Curb Center

Svalbard, Norway, a cluster of islands north of the Arctic Circle, is rich with paradox. A former international whaling base and subsequent site of extractive coal mining, Svalbard is now home to the Global Seed Vault, which stores more than one million seed duplicates to safeguard the world’s food supply. Described as a “geopolitical unicorn,” Svalbard is, at once, an open haven for artists and researchers seeking to generate new knowledge and climate interventions by learning from its landscapes, as well as a target for international meddling because of its prime access to satellite data from above and rare earth minerals below. Site of both extraction and regeneration, attracting both a spirit of collaborative inquiry and pursuits of global dominance, Svalbard’s paradoxical singularity inspired Vanderbilt faculty Jana Harper, Lutz Koepnick and Jonathan Rattner to embark on a three-week research trip in summer 2025 to witness its rapidly changing landscapes and experiment with artistic methods to address the effects of planetary overheating.   Read More

After a semester spent exploring the potential future of art as a tool for democracy, The Curb Center is now looking back: at lineage, at family and at collective memory. Read More

Vanderbilt University and England’s University of Liverpool have announced the inaugural recipients of a new joint seed grant program, which supports faculty teams pursuing innovative projects designed to grow into larger collaborations and external funding.  Read More

HAGOOD finds visual artist Lanecia Rouse collaborating with her sister, poet Ciona Rouse, to explore their matrilineal line, in search of the softness and steel of the long line of women that carried them into the world. Read More

The Curb Scholars program at The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy is taking on five new undergraduate students this semester. This program, inspired by the life and career of songwriter and entertainment figure Mike Curb, rewards students working in a variety of artistic spaces. Read More

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt has awarded nearly $80,000 over the past academic year to undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff pursuing community-facing arts-based projects. This is triple the impact of previous iterations of this program, spurred by new application procedures, outreach and project development methods. Creative Inquiry Grants, named for the Curb Center’s goal of elevating art as a mode of inquiry, award up to $2,500 per applicant and the use of Curb Center space and resources to the stewards of a variety of important projects. Read More

A university requires more than professors, administrators and students to run properly. The preparation of food, maintenance and cleaning of facilities, landscaping and groundskeeping work, and thousands of other essential tasks build the foundation of every place of learning. Even so, conversations between these two worlds can be rare, and when they do occur, might be scaffolded by hierarchical ideas about work. One program, sponsored by the Curb Center in collaboration with Forklift Danceworks, seeks to change this.  Read More

The Curb Center at Vanderbilt and Belmont University are sponsoring composer and musician Hannibal Lokumbe’s visit to Nashville this April. He will be speaking with courses, giving a talk alongside his biographer Lauren Coyle Rosen, and working with the Vanderbilt 16 on their performance of two movements of his piece “In The Spirit of Being.”  Read More

Baum will be visiting Vanderbilt on April 3–4, visiting courses and giving a public talk about her new memoir as a part of The Curb Center’s spring semester programming theme: Art and Democracy. Read More

As part of the Curb Center’s spring programming theme “Art and Democracy,” painter Robert Shetterly will be visiting Vanderbilt courses and giving a talk with senior lecturer Jack Crawford during the week of March 17. Read More

Another exciting weekend of performances exploring emotional responses to climate change will be the final event this semester sponsored by the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative. Experience mascots come to life, a revival of a beloved 1990s cartoon, a very tense focus group and some old-fashioned school spirit in these two plays developed in conversation with the Vanderbilt community.   Read More

Commissioned by the Eco-Grief Performance Project, a collaborative effort of the Science and Media Grand Challenge, the Theatre Department and the Curb Center, two plays are being performed Sept. 26-19; these works are expressions of complex emotions brought on by living in a changing climate. Read More

Acid mine drainage. Digitally printed legal documents. Drone photographs. Core samples. Appalachian bituminous coal. The artists represented in Extraction/Interaction—the Curb Center’s fall exhibition—use these and other materials to create bodies of work that galvanize responses and resistance to the climate crisis. Featuring the work of Will Wilson, Eliza Evans and John Sabraw, Extraction/Interaction considers how climate grief can transform artistic practice into a mechanism for positive environmental impact.   Read More

Available to graduate students across disciplines, the Curb Public Scholars Program provides a two-year grant of $2,500 for public-facing creative projects, while the Creative Inquiry Grant Program awards various levels of funding ranging from $500 to $2,500 and is open to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff. Read More

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy has selected three incoming first-year students and two rising sophomore students for the Curb Scholars Program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership. Read More

Imagining Wholeness is a culminating showcase of works of expressive art created by participants in the Express Yourself writing workshops at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and in visual art workshops hosted collaboratively by the Curb Center and Gilda’s Club Middle Tennessee.   Read More

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy is pleased to announce Art as Protest, the culminating showcase of creative projects by this year’s cohort of Curb Scholars. On Monday, April 1, 7–9:30 p.m. at the Sarratt Student Center Cinema and Gallery, Curb Scholars will present work spanning visual art, dance, film, fiber arts and creative writing. Each piece offers a unique interpretation of “art as protest”—the theme they have been investigating throughout this academic year. Read More

Heglar will offer a public lecture at Vanderbilt at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 20, to kick off the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong interdisciplinary project that will use art to illustrate the emotions evoked by living through climate change.   Read More

The exhibition, The Glory of the Day: LeXander Bryant Meets Florence B. Price, Bryant turned his attention to another kind of community: the communities of musicians and audiences that took shape around the performance of classical music composed by Florence Price. Read More

The Curb Center is pleased to announce the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong collaborative project that will use art as a tool to investigate the complex set of emotions—sorrow, guilt, terror, complicity and a range of others—that come to mind as we contemplate our changing climate and witness its effects on earthly life. By engaging artists working in a range of disciplines—theater, creative writing and the visual arts—the Curb Center aims to highlight creative work that confronts the emotional dimensions of climate change with the hope that true emotional reckoning might serve as an avenue to candid dialogue, innovation and lasting impact. Read More