By Sam McDonald
The new curator and director of the Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, brings to Old Dominion University a stockpile of knowledge that’s easy to admire and hard to categorize.
As a folklorist and anthropologist, Waugh-Quasebarth has conducted research with global reach, studying musical instrument makers of Appalachia, placemaking in post-coal economies, and crafts and the creative economy in Central Asia. He worked two years as program manager for the Asian Cultural History Program of the Smithsonian Institution.
He’s won a list of teaching awards and given lectures at Cambridge University in England and Meiji University in Japan.
However, he’s no stranger to Virginia. Waugh-Quasebarth studied anthropology and history at the University of Virginia, then headed to the University of Kentucky, where he earned both a master’s and a doctorate in anthropology. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar and public folklorist at The Ohio State University before being hired as director of the university’s Center for Folklore Studies.
To help introduce him to ODU and Hampton Roads, we asked Waugh-Quasebarth questions about his plans, interests and appetites.
Q: Do you plan to take programming for the Gordon Galleries in a new direction? Describe your vision for the galleries.
A: I think a lot about structures and underlying values in my work. Something I’ve learned from my training as a folklorist is the attention to collaboration between culture workers in different settings and emphasis on everyday expressive culture. I’m excited to continue to practice this value of collaboration at the Gordon Galleries, not only with artists and art collectors, but also with art practitioners in other fields including medicine, natural sciences, engineering, among others, who have their own expressive traditions and a lot to share.
Q: Thinking about your new role, what opportunity do you find most exciting?
A: As a material culture scholar and a student of craft, I’m very excited to work with the existing collections in the Gordon Art Galleries to try and tell their stories as objects with biographies in their own right, as well as through connections and relationships with objects we might lend for exhibitions. Locating this sense of relationality and interconnectedness at diverse scales from the minutia of the material of the object to globe-spanning processes is one of my favorite parts of research and public programming — made all the better when done with partners throughout the process.
Q: Virginia — and the wider region — is home to many veins of folk art and self-taught expression. Are there some lesser-known ones that you’re particularly eager to mine as curator?
A: Where to begin?! Virginia has such a rich history and geography and is constantly changing, making the possibilities for highlighting understated or underrepresented expressive traditions manifold. Some of my recent work has concerned amplifying and revisiting centuries-old expressions that have been historically neglected by partnering with local history organizations. I’d love to bring this methodology to rethink questions of place and environment around Virginia’s music and craft traditions, for instance. But I’m also interested in more recent folkloric expressions that have been understudied, like costuming and cosplay in various fandoms. Virginia’s own GWAR, for example, has been a huge influence on folk theatrical and musical expressions in the metal scene and beyond.
Q: I understand you’ve done research on musical instrument building. Might an exhibit of handmade instruments be on the horizon?
A: Speaking of traditions that can be understood in new ways! I’m planning on bringing musical instrument making into an exhibition, either in its own right or as a part of a larger exhibition on craft, art and environment in Appalachia. Looking at how our craft traditions and folk art are entrenched in larger environmental and economic processes is key to my perspective. There are many incredible makers in Virginia and surrounding mountain regions that I could see including in an exhibition that draws together this region and others through the material and environmental connections that draw us together. I’ve been thinking a lot about how music and craft traditions ran alongside the coal trains that stopped right here next to ODU.
Q: Is there a facet of life in the Hampton Roads region that helped to make this job attractive to you? The beach? The cultural diversity? Easy access to blue crabs?
A: Well, I’m definitely looking forward to picking some crabs, and we’re ready for more mild winters to be sure! I’ve lived in different regions of Virginia for much of my life — the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge, the Piedmont around Charlottesville, and Northern Virginia — but the Tidewater is in many ways new to me. I’m a person who loves getting to know regional culture and the intricate relationships of culture, power and environment that make up our expressive traditions to become the fiber of place and community. I’m really looking forward to getting in my truck and spending time on the road getting to know the place as it’s understood by the people here through lived experience.