Alumna helped make Cheekwood's international playhouses a success
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Lipscomb alumna heads to NYU, and brings artistic expertise back home at Cheekwood
If your child rushed to play in the international playhouses displayed at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden in Nashville this summer, or if you enjoyed the light and sound installation around the Steve Tobin sculptures on the grounds or even one of Cheekwood’s First Thursday Nights in the Garden programs, then you have benefitted from the hard work of one of Lipscomb’s visual arts alumni.
Meagan Rust (’08), a Nashville native, came to Lipscomb majoring in pre-architecture, but thanks to the encouragement of Lipscomb faculty, she left well-prepared to pursue the career that truly spoke to her heart.
“This position is exactly what I wanted to do,” said Rust, public programs manager at Cheekwood. “Developing events to help people engage in art work and to understand different viewpoints in works of art. Even if it’s just having music in the gardens, everything I do is helping people engage with the gardens or the exhibition and to see it in a different way. Education is at the root of all the programs at Cheekwood.”
Rust’s journey to her current position began with strong relationships with Lipscomb’s art faculty, including Rocky Horton and Cliff Tierney, who encouraged her to step out in faith and pursue art more seriously. Through their mentorship, her work was chosen as one of several to represent Lipscomb at the Future/Now: Midstate Art Majors exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and she obtained an internship at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London.
“Had I gone to a bigger school, I may not have had those opportunities,” Rust said.
After graduating from Lipscomb, she was accepted into the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, where she studied her own customized blend of art theory, art history, anthropology and museum studies to explore how society, media and the general public interpret art. At Lipscomb she had taken a similar road, majoring in studio art but unofficially minoring in art history through several independent studies with faculty.
“Because my Lipscomb education was so interdisciplinary, I was really drawn to that NYU program,” Rust said. “Working with the professors to explore what I was really interested in, made Gallatin the right place for me in 2013.”
For her thesis at NYU, Rust wrote about how the public talked in digital spaces about a Kara Walker exhibition in a Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York. The 75-foot-long sugar sculpture made a statement about slavery and the history of the sugar trade, but it didn’t get interpreted that way by many posting about it online, Rust said.
Upon receiving her master’s in September 2015, Rust went right at work at Cheekwood where she now develops educational materials to supplement the garden’s art exhibits (like this summer’s “International Playhouses”), helps coordinate artist lectures, workshops and camps and helps plan festivals such as Cheekwood in Bloom, Cheekwood Harvest and the Family Night Out series.
Rust says that the lessons she learned at Lipscomb still resonate as she helps to shape Nashville’s cultural scene today.
“Being encouraged by the faculty to explore my interests and not hold back in those times when my ideas weren’t fleshed out, that’s when the faculty really pushed me to take it one step further,” she said. “They are really invested in students and in helping them develop their craft. That expectation to do more, and to think outside the box, has translated to grad school and to my career now.”