Welcome to I On the Arts: European Edition!

Greetings!

I'm Deborah Krieger, a 2016 graduate of Swarthmore College in Art History, with minors in Film and Media Studies and German Studies. My main blog, which I've been running for the past six years, is I On the Arts. I am a freelance writer and aspiring curator interested in contemporary art, new media, visual studies, and social activism, and hope to go to graduate school and eventually work in an art museum or art nonprofit.

This blog will chronicle my experiences as a Fulbright grantee in Vienna, Austria, from September 2016 to July 2017. In this capacity, I will be taking classes at the University of Vienna, teaching English in a local high school, and researching visual artists in the Sinti/Roma and Jewish communities in order to learn how artists in these communities express their identities as minorities and/or historically oppressed peoples through their practice. I plan to examine the artworks themselves, as well as conduct interviews with the artists, centering on their choice of media, specific subject matter, and forms of self-expression. How do their works address their own experiences as members of the Roma/Sinti or Jewish communities of Vienna? How do they engage with the histories of their ethnicities in their practice? How does the current population and relative level of assimilation of the two sub-cultures affect the art they make? 

Unlike my main blog, which is reserved for professional and academic writing, this blog will be much more informal, containing more quotidian observations and stories about my daily life in Vienna. If anyone reading this wants to support me and my research and express how much they love and miss me all the way back home, I am linking to my Amazon wish list, which will consist of electronic editions of books pertinent to my research, both in Vienna and for my graduate preparations (since foreign travel plus large tomes equals expensive bags at the airport!).

I would like to thank all of my professors, letter writers, advisers, editors, readers, supporters, friends, and, of course, my family, for making my Fulbright adventure happen!