George Rush is an Associate Professor in the Painting and Drawing program of the Department of Art. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts.
How and when did you become involved with OPEEP?
Since reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in my 20’s, I’ve had an interest in the potential for prison abolition and reform. My colleagues in the Department of Art, Dani ReStack and Carmen Winant, taught a course for OPEEP and recommended I consider doing a class. I participated in the OPEEP training last spring and will be teaching for the first time in SP25.
What course will you be teaching in SP25, and what topics are you excited about covering with your students?
I will be teaching Drawing. I’m always excited to teach drawing, which I see as a complex subject that people often assume is either at the service of other fields, or dependent on natural ability, or simply recreational. Instead, I like to work with students to explore drawing as a set of elements, such as line, value, mark, gesture, material, surface, as well as its long history. Through investigative and direct engagement with prompts and approaches to these elements, I hope students will experience how drawing can help to expand their own individual understanding of seeing and consciousness.
What is one thing that you wish more people knew about prison abolition and transformative justice?
I am new to this field, but my hope is that people will become more understanding that the way we treat those whom we incarcerate is a reflection of our society as a whole.
What do you like to do in your free time?
What free time? Or is all of my time free? I enjoy spending time with my family and friends. I feel incredibly lucky to have a profession I love, which is being an artist, and a job that I love, which is being a professor at OSU.
Any further comments you'd like to share with readers?
Art can be an incredible way to understand oneself and the world and I hope more people engage in it and support it everywhere.
