Michael Mercil Awarded Harpo Foundation Grant

Michael Mercil, Associate Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, has been awarded a Harpo Foundation grant of $9,000 for The Virtual Pasture, his ongoing collaborative project with the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Social Responsibility Initiative in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware, Ohio. The funding focus of the Harpo Foundation for 2010 is “the relationship between art and site in an era defined by digital technologies,” and to support projects “grounded in the real world, that will draw upon local phenomena, activate social relationships within a community, [and] trigger memory to recall a places unique history” while “exploring the idea of place using technologies that challenge our traditional notions of what qualifies as locality.”