Picker exhibitions challenge stereotypes
Two dramatically different spring exhibitions in the Picker Art Gallery each dealt with the common theme of challenging conventional stereotypes.
    In Of Someone and Something, associate art and art history professor Linn Underhill displayed selections from seven major photographic series that she has created since the early 1990s. The images were taken in a studio, with several different props and the artist as her own model. The retrospective included images from Cosmic Dominatrix, 2000-2001, in which Underhill said the idea was “to think about how it would look if women were in charge of the world, and if they behaved in a way comparable to the way men behave in power.” This alternative world includes an image of Underhill as a leather-clad goddess hovering on a black cloud in a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s fresco.


German photographer Christina Zück explores the possibilities for understanding and makes her presence felt by the viewer of her photographs. Her exhibition Defence Phase II Karachi appeared at the Picker Art Gallery from April through July. (photo by Christina Zück)

    “[This exhibition was] informed by feminist theory and gender theory, and much of it has to do with trying to come up with new ways of representing women and thinking about gender as a masquerade,” explained Underhill. Her hope, she said, was that Colgate students would walk away “think[ing] about gender roles as being malleable.”
    Just opposite Underhill’s exhibition was German photographer Christina Zück’s Defence Phase II Karachi, a series of photographs taken with an analog medium-format camera, in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2008.
    Curator Joachim Homann explained that the images “are an investigation of public life in a city in Pakistan that is so often in the news because of the difficult political situation, with an officially pro-American government that is getting all these different demands from the people there.”
    Homann has known Zück and admired her work since they were in graduate school in Germany together. “She really wants to allow visitors to zoom in on individual images, and in those images, you will find details that might teach you something about the reality,” he said.
    One such photograph depicts two women on a street corner wearing hijabs. One woman is turning away, the other, staring into the camera. Homann pointed out that on closer examination, the woman who is staring is carrying a notebook with diagrams of DNA on the outside, suggesting she is in a medical profession of some kind.
    “The camera is a way for Christina to communicate with people,” said Homann. “She is always very interested in how the subjects react to her presence. She’s also bringing her own cultural values into this context, and that’s reflected in the images as well. This precludes her from giving an objective narrative. It is more an open-ended conversation that she hopes to provoke.”
— Kate Preziosi ’10

Shapes for Hamilton
Just as each person in Hamilton is unique, so, too, are the almost 2,000 printed shapes that artist-in-residence Allan McCollum distributed to town residents in April. The New York City–based artist chose Hamilton as the location of his newest project, meant to both represent individualism and unite the community.
    In 2005, McCollum designed a system through Adobe Illustrator to produce enough two-dimensional shapes that a different shape could be created for each person on the planet. The system also keeps track of the hand-drawn computer images to ensure that no two will ever be alike and that no two people will ever share the same shape.



Can I have my shape, please? A Hamilton resident picks up her own individual “shape,” created by artist Allan McCollum, from art professor DeWitt Godfrey, who invited McCollum to bring his Shapes Project to town. McCollum can produce more than enough unique two-dimensional shapes for every person on the planet. Before the shapes were given out, they were displayed in Little Hall’s Clifford Gallery. (photos by Andrew Daddio)

    At the opening reception on March 10, members of the Hamilton and Colgate communities saw their shapes for the first time on a computer in the gallery, recorded the section of the gallery in which it was located, and then found their 5" by 7" printed shapes. The shapes were later distributed to community members at various locations including Hamilton Central School, the Palace Theater, the Poolville Community Center, and Colgate’s quad. Each shape was signed by McCollum and provided free of charge.
    Art and art history professor DeWitt Godfrey coordinated the project with McCollum, the 2010 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Distinguished Artist in Residence in the Department of Art and Art History, through the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts.
    A team of students and Colgate staff members contributed to the Shapes for Hamilton project with community research, distribution planning, and setting up the exhibition. “Each of his creations is unique, yet they remain remarkably similar to one another, like us humans,” explained Shapes staff member Gabe Rosen ’12, a studio art major.
    Although McCollum has used the shapes system in other projects, this was the first time he distributed individual shapes to each member of a community. Shapes can now be seen around town, hanging in the windows of homes, in professors’ offices, and even in school lockers at Hamilton Elementary.

Open mic

Finn McCool,* by Arianne Templeton ’10

When I choose to trench a river,
I drag my little toe through
dirt, rocks, squiggling worms —
grime under my smallest toe
would bury lesser men
(Girth! Wealth! Patriotism!)
in glorious progress.
I’ve been molding Earth since
before Ireland was serpentless.
Forests snap their trunks above the roots
(count the rings long past 1776)
to make way for squares of cement —
limestone, shale, iron ore, sand —
I’ve mixed them all with whiskey after
the longest days of burying cities.

Tara, being razed to the ground
every year by that hideous monster
for the passing of 23 seasons,
was free when I tamed the destruction —
he was my lapdog until he limped
out of decrepitude to nothing.
Some white-beard highwayman shouted
when I de-clawed the dragon:
“new life springs from under piles of ash,
and fire cleans the dead leaves from the grass.
We gloried in the green.”
I ground his soft skull to make my stew
heartier.

Many are the Giant’s Causeways
you should thank me for.
From the first causeway,
with rounded pillars and friendliness
that invites tourists to clamber on it
that I drummed up
while skipping rocks from Antrim beach,
to my latest sky stairway in Dubai.
You’ve heard it was built by men?
Time was, you’d have known it was Finn
and your human knees would’ve quaked.
But even though you’ve forgotten I can
twist California off like the end of a ripe bean,
I’ll keep bulldozing mushroom clouds into myself.

*According to Irish folklore, Finn McCool was a giant who created the landscape of Ireland by walking on it. First published in the 2010 Colgate Portfolio.

Two receive Schupf/Lorey Senior Art Prize
Seniors Kelly Boyle and Emily Rawdon received the 2010 Schupf/Lorey Senior Art Prize, which, since 2007, has been awarded for outstanding work as identified by Paul Schupf ’58 and Robert McVaugh, professor of art and art history.
    Boyle, a native of New Hampshire, was an art and art history major and an Islamic studies minor. Her ensemble of four strikingly inventive video pieces, Story of Some Kind, explores personal and media imagery in the context of American discomfort with ambiguity.
    Rawdon, daughter of Dick Rawdon ’65, was a double major in art and art history and theater from Kentucky. Her photographic installation Usual Flow-voids of the Circle of Willis are Preserved explores the psychic mingling of euphoria and fear associated with epileptic seizures. In August, she will enter the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
    “Professor McVaugh and I worked long and hard to choose these two first-class art works. Owing to the overall high quality of this year’s senior art exhibition, several other entries might have been chosen,” said Schupf, who expressed special thanks to Evan C. Lorey ’10 for his gift that allowed Colgate to award an additional prize this year.
    The awards were given at the senior awards convocation in Memorial Chapel on Saturday, May 15. See a full list of award recipients at www.colgate.edu.

Poetry that matters
Her voice was characteristically scratchy and barely louder than a whisper. Yet, true to form, Louise Glück, the Pulitzer Prize–winning lyric poet, held her audience spellbound for 45 minutes as she read nine poems from her latest collection, A Village Life, at the end of March.

Pulitzer Prize-winning lyric poet Louise Glück reads from her latest collection,
A Village Life. (photo by Brooke Ousterhout ’10)
    Glück received the Pulitzer in 1993 for The Wild Iris, her sixth of 11 books of poems. Early in her career, she also authored Proofs & Theories, a collection of essays on poetry that received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction. Presently, she teaches at Yale University.
    After decades of writing with a minimalist’s precision, Glück changed course for the poems in her latest collection, using language that she characterized as “more relaxed, even gawky.” Nonetheless, the poems she read included the “punches to the gut” described in her introduction by English professor Peter Balakian. Earlier in the day, she spoke to his Post-WWII American Poetry class.
    Scott Reu ’13, who reads his poetry at open mics and is a member of the student group Poetically Minded, came to the reading eager to ask a question that, he said, led his father to burn reams of his own early works. Reu wanted to know: “How can writers, especially younger ones, distance themselves enough from personal experience to create poetry that really matters?” The question was especially apropos, not only for the only American poet who has twice served as judge for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, but for one whose work addresses such universal issues of the human condition as being young, coming of age, and love affairs beginning or ending.
    “There’s a difference between the circumstantial and the intensely personal,” Glück said. “A dramatic breakup with a lover can make a great poem, but experience has to undergo a transformation. It can’t simply be decanted onto the page.”
    Reu was encouraged. “Her response set my mind to work,” he said. “I am astonished that a single answer to a single question could have such an impact on the way I think about poetry.”

Running with Scissors memoirist raises big issues
Augusten Burroughs, who chronicled his unusual childhood in his 2002 memoir Running with Scissors, delivered a candid keynote address at Colgate’s fifth annual Big Gay Weekend in April. His messages ranged from developing inner strength (“What you need is not more confidence. You need to subtract whatever it is that prevents confidence, and that is caring too much about what other people think”), to the inevitability of legalized gay marriage (“There will be a day when you will hold today’s discrimination in the palm of your hand, like a charming memento”).


Author Augusten Burroughs meets with students at Merrill House before delivering his public lecture. (photo by Andrew Daddio)

    While Burroughs considered himself to be an unlikely special guest — because, he said, he “never had a moment where he ‘came out’ to anything” — he gave members and supporters of Colgate’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ) community a lot to talk about.
    Burroughs’s now-famous childhood provided fodder for his first memoir, which became a film of the same name. When his mother was no longer able to care for him, he was sent to live with her psychiatrist and an extended family of long-term patients, many who were psychotic or schizophrenic. “In that environment, my sexuality was not an issue,” he said. “I didn’t ever think about being gay. It was like being right-handed. Why? I don’t know. I just am.”
    The theme of the weekend was “Be Yourself.” About that, Burroughs said: “I wish I could take forensic evidence out of my brain and stick it in yours so you would know that that’s all you have to be. That’s everything you have to be.”
    But things aren’t always that simple, said Aleksander Sklyar ’10. “It makes me happy to know that there are individuals out there, like Augusten, who did not have to go through the pain and difficulty of ‘coming out.’ However, for many in the LGTBQ community, me included, being ourselves is anything but simple; the process to self-acceptance and self-assertion was anything but an easy one for me.”

New music champion
The Society for New Music (SNM), co-founded by Neva Pilgrim, Colgate’s voice teacher and artist-in-residence, was a 2010 recipient of the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction.
    Pilgrim and several SNM board members attended the awards ceremony in New York City in May. “It was a who’s who of American music — people from BMI [Broadcast Music, Inc.], people from ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers], famous composers, other performers — and to be recognized in that company was a thrill,” she said.
    Pilgrim founded the SNM with musicians Ralph D’Mello and Greg Levin in 1971 when all three moved to the Syracuse region from big cities and believed the area needed a stronger new music presence. The society’s board of volunteers now presents about 25 concerts a year, including a winter series in Syracuse and a month-long summer arts festival called Cazenovia Counterpoint. In addition, the group funds composers’ involvement in inner-city schools, and Pilgrim tapes a weekly music program on WCNY-FM.
    The American Music Center, which is dedicated to building a national community of artists, organizations, and audiences creating, performing, and enjoying new American music,
described the SNM as “a driving cultural force for contemporary music in the United States.” SNM was one of four recipients this year, joining the ranks of past honorees including Leonard Bernstein and Dizzy Gillespie.


Entropy Barn 1-29, Entropy House 1-4, and Entropy Shed 1-3, digital prints by Bryan Kretschmer ’10. “These works are an exploration of the built space that surrounds us in daily life but often goes unnoticed,” Kretschmer explained in his artist’s statement. “Each of the structures was built for a specific purpose or function. The silhouettes serve to show that, although they are purpose-built, they have an underlying aesthetic beauty that is often overlooked. In addition, the silhouettes serve to record a specific point in each of the buildings’ ongoing process of entropy.” (photo by Warren Wheeler)

Click here to see more of this year’s senior art projects.

Courage, heart, and brains: Oz Project helps children break down barriers
In April, friends, family members, and supporters of The Oz Project filled the Palace Theater to watch an inspiring production of The Wizard of Oz. On stage, children with and without special needs performed their hearts out in the culmination of an eight-week theater program created by Colgate students and faculty members.
    The program’s goal is to foster an inclusive social learning and growing environment for children with a wide range of needs, including autism-spectrum and related disorders.


The Oz Project, an eight-week theater program created by Colgate students and faculty members, brought together children with and without special needs for a performance of The Wizard of Oz. (photo by Andrew Daddio)

    Alexandra Snell ’10 said the idea for the project emerged from conversations she had with fellow seniors Lindsey Simpson, Lauren Kaplan, Samantha Horn, and Hannah Sandler, and with psychology professor Regina Conti and educational studies professor Sheila Clonan. Throughout the semester, this core group of students and faculty met regularly to develop and critique curricula and activities that were used with the children, as well as to monitor the engagement and growth of the children involved.
    As the project grew — attracting elementary students from Hamilton and other communities — so, too, did the team supporting it. More than a dozen Colgate students, along with community volunteers, took part.
    Workshops, set to the themes of The Wizard of Oz, facilitated development of social skills such as making
new friends in uncomfortable situations, like Dorothy did with the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion in the unfamiliar land of Oz. Participants learned new ways to deal with many challenges, from feeling left out to responding to a bully. “By using drama games, music, and performance to teach different social skills, we were able to concentrate both on personal growth and commitment to a larger group of people,” said Simpson. “It was really inspiring to see how the kids excelled individually, but also grew as a group who supported each other and celebrated one another’s accomplishments,” she added.
    Children also learned to use sign language during the song “Over the Rainbow,” thanks to community volunteer Bethany Sackel, who also worked with volunteer Delaine Dacko to choreograph and facilitate creative movement within the energetic group.
    All the children, be they energetic or quiet, were encouraged to express and recognize their differences.
    “The beauty of The Oz Project was most apparent in the day-to-day interactions among the kids. They could look beyond the obvious differences between them and focus on what they shared,” said Kaplan.
    This sense of teamwork was evident in the final production, in which close to 30 children, comfortable with each other and their differences, sang and danced like stars. The production was a big hit with the audience, but the true success was found within each and every participant on stage, who overcame the challenges of social situations and grew to embrace new friendships.
    Although its cardinal leaders all graduated in May, it is hoped that the project that Snell said touched all aspects of the Hamilton community will be reprised for years to come.
— Eileen O’Brien ’10