Honoree: Prudence Gill

RICK LIVINGSTON: My name is Rick Livingston, I am now the interim director of the Humanities Institute. I will be speaking about Prudence Gill, who is the curator of the Hopkins Hall Gallery in the Art Department at OSU. I got to know Prudence back in 2005-2006. At that point I was the associate director of what was then the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities. Part of our mandate was to get people at OSU engaged with and thinking about the public. One of the topics that was floating around at that time was the question about public art in Columbus.

So I was going around trying to ask people how do we engage on the subject of public art and a variety kept saying to me "You need to talk to the curator of the Hopkins Hall Gallery, you need to go see Prudence because Prudence really knows everything that's going on in this area." At that point I went to see her. It was very difficult to have a conversation with Prudence because there constantly were people coming in and interrupting her, or she was answering the phone and answering email and answering questions from a variety of students. But it became clear that she was listening very carefully to the things I was saying, even while carrying on these other things, and I was amazed at how much she was able to coordinate and keep control of imaginatively.

We really just had a brief conversation or two about public art and Prudence came up with an idea to have an exhibit and within a couple of months it was up on the wall. She'd sort of taken what had been a fairly inchoate idea about "people should think more about public art" and turned it into something really of great interest. So what I wanted to say about her way of working was that she had all these demands on her, all these people who were looking to her to do certain things and she was able to take those coming from different places and different states of finish and articulation and turn them into these moments of glory, bring out what was best in them in relation to what people were doing.

So as a personality, I think Prudence is somewhat shy or at least certainly self-effacing-- she's one of these people who works a lot in the background but without whom the work of the department, the work of the discipline, and the work of the university couldn't go on. I think there are a lot of women like that; I think they aren't exclusively but a majority are women who are helping on a day-to-day basis to keep the machine moving along and whose contribution is easy to overlook. Easy to overlook because it's the way sometimes clashing opinions and visions are brought together and allowed to coexist. So she's someone whose work is not principally about herself but is done in part of a sense of extended family and as a labor of love within this network of people that she knows.

Transcription by Transcribe OSU