Art Brilliance Challenge Education Creativity Complexity

Published in the CSUF Daily Titan newspaper on March 12.

A metaphor comparing fish in water to humans and the collective blindness of our reality perfectly explains why Karyl Ketchum creates.

"We're the fish and ideology is the water," Ketchum, a part-time lecturer in the Women's Studies Department said. "It's impossible for the fish to analyze or even imagine water, because it's wholly immersed. The thing that being creative does may be our only way out of the fishpond, maybe it's our only way to get a critical distance and actually see the water, or see the ideology and begin to subvert it, poke at it, turn it upside down or even give it a name."

When Ketchum talks about academics and art, wisdom radiates from her hazel eyes, but when she's forced to recall memories from a childhood riddled with change, the brilliance in her eyes is replaced with an innocent stare of a little girl once lost.

Ketchum, 44, will become a full-time teacher in the fall and will head classes like Gender and Technoculure, Intercultural Women's Studies and Gender and Globalization.

She attributes her success to a series of events that led her into the arms of her adopted grandmother Francis.

"My family background is fairly complicated," Ketchum said. "I was born in Cleveland, Ohio to my birth mom who, at the time, was 16 years old and then I was put up for adoption."

Ketchum lived in foster care for six months before her adopted family arrived to take her to a new home in Elyria, Ohio.

"All of a sudden I have a grandmother who is one of the first women to get a Master's degree in literature," she said. "[She] ended up quoting Emily Dickinson to me and all the great women poets, along with many of the great male poets. [She] really instilled in me a love of art in all its forms."

These are aspects of life she said would have never crossed her path had she stayed with her birth family.

"I was born into a family that was incredibly poor that lived in southern Ohio, really an area that we would call Appalachia," Ketchum said. " [It had] the kind of poverty that most people can't even imagine. Most people associate this kind of poverty with third world spaces."

Her adopted father James, a retired journalist, also instilled factors within Ketchum's life, that helped shape her professionally.

She developed a love for language and learned through the power of creative thought she could create change.

"He had a really profound influence on my life," Ketchum said. "Both of them [her father and grandmother] are humanists. Both of them believe, believed in the case of my grandmother, in social justice, art and in language. I trace a lot of what I'm doing back to both of them."

The family moved to San Diego when Ketchum was 15 when her father became the managing editor of the San Diego Evening Tribune.

Ketchum graduated from Poway High School in 1982.

Although she considers her high school years to be quite boring, she did frequent the beach and develop a serious painting habit.

In the years following graduation she married her high school sweetheart, gave birth to her two daughters Britt and Hail, divorced her high school sweetheart and then re-married.

In 1994, after her grandmother passed away, they moved to Northern California.

"I was accepted to U.C. Davis," she said.

Ketchum received her Bachelors degree in art studio and women and gender studies in 1999.

She earned her Master's Degree in cultural studies in 2001 and soon after, she received her doctorate in the same discipline.

She began teaching at U.C. Davis when she entered graduate school.

"She's a terrific addition to our faculty," Renae Bredin, the program director for women's studies said. "[Ketchum] is an amazing artist and has an amazing theoretical background in terms of cultural studies theory, feminist theory, post modernist theory, and that's a rare combination."

Student feedback like "amazing" and "extremely compelling" funnel back to Bredin regarding Ketchum's teaching.

"[Students] feel like they come out of classes having learned more than they imagined they would have learned," Bredin said. "She has a depth of understanding that transcends boundaries. She's not only an artist and she's not only a theorist, she's both at the same time, which in terms of the kind of work she does, the research she does and the combination between that and her art, is very rare - very unusual."

This is Ketchum's third semester at Cal State Fullerton.

"The Women's Studies Department at Cal State Fullerton actually decided they wanted to include a cultural studies emphasis in their program," Ketchum said. "So what that means for me, is that my background in cultural studies and my passion for art making, in all its different forms, is really valued here. That's why this is a really perfect place for me to be."

Now that Ketchum has obtained full-time status, she will move from her cubicle into an office, but more importantly, she will continue to participate in an ongoing conversation within cultural studies and its relationship to feminist theory.

She also wants to see more men in the classroom.

Radio-TV-Film major Robert Regalado can't imagine taking a women's studies class only because his major restricts extra time from his schedule.

"If I had extra time I would consider it," Regalado said in a recent interview.

"I think there's a real problem with thinking that women's studies is all about male bashing," Ketchum said. "I think that still lingers, that idea and it's so outdated. It's not at all what it's about. It's like the fish thing. It's all of us getting that critical distance."

Ketchum said she wants her students to grasp the notion that they can make sense of the world by critically deconstructing and reassembling it in a way that makes sense so they can navigate it mindfully and not blindly.

Also, she said she wants students to get a sense of who they are in the world and understand the responsibilities of being educated.

"To be at the university is a tremendous privilege," Ketchum said. "That privilege, as all privilege does, confers a great deal of responsibility. Not just the responsibility to go out and get a job and make money, but a responsibility to share that knowledge and a responsibility to live mindfully."