Dr. Fredo Rivera, Grinnell College
Art and architectural historian Fredo Rivera ‘06 is Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where they teach classes on modern and contemporary architecture and urban visual culture, as well as the art of the Americas, with a focus on the Caribbean. Professor Rivera’s current research includes art and architecture in modern Cuba, Haitian art, photography and visual culture, and queer performance and visuality amongst the Caribbean diaspora.
Rivera completed their dissertation “Revolutionizing Modernities: Visualizing Utopia in 1960s Havana, Cuba” in July 2015. They previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2011-2013). rofessor Rivera has worked on a number of exhibition projects, including: The Elusive Master: Emmanuel Merisier, from Haiti to beyond (Little Haiti Cultural Complex), Edouard Duval-Carrié: Metamorphosis (Museum of Contemporary Art-North Miami), From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography (NSU Art Museum-Ft. Lauderdale), Nation on the Move – the Puerto Rican Diaspora: Photographs by Frank Espada (Duke University Libraries), and Building Broward: A Guide to a Century of Architecture (Florida Atlantic University & Broward Cultural Division). In addition to their Ph.D., Rivera has a Graduate Certificate in Latin American & Caribbean Studies from Duke University (2015), a Masters of Art in Art History from Duke University (2010), and a Bachelor of Arts (Africana Studies and Art History, with honors) from Grinnell College (2006).
Dr. Petrouchka Moïse, Grinnell College
Petrouchka Moïse is currently an Assistant Professor / Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator at Grinnell College. She joined Grinnell as the CLIR/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Haitian Visual Arts (2020-2024), working jointly with the Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts. Dr. Moïse will play a central role in coordinating the Haitian Art Digital Crossroads project (HADC). The HADC aims to make the Haitian art collection of the Waterloo Center for the Arts, the largest publicly held collection of Haitian art outside the island nation, digitally accessible as a preparatory study for the creation of a digital hub for a network of online resources in Haitian and Caribbean studies. In addition to managing this project, she will collaborate with cultural and academic institutes within Haiti and amongst the Haitian diaspora to build awareness of this collection. Dr. Moïse is a first-generation Haitian born in the Diaspora. With life beginning in Brooklyn, New York, she grew up surrounded by a large Haitian family with a strong sense of Haitian pride. As she learned to overcome language and cultural barriers, cultural awareness and expression have become a core value that she promotes throughout her professional and artistic life. Dr. Moïse’s artwork investigates the search for identity through the mediums of resin, wood, word, and water. She is Louisiana’s first graduate with a Doctor of Design in Cultural Preservation from Louisiana State University College of Art + Design. Her post-doctoral research focuses on developing her ‘mitan-morphic’ theory, http://www.vivrestudios.com/works-exhibitions, by developing the descriptive metadata required to identify the “Haitian artistic signature” across all art forms.
Mark Christel, Grinnell College
Mark Christel is an Associate Professor and the Department Chair of the Libraries at Grinnell College. Mr. Christel is responsible for library administration, collection development and library planning. He acquired his MILS degree from the University of Michigan.
Kent Shankle, WCA
Kent Shankle is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa holding a degree in art with an emphasis in studio art/photography and art history. He has spent over 30 years working in community arts administration. In 1995, Shankle was hired to the position of Curator at the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA). He currently serves as Director of that institution, overseeing cultural and arts programming for the City of Waterloo, Iowa. Under his tenure, the center’s collection of Haitian art has expanded from 200 pieces to over 1,700 works, making it the largest public collection of its kind in the world. WCA has also established a Mexican Folk Art Collection which grew from less than half a dozen to over 1,000 objects over a period of three years and the center has greatly expanded its collection of works by American Regionalist masters including Grant Wood. In 1998, Shankle was awarded an International Partnership Among Museums (IPAM) grant by the American Association of Museums to take part in a museum exchange project with the Musee d’Art du College St. Pierre in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Beginning in 2005, Shankle led a planning team for the Phelps Youth Pavilion, a 39,000 square foot children’s museum expansion to the Waterloo Center for the Arts. The award-winning facility, which opened in April 2008, has since served hundreds of thousands of visitors. Shankle’s curatorial work has included numerous exhibitions featuring works by artists including Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Marc Chagall, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Mr. Imagination, Frank Lloyd Wright and many others. In 2009, he served as curator for Mystical Imagination: The Art of Haitian Master Hector Hyppolite, an exhibition which opened at the Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of Atlantic States in Washington DC before embarking on a tour of other U.S. venues. He, along with colleague Cammie Scully, planned and presented Master Artists of the Bahamas, an exhibition and symposium which was mounted at the Waterloo Center for the Arts then later traveled to Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts. Shankle continues to travel frequently to Mexico and the Caribbean for a variety of curatorial projects. Additionally, Shankle has served on numerous boards and committees holding positions including Past President and member of the Board of Directors for the Haitian Art Society, former Iowa Museum Association Board Member, Chair of the Waterloo Public Art Committee, Officer of the Waterloo Cultural Arts Commission and Friends of the Art Center, and member of the Board of Directors for the Haitian American Museum of Chicago.
Dr. Liz Rodrigues, Grinnell College
Liz Rodrigues is Associate Professor, Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Liz’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of critical digital studies, digital humanities practice, and twentieth-century multiethnic U.S. literatures. Her book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our contemporary sense of data’s revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.
Liz co-leads the Vivero Digital Fellows program and is associated with the Digital Studies Concentration. In the area of digital humanities practice, she has published on metadata creation for digital projects and ethical practices for faculty/student digital project collaboration. She has presented at the Digital Library Federation Forum, Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, and Digital Humanities 2022. She currently co-chairs the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions, with a focus on digital critical editions. She attended Kenyon College, where she majored in English and minored in Greek. She received her MLIS from the University of South Florida and MFA in poetry from Florida Atlantic University on an Institution for Museum and Library Services-funded fellowship. She worked at Grinnell College in a term position 2008-2009. After receiving a PhD in English Language and Literature with a certification in African American and Diaspora Studies at University of Michigan in 2015, she was a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple University 2015-2016 and returned to Grinnell College in 2016. She was a Harris Faculty Fellow 2019-2020.
Chawne Paige, WCA
Chawne Paige has been with the Waterloo center for the Arts since 2001, originally hired to redevelop the museum’s brand identity and to manage the creative development of all print and electronic marketing materials, including: signage, exhibition collateral, educational course-ware, museum photography and website development. His role later transitioned to Digital Arts Manager in 2005, where he developed a digital arts education program, operated as an instructor, technology manager, and provided training opportunities for area K-12 teachers.
Curator since 2013, Paige coordinates directly with artists, collectors, donors, board members and organizational partners to plan, program, ship, install and interpret exhibitions presented in the museum’s eleven galleries. These exhibitions include but are not limited to exhibits developed directly from the museum’s Haitian/Caribbean, International Folk Art, Midwest, American Regionalism and American Decorative Arts collections. Paige organized the 2017 Haitian Art Society Conference in Waterloo, Iowa and the Midwest that featured panelist from Haiti and across the US, along with the museum’s extensive Haitian collection in eleven exhibitions, including: Birth of the Hummingbird and Other Marvels by Pascale Monnin, Uncle Fun’s Over-Stuffed Suitcases of Spectacular Haitian Art, 40 Years of Collecting, Haiti in Iowa, Veve: Spiritual Symbols of Haiti. In his short time as curator, he has mounted over 25 exhibitions focused on Haitian Art.
If he is not at the museum, he can be found dedicating his time to elevating the arts or producing his own artwork. Paige has served as a board member for the Iowa Arts Council, Experience Waterloo, and currently is a member of the Board of Directors for Youth Art Team, Limelight Arts Cedar Valley, and Friends of the University of Northern Iowa Permanent Art Collection and Gallery. In 2012 he was an artist-in-residence at Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts in the Bahamas, and continues to exhibit his artwork throughout Iowa. Paige received his Bachelors of Fine Art with a Studio Emphasis in printmaking & graphic design with honors from the University of Northern Iowa. While studying in Cedar Falls, he worked as a student art director and graphic designer for the Center for Educational Technology at the university. He also took a strong interest in Religions of the World, African Art and African Diasporic art histories in the Caribbean and Latin Americas.
R. Cecilia Knight, Grinnell College
R. Cecilia Knight is an Associate Professor in the Grinnell College Libraries who provides leadership for metadata design and creation. Cecilia has been part of the Grinnell College Libraries team since 1993 and has been a participant on the HADC project from early days. She is an artist, working primarily in ceramics; and brings a great appreciation for the creators and their contexts to this project.
Elizabeth Andrews, WCA
Elizabeth Andrews currently serves as Registrar and Curator of International Textiles at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. She corresponds with donors, appraisers, patrons, and board members to assess, document and celebrate the museum’s rapidly expanding collection. Andrews plays a key role in the museum’s efforts to maintain safe storage and physical access to the collection of approximately 6000 objects. She also develops and installs exhibitions with a focus on international textiles and works to facilitate both incoming and outgoing traveling exhibitions. Andrews received training in the Studio Art and French Language departments at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and continued her studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, NE where she completed an MA in Textile History. While studying in Nebraska, she worked to preserve and document a unique and growing collection of historic and contemporary textiles at the University’s International Quilt Study Center and Museum. Andrews applies a love for unique art objects along with respect for their makers and collectors to her work. Andrews has experience working and volunteering in museum collections around the Midwest and has shared her skills and devotion to connecting people through the arts with the Waterloo Center for the Arts community for nine years.