CONWAY,
Ark. (April 30, 2021) — Hendrix College students recently launched Audiovisual Arkansas: Citizen Storytellers (AV Arkansas),
an online collection of multimedia stories about Arkansans, with a focus on
work, play, and place. The website is www.avark.net.
Students
involved in the project include Dylan Hicks ’21, a studio art major from Guy,
Arkansas; Julia Kraus ’21, a philosophy major from Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Ragan
Price ’21, an English-film studies major from Conway, Arkansas.
The
student team collaborated closely with Hendrix art professor and photographer Maxine
Payne and author and creative writing professor Dr. Tyrone Jaeger. Support for
the project is made possible by the Margaret Berry Hutton Odyssey
Professorship, held by Payne and Jaeger. Students will receive Global Awareness
Odyssey credit for their participation. The project and Payne and Jaeger’s
professorship will be complete at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year.
“Our
mission is to collaborate with Hendrix students to tell the stories of
Arkansans,” said Payne.
“Since
we’ve known each other, we’ve shared our mutual admiration for artists who root
their work in place and who bear witness to the strange wonders of the people who
spring up from these places,” said Jaeger. “Place is important, and as artists
we both seek to understand the places where we live, work, and play.”
Through
AV Arkansas, students learn to engage with local communities, to search for
stories in Arkansas, and to produce engaging artworks that foreground story. As
they engage with the people and places that make Arkansas, students develop
fluency in multimedia storytelling, using a wide range of audio and visual
editing tools to produce short documentary and other films, illustrations, photographic
essays, podcasts and radio features, and text.
“During
my time working for AV Arkansas I learned a lot about crafting a story based
around someone’s life and how to create art that properly represents them as a
person,” said Hicks. “The process of filming, editing, and befriending a
subject is something I hope to take into future careers in storytelling that I
apply for.”
“AV
Arkansas taught me to be a more confident while conducting interviews,” said
Kraus. “At the start of the summer, I thought I needed to fill up silences with
small talk to make interviewees comfortable, but I’ve learned it’s okay to wait
silences out or rephrase questions to get more complete responses. It’s an
interview not a conversation, it’s okay if it’s a bit awkward in the moment if
the tape sounds better in the end.”
“While
working on AV Arkansas, I developed my audio editing skills in Audacity a great
deal,” Kraus added. “This summer, I’ll apply that experience to learning more
professional audio software including Audition and Logic while I intern at Arts
& Letters at UALR.”
Next
year’s student team includes Lauren Allen ’24, (anthropology major, Nashville,
Tennessee); Hannah Diggs ’23, (English-creative writing and history double major,
Bonnerdale, Arkansas); Sophie O’Reilly ’24 (undeclared major, Tulsa, Oklahoma);
Josiah Vallone ’22, (English-creative writing major, Conway, Arkansas); and
Vada Wood ’24, (English-creative writing major, Clarksville, Arkansas).
“Participating
in AV Arkansas will allow me to have in-the-field experience with work that I
hope to do in my own future career,” said Allen. “I also love the point that
Maxine Payne made during the information session; Hendrix has always been
viewed as its own prestigious bubble in the Conway community. I love that this
project allows the College to create more roots in the state and better get to
know the community that it is a part of.”
“I
enjoy discovering meaning in the people and places around me, and I am honored
to work with other individuals who are passionate about making media,” said
Diggs.
“I
hope to gain direct documentarian experience so that my future fieldwork and
literary endeavors more accurately capture the lived experiences of others,”
said O’Reilly. “I am particularly interested in and dedicated to amplifying
voices that are marginalized, under-represented, or inaccurately depicted in
mass media. Throughout this process, I hope to begin to make Arkansas feel more
like my home, both by forming deeper relationships within Hendrix and in the
state community at large.”
“By
participating in AV Arkansas, I wish to experience the community around me in
greater depth than I ever have before,” Wood said.
Jaeger, Payne, and their students had hoped to host a release party
and share the AV Arkansas stories with the Hendrix community, but they will
reschedule it for next school year due to COVID-19. In the meantime, the team
encourages the community to visit the website and enjoy the stories.
“I think Ragan Price put it best when she said how much she
loved meeting people and learning about their lives, and what a gift it is to
have been trusted to frame and share their stories,” said Jaeger. “I hope
people enjoy the stories as much as we enjoyed making them.”
About Hendrix College
A
private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix College consistently
earns recognition as one of the country’s leading liberal arts institutions,
and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You
Think About Colleges. Its academic quality and rigor, innovation,
and value have established Hendrix as a fixture in numerous college guides,
lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876, Hendrix has been affiliated with the
United Methodist Church since 1884. To learn more, visit www.hendrix.edu.