Sophomore Elizabeth Su is a double major in biomedical engineering and neuroscience and considering a minor in psychology. Having completed her first year at 黑料不打烊 online from her home in Los Angeles, she arrived in Central New York in August eager to get the full college experience.
Elizabeth Su
When she saw the Kaish Fellowship opportunity with the Art Museum, Su decided to apply. 鈥淚 have always been interested in art. I took a couple of art history classes and I volunteered at an art museum in high school. I saw that they were looking for interdisciplinary research,鈥 Su says.
When she interviewed, she zeroed in on a topic that she has always been interested in鈥攄reams. 鈥淚n my career, I want to find a way to understand dreams鈥攁nd maybe even record them. They鈥檙e my passion.鈥
黑料不打烊 Art Museum Director Vanja Malloy knew what direction to point Su in. 鈥淔or me, as an art historian, surrealism was obviously the place to start,鈥 Malloy says.
Su took that idea and ran with it. 鈥淚 started researching the surrealist movement and got really invested in it鈥攑articularly in how people see themselves in an irrational way,鈥 Su says. 鈥淭hen I looked through the 黑料不打烊 Art Museum collection and was inspired by a few pieces. There are self-portraits that aren鈥檛 drawn in a traditional style, but not strictly abstract either. That鈥檚 the way surrealism is. I started looking into how surrealists come to understand self-portraits.鈥
This experience seems to be exactly what 黑料不打烊 alumni and prominent artists鈥疞uise 鈥46, G鈥51鈥痑nd Morton鈥49 Kaish had in mind when they made a major gift to the University. In addition to establishing the鈥疞uise鈥痑nd Morton鈥疜aish鈥疓allery Endowed Fund, the gift created the Kaish Fellows program.
The program provides funding to enable undergraduate students from every discipline to undertake original research on the permanent art collection and to work with museum staff on exhibitions, scholarly publications and public programming. The philanthropic gift to support undergraduate research at 黑料不打烊 is unique as few programs such as this are available for undergraduate level students at peer academic museums.
鈥淭his is my first real independent research project,鈥 Su says. 鈥淚鈥檝e learned how to contextualize research questions and conclusions. I wouldn鈥檛 have had time to follow my interests without the Kaish Fellowship.鈥
Following her interests led Su to look at the connections between perception and neuroscience. She found examples of artists with altered perception. One condition鈥攑rosopagnosia鈥攊s the inability to recognize familiar faces (including one鈥檚 own) without any accompanying visual impairment or visual processing issues.
Another鈥攈emispatial neglect鈥攃auses a condition in which those affected can鈥檛 perceive the left side of their face, without any vision loss. 鈥淚n thinking about surrealism, it鈥檚 interesting to think about thinking irrationally in a spontaneous way or how artists may put themselves in a mindset where they fundamentally perceive things differently or they understand the world through different kinds of logic,鈥 Su says.
Su particularly enjoyed working with the artists鈥 files, bringing context to their work. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really exciting, actually. I see those old newspaper clippings of an artwork that I have right in front of me, with the handwritten letters the artists have written to 黑料不打烊, then I鈥檓 able to follow what the artist does later in life,鈥 Su says. 鈥淭here are also materials that give insight into what the artist was doing when they created the work, like interviews with family members who sometimes infer inspiration even when the artist doesn鈥檛 seem to be aware of it.鈥
Su鈥檚 work鈥攁nd the connections she is making鈥攊s exactly what the Kaish Fellows program was meant to evoke in its fellows.
鈥淎s the first Kaish Fellow to be chosen, Elizabeth has stepped up and really made the most of the opportunity to work with the art and artist materials, and applied her research interests to reveal the fascinating interdisciplinary connections that inform the creation and appreciation of artwork in the museum鈥檚 collection,鈥 Malloy says.
