Gottesman wins Creative Capital grant

Eric Gottesman (Faculty Fellow, Photography) has received a 2015 Creative Capital grant for The Oromaye Project. This project creates space for civic dialogue through the collective visual adaptation of a controversial Amharic novel, Baalu Girma’s Oromaye, and a transnational participatory public photography project. Using the novel as an anthropological, literary and artistic tool, Gottesman will engage people in Ethiopia and Eritrea—where Girma lived, wrote and was last seen—in public readings of his novel and in making photographs that address his legacy and the state of public expression and civic dialogue in contemporary East Africa. The participant-produced work will be exhibited in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the artist will also collect and exhibit video documentation of the process.