Yorke is a fine arts major but also has a strong interest in anthropology. He completed an "honors thesis in painting [for which he] created a series of paintings and prints" that he describes as self-portraits. The work was on display in Fayerweather Hall until Monday.
Yorke explained his reasons for applying for the fellowship, which he will use to study in South Africa and Australia. "I applied for the Watson Fellowship because I wanted to get away from institutional life for awhile, but more importantly, because I wanted to pursue my interest in art and anthropology independently," he said. "I will use the fellowship to study the politics of art and racial reconciliation projects in South Africa, remembering apartheid, and in Australia, remembering the 'lost generation' of aboriginals."
Yorke credits Professor of Anthropology Deborah Gewertz and Professor of History Sean Redding with helping him to "think through important considerations regarding the shape of the project."
Both Yorke's thesis and plan for the fellowship are extensions of a project for which the College granted him a fellowship this past summer. He returned home to Topeka, Kan. to explore the irony of the city's history with segregation. Yorke noted that Topeka was the site for Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down segregation in public schools, but that its educational system is still largely segregated.
"After a year, I will return to U.S. I will go to Philadelphia, where I plan to attend the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania," said Yorke.
Grigorenko, too, has detailed plans for her use of the fellowship. "In August, I will be heading to the former Soviet republics of eastern Europe for twelve months. I will be going to Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Armenia and Kazakhstan to do a photography project about people's experiences as part of the former Soviet Union," she said. "The unifying theme is the experience of non-Russians in a predominantly Russian regime-the area's individual identities, cultures, and even languages were often oppressed or even lost. Now, these newly-independent countries are trying to reestablish themselves."
Grigorenko will photograph the transition-in-progress and conduct interviews in Russian to complement the photos. She hopes to combine the pictures and interviews into a book.
According to the College press release, Grigorenko posed a number of questions in her proposal that she wanted to address: "What does it mean to emerge from the ashes of a dead superpower? How does one deal with a past that simultaneously inspires terror, but also, in light of the area's current economic situations, nostalgia?"
Grigorenko said that she was very excited about the Watson Fellowship because she felt she needed time off from institutional learning. "The Watson appealed to me because I took a year off before starting college-I joined a ballet company in Paris-and knew how important it was to take time off from studying to re-coup and figure out the next steps," she said.
After her year-long fellowship, Grigorenko plans to "get a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography, then go into photojournalism...and maybe be a professor," she said.
Grigorenko is majoring in fine arts and French and is "currently working on a thesis in photography, which is opening in the gallery in Fayerweather this Thursday."
Watson Fellowships award up to 60 college graduates from the nation's top liberal arts colleges with the opportunity to travel abroad and participate in independent study.