Ruth Hayes, 2022-09-01

Item

Staff Only

Ruth Hayes Oral History Interview Transcript

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Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Evergreen Oral History Project collection contains interviews with more than one hundred retired Evergreen faculty, administrators and staff. These conversations were conducted mostly by current and emeritus faculty. From the initial year devoted to designing the College (1970-71) to the present, Evergreen has been a highly innovative academic institution, committed to pedagogy that strongly supports students’ learning. The project’s purpose has been to document a very wide range of experiences and points of view of longtime members of this community. Faculty narrators recall how they developed their practices of team-teaching, interdisciplinary studies, communities of inquiry, and other distinctive features of the curriculum. Nearly all narrators tell stories about their biographical backgrounds, how being at Evergreen affected them, and how their work contributed to students’ education. Narrators also reflect on how they and Evergreen responded to challenges and changes of politics and culture, including issues of class, gender and race, over the College’s first half century.

The Evergreen Oral History Project began in 2016. As of May 2024, 104 retirees had been interviewed by twenty-eight interviewers. Interviewers have chosen whom they wish to interview, which imbues many of these discussions with the tenor of dialogues between friends. Rather than respond to a preset list of questions, narrators discussed whatever was most memorable and interesting to them.

Special thanks go to transcriber Penny Miller, who made draft transcripts of almost all of the recorded interviews; Amanda Walker and Abby Kelso, Vice-Presidents for Advancement, who sponsored and found funding for the project; Pat Barte and Ray Janssen-Timmen, for administrative support; John Sheehy, director of Reed College’s oral history project, for guidance launching ours; Susan Fiksdal, Anthony Zaragoza, Barbara Smith, Nancy Taylor and Nancy Koppelman, each of whom interviewed many retirees; Liza Harrell-Edge and Sadie Aymond, for accessioning and managing the collection in the Library Archives; and the anonymous donor whose generosity made the project possible. Sam Schrager has been director of the project.

Dates

Creation: 2022-09-01

Biographical / Historical

Ruth Hayes (b. 1955) came to animation through drawing and printmaking, studying with Eric Martin, Mary Beams and George Griffin at Harvard in the 1970s. Moving to Seattle in 1979, she began to publish flipbooks as an alternative means of distribution and as a low-stakes strategy for playing with ideas and developing visual metaphors. In 1989, after ten years freelancing, teaching animation workshops to K-12 students through the Washington State Arts Commission Artist in Residence Program, and working for publisher The Real Comet Press, Ruth entered the Experimental Animation program at California Institute of the Arts, studying under Jules Engel, Christine Panushka, William Moritz and Thom Andersen. After earning her MFA in 1992, she taught youth in Seattle area public schools, Washington juvenile justice institutions and the California State Summer School for the Arts. From 1997 until her retirement in 2022, Ruth was a member of the faculty of The Evergreen State College where she taught the history, theory and practice of animation in broadly interdisciplinary contexts that included the natural and physical sciences, the visual arts, and cultural studies. Ruth has worked in a wide variety of animation formats including 16mm film, digital video and pre-cinema formats including flipbooks, zoetropes and praxinoscopes. A committed experimentalist, she has explored visual phenomena, engaged in historical and political critique, mined personal experience, investigated relationships between human and non-human worlds and contributed to collaborative and improvised expanded cinema performances.