Weitzman’s Ani Liu on motherhood, microplastics, and her multimedia works on display
Weitzman professor of fine arts Ani Liu explores the physiological and emotional transformations in motherhood through her multimedia artworks while teaching students how to conduct fine arts research.
2 min. read
When she joined the faculty of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design in the fall of 2021, Ani Liu was creating multimedia works that examined the effects that emerging technologies have on people’s lives and communities. Liu, the Carrafiell Assistant Professor (Emerging Design) in the Department of Fine Arts, is teaching Creative Research, a course that breaks down fine arts research into modules including observation, documentation, the scientific gaze, archives, and data visualization.
Ani Liu is the Carrafiell Assistant Professor (Emerging Design) at the Weitzman School.
She considers how artists conduct research and the question of research itself. “What is research? What is knowledge? How is knowledge produced?” she asks. “How is the knowledge that artists and designers create different from, say, what a physicist creates, or a mathematician, economist, or historian? Part of this course is trying to answer these questions through exploring research from different angles.”
Motherhood features predominantly in her art, which is currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. “At some point I realized parenthood is my reality now, and I needed to make it work. Being a little bit nerdy, I couldn’t help but also intellectualize motherhood, and research it like any other topic,” Liu says.
“In the last few years, I have also been conducting research and making work around microplastics. In this day and age, we all have microplastics in our body, in our blood, in our brain, literally every part of our bodies,” she say. “A few years ago, I read a paper about how researchers in Italy had found microplastics in breast milk, which shocked me. And I thought, would I be able to reproduce their findings in my own body? For the last year and a half, I’ve been distilling microplastics out of my breast milk, with a goal of making a sculptural installation about the experience.”
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.
