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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2006 : River of Research

River of Research

by Kelly O'Brien

“I think I’m an archivist,” says artist Barbra Nei (M.F.A. '92, art), describing her approach to creating her multimedia art installations. Over the past 15 years or so, Nei has addressed subjects from the Armenian genocide to medical research, women's issues, and refugees in work that both incorporates archival documents and recreates archival elements.

As an M.F.A. student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s, Nei took full advantage of all of the research collections available at such a comprehensively multidisciplinary institution. "I spent just as much time in women's studies and history of medicine as I did in the art department,” she says. As a result, she notes, she makes art that is about something.

Nei recently applied this aesthetic to an exciting new public art installation in Jones Hall (which reopened this fall following extensive renovation). Faced with a commission to create something that would fit into an existing lay-in light grid installed below Jones's gigantic central skylight, Nei envisioned a river of information, a concept that pays tribute to University research and to the river that winds through the Twin Cities campus. As part of her process, she researched archival maps of campus at the Borchert Map Library and put out a call to faculty members in search of current research that could be excerpted for the "river.”

A visit to Nei's studio bears out her description of herself as archivist. One wall is covered with copies of the maps from the Borchert library. Samples of etched and engraved glass sit on a window sill. And one wall, some 30 feet long, is covered with submissions sent to her for this project by University faculty members.

In preparing for this project, Nei received texts of research documents, published articles, music scores, literature, scientific formulas, and more from faculty across the University. CLA departments are well represented in the project—there are pieces from women's studies, art history, music, economics, and cultural studies and comparative literature.

Sentences, phrases, and formulas were excerpted from these materials, etched into multiple layers of glass, and laid in the grid. The resulting installation is "a snapshot of research happening at the University right now,” says Nei. "It's a historic document for the future.”