arts

Why Neibuhr? Why Now?

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Students Work with Former K Visiting Professor Jeremy SabellaSeveral students from Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim‘s videography classes had the opportunity to interview Jeremy Sabella, author of the companion book  of the new documentary, “An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story.”

The K students asked the questions and did all of the sound and camera work required for the interview. They focused on the reasons the filmmakers chose to tell Neibuhr’s story. Their interview will be featured on the film’s website in coming weeks. The documentary film is currently screening in select locations this spring and will air on PBS later this year. It features interviews with many internationally recognized historians and scholars, including former Kalamazoo College professor Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Neibuhr was one of America’s most prominent 20th-century theologians and political thinkers, noted for his unrelenting advocacy for justice and for the incisive clarity of his thinking and writing. Presidents from Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter have credited his impact on their thinking, as well as John McCain, countless historians, theologians, political thinkers, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who cited Niebuhr in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

Niebuhr’s books, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–43) and The Irony of American History (1952), continue to influence theological and political thinking. His insights into human nature and its relationship to political movements and social justice propelled him to speak openly, and often critically, to an America consumed by moral certainty. The documentary includes interviews with many prominent

The K “Sabella Interview” production crew included (l-r): Christine Cho, Kalkidan Amare, Mackenzie Landman, author Jeremy Sabella, Madeline Lauver, Ximena Davis and Blair Garner. Sabella is married to Sarah Koenig, visiting assistant professor in K’s religion department.

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.

MLK and “Our Moment”

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Danez Smith
Danez Smith

What does the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.–his achievements and his ideas–mean for the present moment, what K students’ might term “our moment?” How should his spirit apply–in imagination, in word, in action–to their now and their future?

These are questions posed by and to students by and to the College’s Intercultural Center. The answers to those questions (both continually developing) will inform Kalamazoo College’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on January 16, 2017.

As in the past, K’s activities will be part of various city events on that day. The 2017 MLK celebration Kalamazoo-wide theme is “The Transformative Power of a Unified Dream.”

Director of Intercultural Student Life (ISL) Natalia Carvalho-Pinto and students worked together to shape a celebration that creates opportunities to “consider what transformative power and resistance mean for new generations,” says Carvalho-Pinto. The ISL theme for this year’s K events is “Transformative Power and Resistance in the New Century: What Does ‘The Dream’ Look like Today?”

The day will feature four events, beginning with a convocation address by poet Danez Smith (10:50 a.m. in Stetson Chapel). The title of his talk is the same as the theme for K’s events, and it is free and open to the public.

Smith is the award-winning author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013), and he is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks, among others.

His poems focus on intersecting matters of race, class, sexuality, faith and social justice, and it is characterized by a power, rhythm and imagery that invites and demands a reimagining of the world.

Smith then will lead a poetry workshop (12:30 p.m. Hicks Banquet Room, lunch provided) that is open to K students only. The workshop–titled “Future Tense: Poetry as Blueprint”–will explore the use of poetry to imagine realistic utopias in the not so distant future, and how those futures can allow us to reverse engineer the steps we would need to take to make them. “By looking at speculative worlds of some of today’s young poets of color,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “the workshop will inspire us toward change, possibility, action, dreaming and building the worlds we deserve.”

At 4 p.m. (gathering at Red Square) K students, faculty and staff will join their counterparts from Western Michigan University to walk to Martin Luther King Jr. Park in downtown Kalamazoo. Transportation back to K’s campus will be provided.

The afternoon’s poetry workshop will culminate at 6:30 p.m. with a reading in the Intercultural Center (Hicks). Students will share relevant writings and reflections–their own and that of others, some perhaps written that day during the workshop–about the day’s theme and celebrations. “The potential power of this event is extraordinary,” says Carvalho-Pinto. “We did this at Ferris [State University], and it was one of my favorite events.” The reading is open to the entire Kalamazoo College community, as is the film that will follow at 7:30 p.m. ISL has tentatively scheduled a screening of The Rosa Parks Story (starring Angela Bassett).

“We’re very excited about this year’s events,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “especially their potential to get us thinking about how what we celebrate on this day should infuse our present and future. And I’m particularly thrilled that Danez Smith will be a part.”

***
if you press your ear to the dirt
you can hear it hum, not like it’s filled

with beetles & other low gods
but like a mouth rot with gospel

& other glories. listen to the dirt
crescendo a boy back.

come. celebrate. this
is everyday. every day

holy. everyday high
holiday. everyday new

year. every year, days get longer.
time clogged with boys. the boys

O the boys. they still come
in droves. the old world

keeps choking them. our new one
can’t stop spitting them out.

-from “summer, somewhere,” by Danez Smith, Poetry, January 2016

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!”

Problematic Art and Agonistic Space

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Evergood Mural, Kalamazoo CollegeAssociate Professor of Art History Christine Hahn published an article, “Maintaining Problematic Art: A Case Study of Philip Evergood’s The Bridge of Life (1942) at Kalamazoo College.” The article was published in Public Art Dialogue (6:1, 116-130) on May 27, 2016.

The piece is particularly interesting for any alumni familiar with the mural (see above) in Old Welles Hall. It covers the history of controversy inspired by the work since it’s unveiling (1942), including specific calls (in 1966 and in 2010) for some redress for iconography deemed offensive to and by some individuals and groups. Detailing the call-and-response to the criticism voiced in 2010, Christina ultimately suggests “that problematic public art has the unique potential to produce positive social change by staying in place.”

The article reveals much about K’s history, including Evergood’s time on campus as an artist and a teacher as well as his bona fides as an ardent social radical. Christina also introduces (from Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air) a concept of “freedom of listening.” In his book Hyde cites Benjamin Franklin’s creation of a lecture hall where “people were free to give lectures on whatever they wanted.” In that space (Christina quotes Hyde): “Individual speakers present singular views; individual listeners entertain plurality….The hall was thus built to serve the eighteenth-century idea of replacing the partial self with a plural or public self, one who is host to many voices, even those otherwise at odds with the singular being you thought you were when you first walked in the door….If we take free listening to be the true end of free speech, then freedom itself takes on a different aspect…intelligence arises in the common world, where many voices can be heard; it belongs to collectivity, not privacy, and is available especially to those who can master the difficult art of plural listening.”

Christina invokes Hyde’s notion of “agonistic listening amongst equals in conflict” (a notion that is at the heart of the academy and a direct contrast to “antagonism, where opponents try to silence or destroy the other”) to describe College and student responses to the controversy implicit and explicit in the work, particularly the responses that took place or were considered between 2010 and 2015. She writes: “The building Benjamin Franklin built that embraced such agonistic pluralism eventually became the Philadelphia Academy, which in turn became the University of Pennsylvania. This transformation of space, built to house agonistic conflict among equals, is a particularly fitting symbol of how physical space can potentially create a space for inquiry, conflict and debate. This type of site is necessary and important. Indeed, as Lewis Hyde argues, it is agonistic spaces such as these that are the foundations of democracy.”

The presence of the mural, Christina continues, has provided the intellectual and emotive space for agonistic listening, “has allowed these twenty-first-century conversations on race, class dynamics and elite educations to take place….[M]aintaining problematic public art in an agonistic space helps keep our understanding of the past and our vision of the future firmly in view.” A fascinating article, well worth the time to read it.

Public Lecture Explores Historic Treatment of Pueblo People

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Nora Naranjo MorseNora Naranjo Morse will deliver the annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Kalamazoo College on Tuesday, October 11, at 8 p.m. in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room. The event is free and open to the public. Morse Morse is a sculptor, writer, and producer of video films that look at the continuing social changes within Pueblo Indian culture.  Her talk, “Numbe Wahgeh,” focuses on the historical treatment of the Pueblo people and history retold by indigenous peoples.

An artist best known for her work with clay and organic materials, she has been trained in the Pueblo clay work tradition of the Southwest.  Her installation exhibits and large-scale public art speak to environmental, cultural, and social practice issues.  Beyond New Mexico, her work can be seen at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

She studied at the College of Santa Fe, where she received her B.A. degree in 1980, and is the recipient of an honorary degree from Skidmore College.  In 2014 Naranjo Morse was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist fellowship.  She is the author of two books:  a poetry collection, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay, and a children’s book, Kaa Povi.

Morse will spend two days on K’s campus. In addition to her public lecture she will visit four classes and meet with various faculty and students.

Hornet (and Bee) Artists Feted

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Jim Turner
Jim Turner

The Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo has awarded Kalamazoo College Professor of Music Jim Turner its 2016 Award for Arts Leadership-Educator, and the Arts Council awarded Kalamazoo College Alumnus Ladislav Hanka ’75 a Community Medal of Arts.

Turner, who directs the Bach Festival Choir, will be honored as “a recognized leader in arts and education community” whose work has a strong impact on the greater Kalamazoo community through art and creates positive and productive relationships in the community far beyond Kalamazoo College.

Hanka, whose etchings, prints, and drawings illustrate the intricacies and mystery of nature, is honored as a leading artist with a significant body of creative activity, who has received local and/or national acclaim, and has deeply affected the community through art. The CMA award encompasses all art forms–visual, musical, theatrical, literary, performing, multi-Hornet and Bee Artistrymedia, architecture or design. And, in Hanka’s case, collaborations between man and bee. His most recent ArtPrize entry, “Great Wall of Bees: Intelligence of the Beehive,” featured live bees that buzzed and danced and chewed over three rows of Hanka’s etchings—-detailed images of toads, salmon, trees, insects, birds. The bees built honeycomb along the curves of his lines in seeming collaboration that is at times startling.

Turner and Hanka are part of a group that will receive awards on Sunday, July 17, at the Sunday Concerts in the Park in Bronson Park. The event begins at 4 p.m. with the award presentation at 4:30 p.m. The concert and presentation ceremony are free and open to the public. A reception will follow at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. The reception is free but reservations would be appreciated. Reservations can be made by calling the Arts Council at 269.342.5059.

STORIES Wins at North by Midwest

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EDITOR’S NOTE (May 24): “The Stories They Tell” won the Kalamazoo Film Society’s “Palm d’Mitten” Award for best local film. And the documentary won second place for best feature film at this weekend’s NxMW Film Festival in Kalamazoo! Pictured (below) at the award ceremony are (l-r): Zac Clark ’14 (Production Assistant), Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan (Co-Authorship Project Creator), Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim (Director), Matt Hamel (Photographer/Animator), Michelle Hamel (Videographer) and Dhera Strauss (Videographer). CONGRATULATIONS!

Film Creators of 'The Stories They Tell'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(April 26) “The Stories They Tell,” a documentary film by Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim is an official selection of the 2016 North by Midwest Film Festival and will be shown in the Wellspring Dance Theater at the Epic Center (359 S. Kalamazoo Mall) on May 21 at 3:30 p.m.  In this charming film, Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan partners every Kalamazoo College student in her “Developmental Psychology” class with a child at Woodward Elementary School to write children’s books together. The project’s concept has been expanded and continued through a partnership with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. As the student (college and primary school) create these whimsical, amusing and surprising stories, the connections they make with each other have a lasting impact, not only in literacy and learning, but in understanding their pasts and futures.  The film also screened at the Lake Erie Arts and Film Festival in Sandusky, Ohio, the East Lansing Film Festival in Michigan, and Reading FilmFEST in Reading, Pennsylvania. The tickets for the showing at the Wellspring Dance Theater are FREE but registration is required.

Intercultural Conference and Hip Hop Collective

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Book club flyerKalamazoo College’s Intercultural Student Life group presents the “Intercultural Conference and Hip Hop Collective,” a two-day event on April 29 and 30 featuring guest speakers, the Black History 101 Mobile Museum, panels, discussions and a performance featuring five Hip Hop artists. The event’s venues include the Hicks Banquet Hall and Hicks Center.

Among the event’s goals are building relationships and learning about the intercultural ethos of K. “My student advisory board and I decided to focus our first event on Hip Hop because Hip Hop has a way to cross over cultural boundaries and speak to multiple groups,” said Natalia Carvalho-Pinto, director for intercultural student life.

The museum exhibit is open both days of the conference and is a powerful experience. “Khalid El-Hakim, the museum’s curator, travels with about 1,000 exhibit pieces,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “ranging from the slavery era through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement up to Hip Hop and the modern era.” El-Hakim will deliver the keynote address Saturday, talking about the museum and the importance on continuity in social justice work.

The Conference also features Ernie Pannicioli, a photographer who has documented Hip Hop from its birth through modern days and photographed every celebrity in Hip Hop,” according to Carvalho-Pinto. She adds, “He published a book titled Who Shot Ya, and he speaks about ’the other side of Hip Hop,’ the movement building and struggles that few discuss.” Carvalho-Pinto also is excited about the presence of OLMECA at the conference. “He is a very unique artist,” she says, “and his keynote address will focus on his experiences in the Zapatista movement and Hip Hop in Latin America.”

A Hip Hop panel occurs Saturday afternoon with Miz Korona, Mu, Supa Emcee and Kenny Muhammed THE HUMAN ORCHESTRA. Five Hip Hop artists will perform Saturday night for the “Zoo After Dark” activity.

“Our speakers, panelists and performers are really great people,” says Carvalho-Pinto. I would love to see as many students, staff and faculty as possible attend some or all the conference. My hope is that the event opens more opportunities for dialogue and serves as a place of empowerment for our students of color on campus.”

Blind Date

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Kalamazoo College Professor Di SeussDI SEUSS NAMED one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry! A first in the history of Kalamazoo College to have one of her own so honored. Di is an alumna (class of 1978) and Di is our writer-in-residence and Di is an assistant professor of English. “Di is” is the roiling wellspring and outflow of her remarkable books, most particularly Four-Legged Girl, which the Pulitzer jurors describe as “A richly improvisational poetry collection that leads readers through a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes.”

I like to think of each Di’s books as a glimpse (part dark, part light, and both motion) of a journey into “Di Seuss named,” a good name for a vast, strange and absolutely singular land at the margins of the world.

Graywolf Press commissioned Di to write an essay on Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged girl and Di’s muse for part of her recent collection. You can see Myrtle–or a portion of her–on the cover of Di’s book. Di’s essay, writes her publisher, is “something dark, weird, and beautiful.” It calls forth the poet Emily Dickinson and (at least for me, albeit less explicitly) another hero, another “Di,” the photographer Diane Arbus.

“When born with two vaginas, what is a girl to do?” writes Di Seuss in her essay, “Wear white, collect plants by moonlight and construct an herbarium, become a recluse, write poems? Or take the other route: join the circus, become, as Myrtle did at thirteen, a live exhibit. Without the economic privilege a poetic genius freak like Dickinson was born into, the Four-Legged Girl went for the paycheck. She dressed all four of her appendages in striped socks and black boots and pulled up her skirt to reveal the four knots of her knees. She wore fringe and silk and a hair bow. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead in spit curls with whatever they used for styling gel in those days. Oh yeah. spit.”Four Legged Girl Book Cover

Arbus once wrote, “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot….There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

Later in her remarkable essay about her remarkable book’s namesake, Di Seuss writes, “I believe my association with her predecessor paved the way. My first love was the taxidermied two-headed lamb in my little hometown museum. He was John the Baptist to Myrtle’s Jesus. In his two soft heads and four sweet eyes I discovered the vulnerability and genius of marginality, the burden and the gift of originality….I love and lust after Myrtle Corbin because she is queered and empowered by her idiosyncrasy…dizzied by the realization of her absolute singularity. I experience my own body as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance, and a condition. My legs are exponential….

“Our whole guise,” echoes Arbus, “is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you….I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic…. Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”

Di’s poems (and prose) take me to what I’ve never seen before.