 manifesto “Art and Technology: A New Unity,” were directly involved in more than one school, and in the case of Dr. King, though he was not directly involved with any of the schools, he is nevertheless the most renown figure of social change in the 20^th century, and the consequence of his moral and educational presence, however nebulous at times, plays an important role.

The organic and amorphous nature of catalytic social change through the arts and humanities does not always manifest in the embodiment of a brick and mortar institution.  The Harlem Renaissance (School) had no walls, and is instead identified to a greater or lesser degree by artwork, letters, activism, poetry and publications, as well as organized and impromptu rap sessions in the homes, private art studios or informal gatherings on the street corners of New York City’s Harlem Neighborhood—forums and spaces acting as plein air classrooms—reflecting a key aspect of education through the cultural vernacular of African-Americans prior to the formal abolition of de jure segregation.

While examining the pedagogic and moralist impact these individuals had on said schools, the research simultaneously looks at the impact and interplay of the Two World Wars, all of which converged in facilitating cultural reform and renaissance. Through a deliberate cultivation of interdisciplinary practices, a new gestalt for cultural arbiters and public intellectuals was created with enduring global implications.