Category: Alumni

Arts Academy’s K Connections

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Kalamazoo College alumna Julie MehretuJulie Mehretu ’92 is one of 14 new members voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mehretu is among the most celebrated of contemporary painters in the world. She works from studios in New York City and Berlin. She has exhibited in several important group exhibitions including “Poetic Justice”, 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Whitney Biennial; São Paolo Biennial and Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); the Biennale of Sydney and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Prospect 1, New Orleans (2008); “Automatic Cities” MCA San Diego (2009); “From Picasso to Julie Mehretu,” British Museum, London (2010) and Document XIII, Kassel (2012). Solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; REDCAT, Los Angeles and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003); St Louis Art Museum (2005) and MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2006); “City Sitings,” Detroit Institute of Art and “Black City” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2007); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, (2008); “Grey Area,” Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). In 2015 Mehretu was honored with the U.S. State Department’s National Medal of Arts.

The arts academy, an honorary society with a core membership of 250 writers, artists, composers and architects, was founded in 1898, with members since ranging from Henry James and William Dean Howells to Chuck Close and Stephen Sondheim. The new inductees will be formally welcomed at a ceremony at the New York-based academy in May, where academy member Joyce Carol Oates will deliver the keynote address. Previous speakers have included Helen Keller, Robert Frost and Robert Caro. The new group of inductees features Kalamazoo College connections through its Summer Common Reading program. Among the writers the academy honored this year are Junot Diaz, Ann Patchett and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. All visited K for the SCR program, which featured their novels, respectively, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Bel Canto, and Purple Hibiscus.

Love of Excellence

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Kalamazoo College alumnus Tom Kreilick
Tom Kreilick ’60 in June 2016, when he was honored with a Citation of Merit Award

At Kalamazoo College the bridge between love and excellence is often a planned gift. Within the past two weeks, K has received two such gifts—one that supports excellence in the faculty; the other excellence among students. In both cases the donor made careful plans for the gift some twenty years ago.

Thomas Kreilick ’60 made arrangements for a charitable remainder trust during the College’s campaign, Enlightened Leadership, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Kreilick, a successful businessman who served in several top-level executive positions during his career, died in July of 2016. The trust he established will fund the Thomas K. Kreilick Chair in Economics, a testament to his commitment to the excellence of K faculty.

In 1997, the year her husband died, Virginia Harlow made plans for several charitable gift annuities that would, upon her death, enhance  a scholarship named for her husband–alumnus and emeritus board member (and board chair) I. Frank Harlow ’39, who served as a vice president and general counsel at Dow Chemical Company. Her intent was to honor his love of K by helping ensure that great students would enjoy and contribute to the excellence of the learning experience there. Virginia Harlow died recently, but her gift and its intent live through the I. Frank Harlow Scholarship.

“Planned gifts such as these are votes of confidence in the excellence of faculty and students at Kalamazoo College,” says Vice President of Advancement Al DeSimone. “Mr. Kreilick and Mrs. Harlow worked with K years ago to carefully plan these important contributions. The results will help sustain excellence at K in perpetuity.”

Persons interested in exploring planned gift options at Kalamazoo College should contact Matt Brosco, senior associate director of planned giving (Matthew.Brosco@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7288).

Alumna Spotlights K in Climate Conversation

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A 2015 Kalamazoo College alumna is helping colleges and universities find a variety of ideas for teaching students about environmentalism and climate leadership. As it turns out, her alma mater provides a good model for such ideas.

Bronte Payne has worked as a clean energy associate through Environment America in Boston since graduating from K with a degree in biology. The nonprofit organization works to bring people together to protect clean air, clean water and open spaces.

Bronte Payne Sparks Climate Conversation
Kalamazoo College alumna Bronte Payne, a clean energy associate at Environment America in Boston, will lead a climate conversation for higher-education administrators, faculty and sustainability directors at the Presidential Climate Leadership Summit in Tempe, Ariz.

Climate conversation upcoming

Payne will lead a panel discussion with higher-education representatives, including presidents, sustainability directors and faculty, this Tuesday at the Presidential Climate Leadership Summit in Tempe, Ariz. The climate conversation, she hopes, will encourage administrators to engage students in finding ways to commit their institutions to full renewable-energy use by 2050.

“It’s not so much a presentation as it is a panel to get administrators thinking outside the box,” Payne said. “We want them to see a commitment to renewable energy is an opportunity rather than something that ties their hands. We want to show opportunities for students to get involved.”

Her portion of the panel discussion will focus on how students helped K ensure the environmental “fitness” of its Fitness and Wellness Center, which opened in October after a September dedication. K’s Sustainability Advisory Committee – which included faculty, staff and students – suggested that the College hire two student LEED-equivalent auditors, training them in the design, energy and sustainability criteria that inform LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

LEED-certified buildings use less water and energy, and have less greenhouse gas emissions. Michelle Sugimoto ’17 and Ogden Wright ’16 were chosen from a dozen applicants and met with designers and builders every few weeks during construction. The actual cost of their training and stipends proved to be a small fraction of the cost of LEED certification. Of course the training and the integrity of these two physics and engineering majors ensured their rigorous conscientiousness as LEED-like certifiers. And the overall cost savings allowed the College to buy a 12-kilowatt solar panel array that offsets 5 percent of the new fitness center’s energy costs.

“I would like to show how this was an example of an amazing opportunity for students to get involved in environmental planning and how it might lead to more involvement after school,” Payne said.

Climate conversation at K was inspiring

When Payne first came to K from West Bloomfield, Mich., she planned on attending medical school one day. But plans soon changed.

“I remember talking in class about how the actual city of Kalamazoo was the site of the largest land-oil spill in the U.S.,” she said. “Learning about it was eye opening. The school itself and professors pushed me to think more creatively about what I could do, and how I could engage the community at large. I fell in love with environmental science courses.”

The discovery of her passion for environmentalism led to a Senior Individualized Project involving a Paul Clements congressional campaign, during which she learned about national environmental policy. Now, she can tell others about the exciting things done at K to address sustainability.

“A lot of the work we did at K is how I ended up working in environmentalism,” Payne said. “It’s exciting to talk about the role I have now with Environment America. I also love to tell the story about all the cool work students and administrators did because I love talking about K.”

K Alumnus Named to International Tennis Hall of Fame

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Kalamazoo College Alumnus Vic BradenRejuvenation might be a theme for this year’s tennis Australian Open. Venus and Serena Williams meet in the women’s singles championships match. And if Rafael Nadal (age 30) wins his semifinal match, he’ll face the 35-year-old (ancient by professional tennis standards) Roger Federer in the men’s championship.

There’s a K connection to this year’s Open as well. The late Vic Braden, Kalamazoo College class of 1951, is one of the 2017 recipients of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. That class was inducted during the Australian Open on January 23. Vic was a groundbreaking tennis instructor and sports scientists. Other members of the hall-of-fame class of 2017 include former world number-one ranked players Kim Clijsters and Andy Roddick, wheelchair tennis player Monique Kalkman-van den Bosch and journalist and historian Steve Flink.

A New “Lost” Adventure

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Kalamazoo College Alumna Laura Livingston-McNellisOne great outcome of the K-Plan is an aptitude for adventure–one that lasts a lifetime, with a concomitant fearlessness of failure. Take Laura Livingstone-McNelis, class of 1989. The English major, theatre arts minor, LandSea participant (who studied abroad in the United Kingdom) has taught in the public schools, owned and administered a bed & breakfast business and, for the past four years, served as the company manager for the College’s Department of Theatre Arts and Festival Playhouse Productions. Next month you can add to that résumé the title: Playwright.

Laura’s one-act play, “Lost in the Shuffle,” has been accepted by and will be performed during the Seventh Annual New Play Festival at the Epic Center in downtown Kalamazoo. Her play will stage on Saturday, February 4, at 2 p.m.

Laura cites three reasons for her adventure into playwrighting.

“I was intrigued by the New Play Festival’s call for plays and thought, ‘Why not try?'” she says. Actually, the genesis of “Lost” dates back several months before that call. As a member of the Lake Effect Writers Guild, Laura remembers a particular meeting the previous winter. “The assignment was to write something with a ‘bit of dialogue.’ I thought, ‘Here’s my chance,’ and began the first draft of ‘Lost’ in January 2016.” So the metamorphosis of “Here’s my chance!” to “Why not try?” constitutes one of three motives driving our nascent playwright.

The second had to do with the seminal event that inspired the play. Laura explains: “The play is about Alzheimer’s disease and its effect on the patient and the family, especially family caregivers. My stepfather eventually died of the disease. I recall during a visit to my mom and stepfather’s house finding in a desk a box with a harmonica. I was familiar with the harmonica because years earlier my kids had given it to my mom and inscribed on the box ‘Grandma.’ But when I saw the box that day the word ‘Grandma’ had been carefully crossed out, and in the painstaking handwriting of my stepfather was  written instead the word ‘harmonica.’

“Often you cannot see the devastation of Alzheimer’s until its late stages. Those early effects can be hidden. And yet already the disease had stolen from his mind–at least intermittently–the concept of possession. In his mind, the box did not contain a grandma; it contained a harmonica, so he fixed it.”

The hiddenness and drama of that discovery in the desk relates to the third reason Laura wrote her play. “Theatre is a community of inclusion, able to inspire empathy and be an agent for change,” she says. “Theatre brings light to issues hidden beneath our inattentiveness, and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease require more light,” she adds.

Her script development continues through the rehearsal process and in collaboration with the play’s director and actors. “I’ve done five rewrites during rehearsals,” says Laura, “and learned a great deal in the revisions.” In her play, Laura is writing movement as much as dialogue. For example, her staging of “shuffling” acquires multiple layers of meaning in this poignant work, as much poem as performance. Launching an adventure takes teamwork, and Laura is deeply grateful to the producers of the New Play Festival, Kevin Dodd and Steve Feffer, for providing the opportunity for playwrights like her to develop their work. Ed Menta has served as her mentor since her college days. “And my family and friends have enthusiastically encouraged my writing,” she adds.

“Lost” may be just the beginning of her writing career. “I have things to say,” she smiles, “and I’m no longer too intimidated to try.” She’s at work on a family book about the power of love. “It’s meant to be read by parents to children, and it focuses on the extraordinary relationship between my mom and my daughter.” The working title is “A Kiss Across the Miles.”

Who knows, though, its genre may morph to a play. As might her second work-in-progress, a memoir based on a nightly diary Laura has kept for 41 years (seriously!)…every night, with no more than a couple dozen exceptions, since she was NINE YEARS OLD.

“I don’t have a working title for the memoir,” says Laura. “It’s shaping into the arc of a young woman growing up with a set of expectations and then having to manage a life direction that diverges quite radically from those expectations.”

Add to this oeuvre a second version of “Lost.” February’s performance (version one) takes about 12 minutes. Laura will expand that to a one-act play of standard length (40 to 45 minutes). Who knows, maybe one day she’ll make it a full-length play.

In the meantime, Rave on, Laura. And thank you for the courage.

Soccer Boys, Dinosaur Men

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Jeff Wilson '91 in Niger
Jeff Wilson ’91 in Niger

When the Wilson boys were kids, it was soccer over sauropods. Neither brother, Jeff or Greg, was particularly interested in dinosaurs.

Interests evolve over time. Today Jeff (Kalamazoo College class of 1991) and Greg are paleontologists and professors at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington, respectively. Both men will be speakers at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum (KVM) 2017 summer of dinosaurs. An article on the two (“Brothers in Paleontology”) appears in the Winter 2017 issue of museON, the magazine of KVM. At K Jeff majored in biology and studied abroad in Madrid, Spain. He was an outstanding Hornet soccer player–a four year letter winner, named All American (second team) one year and NSCAA-All Mideast Team two years.

In graduate school both Jeff and Paul studied and worked with renowned paleontologist Paul Sereno (University of Chicago). Sereno will speak about the intersection of arts, history and science in paleontology at the KVM on June 3, 2017.

Jeff and Greg specialize in different areas of the field. Jeff studies the paleobiology of sauropod dinosaurs, the largest land animals every to have existed on earth. His brother focuses on the small early mammals who coexisted with the dinosaurs.

In 1999, LuxEsto published a story about Jeff, who at the time was a paleontology doctoral student at the University of Chicago. Prior to that article Jeff had joined Sereno on five dinosaur expeditions, two in the Tenere Desert of central Niger in West Africa. (See photo of Jeff on one of these expeditions) Jeff was part of the team that discovered a new species of dinosaur called Sucomimus tenerensis, a 34-foot “crocodile mimic.” Jeff’s dinosaur expeditions have taken him throughout the world. And soccer has played a role in some of these trips. Jeff calls it a “universal language” very useful in building relationships when people lack fluency in one another’s first languages.

The Wilson boys sort of flipped the more predominant chronology–not so much interested in dinosaurs as kids, but big-time interested as adults. Why do so many kids love dinosaurs? LuxEsto posed that question to Jeff in 1999. “They’re big; they’re extinct’ and they attain heights we could never attain,” he said at that time. “They are the superheroes of animal life.” And, perhaps most important, “They are the gateway to a mysterious and strange world that is lost to us.”

Good Fortune Uncovers the Latest “Unfortunate Series”

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Lemony Snicket Series
Photo by Joe Lederer/Netflix

Thank god for moms! Without them we wouldn’t have learned about the K connection to the new (or at least new for Netflix) series Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Joe Tracz ’04 is one of the writers on the new series, and his mom sent word about the release (in two days, on FRIDAY THE 13th!) to Ed Menta, the James A.B. Stone College Professor of Theatre.

Her note was not so much about her son as it was about wanting to inform current students of the infinite possibilities of a K education. “We all appreciate what the Kalamazoo College environment did/does to guide these possibilities,” wrote Deb Tracz.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is Netflix’s newest all-ages series drop, culling an eight-episode first season from the first four books in Snicket’s best-selling 1999-2006 children’s novel series. The story recounts the tragic tale of the Baudelaire orphans–Violet, Klaus, and Sunny–whose evil guardian Count Olaf will stop at nothing to get his hands on their inheritance. The siblings must outsmart Olaf at every turn, foiling his many devious plans and disguises, in order to discover clues to their parents’ mysterious death.

Neil Patrick Harris starts as the evil Count Olaf. Other actors featured in the series include Don Johnson, Patrick Warburton, Joan Cusack, Catherine O’Hara, Alfre Woodard, Usman Ally and Aaaif Mondvi. The executive producer is Emmy Award winner Barry Sonnenfeld.

Joe Tracz is a playwright, screenwriter and librettist. His work includes Poster Boy (with Craig Carnelia; Williamstown Theatre Festival); Be More Chill (with Joe Iconis; Two River Theater); and Song For a Future Generation (Williamstown, The Management). His adaptation of the first book in the Percy Jackson series, The Lightning Thief (with Rob Rokicki; Theatreworks USA) received a Lortel nomination for Outstanding Musical. His plays have been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company and Second Stage, and published in Best American Short Plays. At K Joe majored in English and studied abroad in London, England. Two of his plays, Alison Shields and Phenomenon of Decline were produced by Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College. Both received regional awards from the American College Theatre Festival.

Based on the 13-book series written under the pen name Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler), A Series of Unfortunate Events has been printed in 41 different languages, with sixty-five million copies sold as of 2015.

Congratulations, Joe. And thank you, Deb.

Showerdough and Sourdough

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Rob Dunn '97
Rob Dunn ’97

Rob Dunn ’97 is at it again; it being another citizen-science project (or two). And it (or they) are the subject of a fun and wonderful piece by Nicola Twilley, “What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead,” that appears in the December 8 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

Rob is an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University. Twilley is one of 500 participants in his lab’s Showerhead Microbiome Project. Those volunteers (in Europe and the United States) swab the gunk in their showerheads and send the samples Rob’s lab. Twilley found it a tad gross, but Rob wonders if it’s a good thing–those microorganisms in our showerheads. Turns out our bodies are full of other bodies–we depend on them. In fact, those other bodies’ cells (in or on us!) may outnumber our own, making me more other than myself. Wow! Whether or not what’s in our showerheads is good (or not so good) for us remains to be tested. First we have to see what’s in there in order to ask the right questions. Rob’s full of those; he’s a K grad. He’s also interested in the effect (for good or ill) on our “showerdough” of different water treatment processes.

Please forgive that “showerdough” malapropism; there’s a reason for it. Rob’s second current citizen-science project is all about the affect of microorganisms on sourdough and, ultimately on the taste of sourdough bread–across space and time. Some really interesting things may be going on there! Read Twilley’s article to find out. Citizen-science is nothing new to the Dunn lab. He’s done projects on belly button lint, human facial mites, insects in the kitchen, and household dust. Robs the author of three popular science books and was featured (“The Ant on Aldebaran”) in the Fall 2015 LuxEsto.

Van Gogh Mystery’s K Connection

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David Kessler '70
David Kessler ’70

PBS will premiere Van Gogh’s Ear on Wednesday, December 14, (check local listings) and, if you watch, see if you can find David Kessler ’70. The documentary is based on a recent book by Bernadette Murphy, which reveals much that was unknown or contested about the life of the famous painter. Among those mysteries: the accurate story behind the self-mutilation of his ear. What did van Gogh really do on the fateful night of December 23, 1888, in the town of Arles in southern France?

Murphy, an independent researcher living in Provence, had long been intrigued by van Gogh’s story and spent seven years piecing together a meticulous picture of his life in Arles (1888-89); person by person, house by house, exploring closely his friends and his enemies. Her detective work uncovered definitive long-lost evidence, the key document of which she found with the help of David Kessler in the University of California-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where David works.

The show, part of PBS’s Secrets of the Dead series, will reveal exactly what happened the night of December 23, who was involved and how it ultimately shaped van Gogh’s remarkable art. It provides answers to the mystery that has divided art historians for decades and reveals the artist’s roller coaster of emotions and his mental health, placing his actions in proper context for the first time. In the San Francisco Bay area, the show will be air on KQED at 10 p.m.. “I hope you get a chance to watch,” said David.  “I’m hoping I manage to stay up that late myself!”

Profile of Courage

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David FranceIn May of 2013 alumnus David France ’81 returned to Kalamazoo College’s campus to present his Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague.” David has recently written and published a book of the same title, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. On November 21, the New York Times published a rave review of the work by writer and former editor of the New Republic Andrew Sullivan.

“A question has always hung over the reaction of gay men to the plague that terrorized and decimated them in the 1980s and 1990s: Why did they not surrender?,” writes Sullivan. “David France’s remarkable book tries to answer that question.”

The answer, David articulates in his history, is a courage that not only ended a plague but also revolutionized medicine, a kind of courage as remarkable as it is rare in human history.

After graduating from K with a degree in political science, David moved to New York City to study philosophy at the New school. A mysterious disease was killing many people around him, and no one was writing about it. So he began to investigate.

“I had only one science class at K, and I had to take it twice,” he told Elaine Ezekiel in May 2013. “Suddenly I’m interviewing bench researchers trying to see if their work offered any hope.” David trained himself about the virus and about the bench and clinical procedures as well as the federal bureaucracy involved in the development of medicines. He also relied on what he learned as a news editor for The Index.

David also had experience with the need to summon courage. He and his friends had established the College’s first gay and lesbian support group. “It was a dangerous time,” he said. “We had to meet off campus. There were constant threats of violence.” For an Index article that interviewed friends about what it was like to be gay at K David had to use pseudonyms to protect the sources.

Sullivan suggests the combination of David’s qualities, contacts, breadth of expertise and curiosity make him the indispensable author of this profile of extraordinarily persistent courage.

“It took years to gain traction, but the courage of the resistance turned out, over time, to be as persistent as the virus itself,” wrote Sullivan. “And the merit of this book is that it shows how none of this was inevitable, how it took specific, flawed individuals, of vastly different backgrounds, to help bring this plague to an end in a decade and a half.”

Sullivan lauds David’s passion and fairness.”You wonder, of course, how many of those deaths could have been avoided. France makes a strong case for the staggering insouciance of government at all levels, especially in the early years. He’s brutal about bureaucratic incompetence and political cowardice. And yet he is also fair enough to show that the science of disabling a dazzlingly resilient retrovirus was fiendishly difficult and that by 1982, 42.6 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 26.8 percent of gay men in New York had already been infected. The community’s own adoption of safer sex — and the vital gains activists made in pushing for cures and treatments for various opportunistic infections — made the most difference in preventing further catastrophe. But in the end, science takes time. Some made it over the line before the war ended. Many never made it. Some of us live lives still haunted by that distinction.”

Photo of David France by Ken Scheles