According to the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, its mission is “to offer college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel outside of the United States in order to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community.” To apply, McRae submitted a 10-page proposal and letters of recommendation and had interviews with both the Amherst selection committee and representatives from the Watson Foundation.
McRae will travel to Germany, Bangladesh, India, the Czech Republic, Australia, the Ukraine and Belarus as part of her project, “The Characters of Ruin.” She will explore abandoned buildings around the world through drawing and writing, “everywhere from desolate mining towns to industrial districts.” Her goal is “to emerge from the year with a clearer sense of how to express — verbally, visually, emotionally, aesthetically, critically — such a moving subject.”
“I’d been interested in such places for a long time — boat graveyards, rickety barns, anything else that looked neglected — but my drawings of them generally came across as sensational or mawkish, or otherwise heavy-handed,” she explained. “I thought I could easily, and happily, spend a year trying to do better.”
She chose these countries “because they displayed aspects of abandonment that I wanted to study; for instance, I thought it would be interesting and hard to try to draw ruins in a USSR satellite nation. They’re often boxes of prefabricated concrete, so they have very little going for them aesthetically.” Although she has had very limited experience outside of the United States, she said, “I speak some of the languages to limited degrees; I have taken some German classes here at Amherst, and will try to have enough Hindi and Bengali to get by.”
McRae is an English major and will go to graduate school for English literature. She has always been interested in drawing and was home-schooled before Amherst, which gave her a large amount of free time to explore her interests like painting and reading. She plans to work in graphite and watercolors on her trip for reasons of portability.
She explained how her project relates to her English major, “When I began taking English classes at Amherst … I was unfamiliar with the notion of just studying how an artist expresses himself. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could spend my time reading just for tones and styles. I found professors’ discussions as to whether a poem was — for instance — ‘heavy-handed’ or ‘affecting’ to be fascinating. So that [is] somewhat relevant to this Watson project: abandoned buildings can be very forlorn, and depicting them will be a balancing act. I hope I’ll end up with a better ear for tones because of it.”
Expressing her gratitude for the fellowship, McRae said, “It’s a wonderful opportunity that I didn’t expect to have. I was simply startled at first, but became increasingly excited after calling home. My parents were at least as incredulous as they were pleased, and they brought up the topic of paperwork and other logistical matters, which made everything seem a bit more real.”