Coming Together: Mutual Interests Across the Arts and Humanities

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This post is the introduction to a series about the “Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities” exhibition developed by faculty in the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster at Grand Valley State University.

As the conveners of the Society, Technology, and Environment (STE) Cluster in the arts and humanities at Grand Valley State University, it has been our pleasure and honor to work with eight faculty members who joined our community in fall 2024. Their charge as a cluster was to work collaboratively, model inquiry, and amplify significant conversations in the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. Having the luxury of time the group was able to engage with the key themes through conversation, learned about each other’s scholarship, and offered campus learning programs. The efforts of this foundational year led to planning an exhibition to share their work with the broader GVSU community.

Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities is most ambitious effort of the Cluster to date. Working in pairs, members opted to experiment and see what happens when the conventions of scholarship were broadened to center collaboration. They have worked with language, design, image, and object to create diverse projects that are grounded in a historical event or an aspect of lived experience. When examined together, these collaborations stress the power of raising questions; each work asks as much as it says. In turn, viewers can reimagine official narratives, encountering multiple perspectives along with their impact on legacy and memory. An exhibition featuring these collaborations opens in early November 2026 at the Stuart and Barbara H. Padnos Student Gallery on GVSU’s campus in Allendale, Michigan.

Over the next two weeks, each pair of collaborators will share their work in this series.

a white hallway with posters put up. The title "Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities" is posted on the wall
The Many Stories of a Roman Bill of Sale and A Shipping Manifest installed at the Padnos Gallery at Grand Valley State University. Photo by Rachel Anderson.

With their installation, A Beaver’s Vertical Visions, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro and Blair Stein break from anthropocentric models of inquiry to speculate on the intersections of technology and animal sentience. Their research asks the viewer to reconsider the implications of a 1948 effort in Idaho to reintroduce beavers to the rural landscape. 

Maggie ten Berge and Shalom Yabilsu-Anyaduba in The Many Stories of a Roman Bill of Sale also use the possibilities of historical imagination and ask us to connect with the experience of Fortunata, an enslaved woman living in Roman Britain. Foregrounding the contexts of individuals whose histories have been neglected and minimized, their efforts shape for the viewer an ethical approach towards a charged past. 

Offering multiple perspectives to reflect on a past tragedy is also central to Bodies that Remain, Bodies that Dissolve, created by Yue Liang and Kristin Reeves. Using the 1954 Yangtze River flood as a departure point, they interrogate the tensions between state and citizen, between heroes and victims, and between real and idealized bodies. Using both archival approaches and contemporary adaptations of technology they invite viewers to participate in the creation and re-creation of memory. 

Tierney Powell and Wenxin Zhao examine and critique the role of academic labor in their collaboration entitled A Shipping Manifest. Focusing on how the contemporary university is shaped by market and logistic forces as well as cultural mores, they ask viewers to see higher education within a broad context that highlights both the larger systems in which it operates and the human laborers who constitute it—and the cost of such labor to the bodies and identities of these academics.   

A photo taken from above in an art gallery. Artwork is being installed. Two women are standing near a bunch of brown cardboard boxes talking to each other as they attach decals to the wall. There is a table with laptops and other clutter, a stepladder, and bags on the floor. In the front is a wooden box with holes drilled in it sitting on a white parachute.
Collaborators Kristin Reeves and Yue Liang install Bodies that Remain, Bodies that Dissolve in the Padnos Gallery at GVSU. In the foreground is A Beaver’s Vertical Visions mid-installation. Photo by Rachel Anderson.

Mutual Interests presents an alternate model, centering each participant’s investigation of a topic, engaging in conceptual conversation with a peer, culminating in the written and physical manifestation of their dialogue. These projects reveal a depth of knowledge and investigation, while simultaneously inviting viewers, expert or newcomer, to generate their own responses and questions. 

This collaboration celebrates community and reciprocity, resulting in an exhibition where ideas are cultivated together rather than individually. The members of the STE Cluster show us that collaboration requires intentionality and institutional support to allow them to engage with a spirit of inquiry and build lasting connections. Additionally, in Mutual Interests, we are reminded that research is fundamentally personal and involves risk-taking. We hope our colleagues’ work bridging the arts and humanities will be the first of many such projects for members of the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster as well as initiate new conversations within the broader Grand Valley State University community.

cover image design by Raúl Peña
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Rachel Anderson and Sigrid Danielson

Rachel S. Anderson and Sigrid Danielson are both professors at Grand Valley State University, in the English and Visual and Media Arts departments, respectively. However, they’ve been collaborating since their graduate school days, where they both were members of the Medieval Studies Institute at Indiana University-Bloomington where they earned their PhDs.

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