Alumni in the Arts

Transcription

Alumni in the Arts

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Alumni in the Arts
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B U L L E T I N
Spring 2003
Volume 73 Number 3
Bulletin Staff
Director of Development
Chip Spencer ’56
Editor
Julie Reiff
Acting Editor
Linda Beyus
Alumni Notes
Anne Gahl
Jackie Maloney
Design
Good Design
www.goodgraphics.com
Proofreaders
Nina Maynard
Bob Campbell ’76
Bulletin Advisory Board
Todd Gipstein ’70
Peter Kilborn ’57
Nancy Novogrod P’98, ’01
Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
Josh Quittner ’75
Peter Frew ’75, ex officio
Julie Reiff, ex officio
Bonnie Welch, ex officio
Mail letters to:
Linda Beyus, Acting Editor
Taft Bulletin
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A.
[email protected]
Send alumni news to:
Anne Gahl
Alumni Office
The Taft School
[email protected]
Deadlines for Alumni Notes:
Summer–May 30
Fall–August 30
Winter–November 15
Spring–February 15
Send address corrections to:
Sally Membrino
Alumni Records
The Taft School
[email protected]
1-860-945-7777
www.TaftAlumni.com
This magazine is printed on
recycled paper.
Around the Pond
FEATURES
A SPECIAL ISSUE ON
ALUMNI IN THE ARTS
The Stories and
Work of Eight
Alumni Artists
Sport
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The Taft Bulletin is published quarterly, in February,
May, August, and November, by The Taft School,
110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT 06795-2100,
and is distributed free of charge to alumni, parents,
grandparents, and friends of the school.
The Arts at Taft Today 38
By Bruce Fifer
E-Mail Us!
Send your latest news, address change, birth announcement, or letter to the editor via e-mail. Our address is
[email protected]. We continue to accept
your communiqués by fax machine (860-945-7756), telephone (860-945-7777), or U.S. Mail (110 Woodbury Road,
Watertown, CT 06795-2100). So let’s hear from you!
Taft on the Web:
News? Stocks? Entertainment? Weather? Catch up
with old friends or make new ones, get a job and
more!—all at the Taft Alumni Community online. Visit
us at www.TaftAlumni.com.
DEPARTMENTS
Alumni Spotlight
18
Patsy Odden Girls’ Hockey Tournament,
squash team in Scotland, and winter season
highlights
By Steve Palmer
Deane G. Keller ’58
Fred X. Brownstein ’64
Langdon C. Quin III ’66
Alan R. Smith ’67
Susan Condie Lamb ’77
Rachel Bullock ’84
Jonathan Selkowitz ’84
Palmer West ’92
From the Editor
13
Potter Gallery photography, Kilbourne
artists, student art awards, operatic duo,
Mothers’ Day Weekend, Dr. Henry Lee
4
5
What happened at this afternoon's game?—Visit us at
www.TaftSports.com for the latest Big Red coverage.
For other campus news and events, including
admissions information, visit our main site at
www.TaftSchool.org, with improved calendar
features and Around the Pond stories.
Books on Lafayette and living abroad,
multigenerational hockey players, young
alumni network, PBS series on freedom, band
Mile 35, Hartford gathering, iceboat racing
䉳 Mark Potter ’48 teaching students
VICKERS & BEECHLER
On the Cover
“Eastern Mountains,” 2001, woodcut on Japanese paper, 17 in. x 34 in. Copyright Sabra Field.
Sabra Field is an accomplished printmaker based in Vermont, known for her woodblock
prints. Field was Taft’s first full-time female faculty member, 1963–1968, and significantly
expanded Taft’s offerings in the arts. Visit Sabra Field’s web site at www.sabrafield.com to
view her impressive catalog of prints.
䉴 “Self Portrait,” Sabra Field
FROM
THE
EDITOR
From the Editor
The season of spring often means
newness, especially here in the formerlyfrozen Northeast, as we see green
landscapes again. Former faculty member Sabra Field’s exquisite woodcut
“Eastern Mountains” on this issue’s cover
captures this well. Sabra was Taft’s first
female teacher and taught art from 1963–
1968 so we are especially grateful to her
for use of this piece.
A sampling of graduates who later
became professional visual artists makes
up the Alumni in the Arts feature section of this issue. When we researched
how many alumni were working artists
of all kinds, visual, performing, we were
awestruck. The challenge was to select
eight of you knowing that meant we’d
be unable to include the large number of
other talented alumni artists who have
passed through this school.
Taft Dance Ensemble, 1991
4
Taft Bulletin Spring 2003
Many to whom we spoke did not
catch the “art bug” until later in their
careers. Some never took art classes here,
yet others were inspired by teachers like
Mark Potter, Sabra Field, and all the other
painting, music, dance, photography,
theater, and pottery teachers at Taft who
have encouraged their students. Read
Bruce Fifer’s piece “The Arts at Taft Today” and you’ll see how vibrant a place
for the arts this is as you walk the hallways through his words.
As I worked with faculty, writers, and
alumni—artists and other gifted professionals—I was impressed by the
willingness to go above and beyond, helping share both stories and images with the
wider Taft community. How lucky I have
been to work with you on this and past
issues, meeting you on the telephone, by
e-mail, and best of all, in person.
—Linda Beyus
Acting Editor
We welcome Letters to the Editor relating to the
content of the magazine. Letters may be edited
for length, clarity, and content, and are published
at the editor’s discretion. Send correspondence to:
Linda Beyus, Acting Editor • Taft Bulletin
110 Woodbury Road
or to [email protected]
Correction In a photo on page 31 of the winter issue, David Brooks ’60 is
on the right. Our apologies.
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Alumni
S P OT L I G H T
A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad
Edited by Don George ’71 and Anthony Sattin
LONELY PLANET PUBLICATIONS, 2002
Not everyone dreams of being a travel writer, but there
are plenty who do. Don
George’s career has gravitated
around the art of wandering
in more than 60 countries.
His new book, with co-editor
Anthony Sattin, is a collection
of essays on the experience
of living in a foreign country—a book you just want
to immerse in, viewing a
lunar eclipse on a remote
island in the Philippines or
living on a boat moored
on the Seine. Included are
original and selected essays
by some of the finest names
in contemporary travel writing, such as Isabel Allende,
Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Peter
Mayle, Paul Theroux, and
Frances Mayes.
Distilled from Jan Morris’s words,
the book’s title perfectly names a familiar longing or fantasy—“I know well the
delectable thrill of moving into a new
house somewhere altogether else, in
somebody else’s country, where the climate is different, the food is different,
the light is different, [and]
where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t
seem to apply.”
Don, too, has been seduced by living somewhere
else for a good chunk of his
life. When asked what parts
of the world draw him most,
he states, “I haven’t found a
place I don’t like.” His travels started way before he had
an inkling that he’d end up
being a travel writer. Don
meandered into travel writing on his way to being a
poet and teaching creative
writing courses.
After graduating from
Princeton, he, like other tortured undergrads, wondered
what he was going to do with
his life. Awarded a teaching
fellowship at Athens College—“an exclusive prepschool-cum-junior college in
an Athenian suburb”—Don
headed for Greece. En route
to his first teaching job, he
spent the summer in Paris, and later, in
his free time, visited Italy, Turkey, and
Egypt. He fell in love with living in a
foreign country.
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ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
When his teaching stint was up, that
question about what to do with his life
resurfaced. Don says, “After one long
Athenian night listening to my soul, I
decided to reject the professor I had been
programmed to become and to embrace
the poet I was just learning to love: I decided to follow the writing route.”
Don entered an intensive master’s
creative writing program at Hollins College in Virginia. “I lived in a log cabin
on a lake,” Don says, “and wrote a collection of poems, a few desultory
chapters of a novel, and a description of
an impromptu expedition I and a traveling companion had made up Mt
Kilimanjaro the summer after my stay
in Greece.” That story was the linchpin
to his career to come.
He applied for another teaching fellowship in Tokyo. Before leaving for
Japan, he said, holding back laughter,
that he wrote to some major magazines,
naively asking if they wanted him to be
their Japan correspondent. (“Thank you
very much,” they told him, “we already
have someone covering this.”) To his astonishment, Mademoiselle magazine
asked to meet with him to talk about
writing for them, so he gave them his
college story of climbing Kilimanjaro as
a writing sample.
“When I arrived at my campus
apartment in a suburb of Tokyo, a telegram was waiting for me,” Don said. “It
was from Mademoiselle and said: ‘Dear
Don: A hole opened up in our November issue and we put your Kilimanjaro
story in it. Hope you don’t mind.’”
Lafayette
By Harlow Giles Unger ’49
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC., AUGUST 2002
Why is Harlow Unger so
taken with the “forgotten
Founding Fathers” as he calls
them? They have become the
subjects of his research for the
last three books, and possibly
his next. Heroes like the
young Lafayette, Unger
points out, have disappeared
from American consciousness. Having grown up
surrounded by stories of historical and modern-day
American heroes, Unger
wanted to look at our origins
as a nation and where we
came from by writing about
the lives of early American
heroes. The result is three
books on patriots’ lives: Noah
Webster (1998), John Hancock
(2000), and now Lafayette.
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He chose Lafayette as a
subject for this impressive
biography because, next to
Washington, Lafayette was
the most important figure
in the American Revolution. Lafayette is a gripping
account of the heroic
French knight who, at age
19, played a key role in
saving American liberty
and independence. Unger
said he enjoys speaking
to youngsters “about the
19-year-old hero who
abandoned a life of incomparable luxury in France
to serve with Washington
(and 19-year-old Alexander
Hamilton) for American
liberty and independence.”
It is hard to conceive of
this young marquis leaving
his comfortable life of nobility to become a freedom
fighter for America’s inde pendence from Great
Britain. Harder still to realize that Lafayette did it for
his belief in the principles
ALUMNI
The irony was that Don had written only one travel article, ever, and it
was going to be published in a national
magazine, yet he had reams of poetry that
had mostly garnered rejection slips.
Don worked steadily at freelance
writing after Japan and seemed to have the
skill of putting himself in the right place
at the right time. His travel articles were
published in a number of well-known
magazines, and he subsequently landed a
position at the San Francisco Examiner
where he was their travel editor for 15 years.
Don writes in his Lonely Planet
online column, “So, to all those people
who dream of having my job, my advice
is to pull away from your keyboard, take
out a map and follow your wanderlust
to wherever it takes you. Heed that small,
still voice inside and pursue your passion.
In my experience, that’s what will take
you exactly where you want to be.”
Before working for Lonely Planet
Publications, Don founded and edited
Salon.com’s award-winning travel site,
Wanderlust. He has edited two antholo-
of freedom, not for monetary rewards
or prestige. After pushing the American revolution forward and cementing
America’s ties to its ally, France, he
returned to his native country to
command during the French Revolution which turned tragic for him
and his family.
“It seems to me,” Unger says,
“that Lafayette (and the other heroes
of the American Revolution) represent the embodiment of the Taft
motto…I’ve had enormously rewarding experiences talking to high school
kids [all over the U.S.]. Many, I found,
had focused so intently on shrinking
opportunities in high-income occupations that they had failed to consider
the expanding (and rewarding) opportunities in areas that serve their
communities, states, or nation.”
Unger did half of his massive research for this biography in France and
half here in the U.S. He lives in both
New York City and Paris. [As we went
to press for this issue, he was recovering
from a broken leg sustained while skiing in Europe, but intrepidly still doing
his book tour and lectures.]
Even though an enormous amount
of writing has been done on Lafayette,
Unger was undaunted, choosing to see
what he, as a journalist turned biographer, would learn from this young
patriot’s own writings. Unger writes, “An
early (1930) bibliography listing all the
works written by and about Lafayette
at that time runs more than 225 pages.
There is no need for guesswork—only
legwork, objectivity, and a willingness
to let Lafayette tell his own story and
let those who knew him speak for themselves—without cynical interruptions
and specious interpretations.”
“Private schools are the last bastion
of where history is being taught,” Unger
states. He affirms that history as part of
one’s education is vital and, regrettably,
is getting pushed aside in many public
schools. Current events, which he wrote
about as a journalist, become history a
minute later, Unger observes.
After graduating from Taft, Unger
received his B.A. at Yale and master of
arts in humanities from California State
University. He has served as editor, foreign correspondent, and American affairs
analyst with the New York Herald Tribune
SPOTLIGHT
gies of travel writing and is frequently
interviewed on radio and TV as a travel
expert. Don is also a visiting lecturer at
the University of California, Berkeley,
Graduate School of Journalism and lives
in the San Francisco Bay Area with his
wife and two children.
Ed. note: The labyrinth-like twists and turns
that landed Don George in this field are
chronicled in his article called “How I Became a Travel Writer” on Lonely Planet’s
web site: www.lonelyplanet.com.
Overseas News Service, the Times and
Sunday Times of London, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Unger
is also a former associate professor of
English and journalism and has authored
eight books on education. He is a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres,
founded by Balzac to combat censorship
and propagate freedom of expression in
literature and the press.
Unger will speak to the Taft community in the fall of 2003.
“Harlow Unger has cornered the
market on muses to emerge as
America’s most readable historian.
His new biography of the marquis
de Lafayette combines a thoroughgoing account of the age of
revolution, a probing psychological
study of a complex man, and a literary style that goes down like cream.
A worthy successor to his splendid
biography of Noah Webster.”
—Florence King
Contributing Editor
National Review
7
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Don’t Hang Up Those Skates!
Day Brigham ’44 and teammates of the Rusty Blades at the 2003 Senior Olympic Hockey Championships in Buffalo
Day Brigham ’44 advises that he has no
intention of hanging up his hockey skates,
particularly as he has found the fun of
competing with players his own age. He
reports playing in mid-January with a
Central Massachusetts team, the Rusty
Blades, in the 2003 Senior Olympic
Hockey Championships in Buffalo, N.Y.,
sponsored by the National Senior Games
Association. There were 16 teams in the
Producing
Historical
Documentaries
8
tournament, divided by age among the
over 50s, over 60s and over 70s. By winning three of their first four games Day’s
over 70s team reached the Gold Medal
game in which they faced the Gray
Wolves, a team from northern New York.
The teams were evenly matched and the
game became increasingly competitive and
tense with the score tied 1–1 late in the
third period. “Neither team wanted it to
end in a tie and come down to a shootout contest on the goalies,” Day said, “but
indeed such a result was averted. A right
winger for the Rusty Blades came up with
the puck in the right lane in the forward
zone, crossed over towards the net, got
tangled up with the defensemen, managed
to get a shot off and then poked in his
own rebound for the winning goal! Guess
who?” Brigham quipped.
Dyllan McGee ’89 served as coordinating producer for a 16-part series called
Freedom: A History of Us that aired on
PBS this spring. Kunhardt Productions, where Dyllan has been producing
since 1993, worked on the impressive
series for about five years. The overall
theme of this series, freedom, is based
on the award-winning history books for
children by Joy Hakim.
Dyllan started at Kunhardt as an
intern straight out of college, knowing
she was “hooked on documentaries,” she
says. She was a theater major at Trinity
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Scoring Ten
Taft’s ability to develop and send off skilled
hockey players is no secret. But the phenomenon of four alumni from one class
all becoming captains of their college
hockey teams is amazing. Jol Everett,
former faculty member and avid hockey
fan, sent the Bulletin the following letter:
“Now that I am retired on the Cape
and have plenty of time to read the
Boston Globe and to go on to various
college hockey web sites, I have been
happy to discover that four members
of the Class of 1999 are now captains
of their men’s Division I hockey
teams: Brad D’Arco at Colgate, Evan
Nielsen at Notre Dame (he was captain last year as well), John Longo at
the Univ. of Vermont, and Denis
Nam at Yale. This is quite an accomplishment for one class of men’s
hockey players. If there are other
hockey captains at college from the
Class of 1999, men or women, I
apologize for leaving them out.”
An unplanned reunion came about
through competition on the ice January
31 at Yale University when Yale played
against the Univ. of Vermont (UVM).
College in Hartford, Conn. but knew
she didn’t want to be an actress after
graduation in 1993. The closest she got
to filmmaking while at Taft was as editor of her class’s video yearbook. “I was
a disaster of a history student at Taft,”
she laughs, “and I’ve now done a documentary on history,” working for a
company that specializes in this. Dyllan
serves as a trustee of Taft, is married and
lives in Ossining, N.Y. with her husband
Mark and one-year-old son Max.
The educational outreach component for the “Freedom” series is major,
Kneeling, left to right, Ryan Trowbridge ’01 and Ben Driver ’02. Standing, left to right,
Travis Russell, Jaime Sifers ’02, Christian Jensen ’01, Tim Plant ’01, John Longo ’99 (UVM
captain) and Denis Nam ’99 (Yale captain). ANN RUEGG
Eight talented Taft alumni played in that
game in which Yale defeated UVM 6–2.
The talent of Taft’s former hockey team
members is ongoing proof that Coach
Mike Maher has superior skills at honing
young hockey players who go on to maximize their abilities.
“I am extremely proud of all my
former players who have moved on to
play college hockey,” Coach Maher commented. “That so many of Taft’s players
have become captains of their college
teams is a credit to the School and the
lessons Taft teaches about leadership.”
Dyllan notes. The series is the largest
web site that PBS has, with PBS considered the largest “dot org” in the
world, due to a huge amount of traffic
for its plethora of information. The web
site section for the series notes,
obstacles to American freedom—
the ‘unfreedoms’ that have littered
our national story, and in some cases
have called its very integrity into
question. But despite all the mistakes
and all the tragic setbacks, there is
an overarching positive message
to this series. This is a history of
the United States as the unfolding,
inspiring story of human liberties
aspired to and won.”
“Freedom is what has drawn to
America countless human beings
from around the world; it is what
generations of men and women have
lived and died for; it is, in a profound
sense, our nation’s highest calling.
This is also the story of the chief
The series’ web site can be found at
www.pbs.org/wnet/freedom
9
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
In Brief
Band Reunites
Tom Davis ’92 is part of a band
called Mile 35 made up of four Taft
alumni that reunited in New York
City this winter. Tom wrote, “I
thought this would be a fun update
for the next Bulletin because our
band is composed of four former
Tafties: Molly Webb ’92, Ben
Randol ’93, and Jeremy Randol ’95
and me. Since we played together
while attending Taft almost ten
years ago, we decided to reunite and
kicked off a mini East Coast tour
with our latest CD inviting many
of our lost Taft friends this past
January. The guests were a span of
my entire four years at Taft and it
was a great time seeing faces come
out of the woodwork and venture
into the nightlife of New York.” The
band’s web site is www.mile35.com
䉲 The band Mile 35, comprised of Ben
Randol ’93, Molly Webb ’92, Tom
Davis ’92, and Jeremy Randol ’95,
strum into action at the Lion’s Den in
New York City this winter.
10
Seated, left to right, Dave Kirkpatrick ’89 and Christina Rogers ’85; Standing, left to right,
Dick Williams ’89 and Brooks Gregory ’89. Not in photo, Bob Cramer ’78 and Matt Allen ’88
Young Alumni Network…
the Start of Something New!
You’re going to graduate from college and
you pick a city where you think you want
to live and work. Then it hits you—you
have no idea what to do next! You have
lots of questions, but aren’t sure whom
to ask. You have to find a job, but you’re
not sure what you want to do. You need
to rent an apartment but you don’t know
where. It’s a dilemma that greets many
young men and women every year.
Six alumni in Atlanta, Ga. have offered to help by forming the Young
Alumni Network of Atlanta. Bob Cramer
’78 is the CEO of A.D.A.M., a computer
health service company. Christina
Braisted Rogers ’85 is a partner at Alston
& Bird, specializing in real estate. Matt
Allen ’88 is a partner at Goetz Allen &
Zahler, concentrating on personal injury
work. Brooks Gregory ’89 is a partner at
Gregory Financial Services, financial consultants. Dave Kirkpatrick ’89 is the
Director of Marketing for the Collegiate
Licensing Company which handles the
marketing for over 180 universities, athletic conferences, bowl games, and the
NCAA. Dick Williams ’89 is a principal for North American Properties, a
national real estate development firm
specializing in urban renewal projects.
All six alumni jumped at the chance
to help other Tafties who want to move
to Atlanta or want to question them on
their specific careers. They also plan to
organize several social gatherings
throughout the year “just for fun.” Hopefully, their idea will be a prototype for
alumni in cities around the country.
If you would like to talk to any of
the six members of the Young Alumni
Network of Atlanta or if you live in
Atlanta and would like to join them or
would like to start a similar organization
in your city, please contact Olivia Tuttle,
the Director of Alumni Planning, at 860945-7743 or [email protected].
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Making Light
of Gravity
Several classmates of Jonathan Hix ’53
have wanted to know about iceboat racing without necessarily trying it, but these
veterans of big regattas say very little about
the feat itself. Controlling such sinewy
crafts on the verge of flight, keeping in
touch with some frictional resistance, becomes second nature to them.
For Hix and others, the most compelling challenge is to design, build, and
hone the boats themselves. Moreover, the
adventure in racing is also the regatta as
a social event. Iceboating clubs race sail
to sail on miles of frozen rivers, lakes,
and bays. Jon enters as many races as he
can reach—that is, with his boat whistling, well-secured to the top of his van.
So much for one man’s passion in retirement. He shared some of his captivation
with this growing sport with us:
“In the early sixties I was fascinated
when I found that my wife Charlotte’s
father had sailed on the ice of Long
Island’s Great South Bay. As a new homeowner, I spotted an iceboat plan in a
how-to book…I built a boat-building
bench and constructed a DN, a class
boat. On her first time out my head was
in the clouds; so was the portside runner blade. Hiking a runner at real speed
gathered in seconds was something you
do only once. I didn’t know about steering off, while gently letting out the sheet.
Well, dropping the runner back to the
ice with a ‘thud’ convinced me that I had
a strong boat.
“A memorable outing with my DN
was doing Lake Winnipesaukee end to
end. This race is renowned as the Great
Long Distance Ice Yacht Race. It takes
place only when the ice is suitable. Between 1991 and 1996 I’ve made the trip
four times. Each time, people gathered
along the banks, some even from the
colder parts of Europe. I met a number
of racers who still used the older boats
known as Hudson River Stern Steerers.
Jonathan Hix ’53 with his J-12 on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut
One sage of these boats, Raymond Ruge,
took me for my first ride on a boat that
had 765 sq ft of sail (compared to my 60
sq ft) and weighed in at almost 2,000 lbs
for 50 feet in length. I ended up buying
a smaller version that needed work and
took up a lot of backyard, plus 18 feet of
running plank suspended over the cars
in the garage. I worked on “Northwest”
(375 sq ft of sail and 30 feet in length)
for over 20 years, renewing much of the
hardware as well as the yellow pine hull.”
Increasing his iceboat building skills
through these restorations, he began build-
ing a new class of boat, the J-14, that was
light due to its hollow spar and runner
plank. Later, while “grounded” due to hip
replacement surgery, Hix says he started
working on a new design called a J-12, a
shorter and even lighter boat. Once built,
he had to face what they call “the great
wait.” “Where was the ice going to be?”
He finally got his new craft out on
Connecticut’s Candlewood Lake in midJanuary. “Handled like a dream,” he says.
One can only imagine what his next
design will be. This iceboat builder and
racer is unstoppable.
11
ALUMNI
SPOTLIGHT
Hartford Gathering
On January 16, over 90 alumni, parents
and friends met at the Hartford Club to
welcome Pam and Willy MacMullen ’78
to the Hartford, Conn. area. The party
was hosted by Leslie and Sam Acquaviva
P’02, ’04, Mary and Jim Barnes P’00,
Mary and David Dangremond P’05,
Scott Frew ’70, and Karen and Tim
Largay P’89, ’93, ’97. At the party, Willy
Taft Telethon
Class agents Brian Lincoln ’74, P’05 and
Mac Brighton ’74, P’05, ’06 busy raising
money for the Annual Fund at the New
York City Telethon in February.
䉴 Seated: Pam MacMullen and Nancy
Schoeffler; Standing: Sam and Leslie
Acquaviva, Mary Dangremond, Scott Frew
and David Dangremond
䉲 Seated: Karen Largay, Willy MacMullen,
Mary Barnes and Tim Largay; Standing:
Peter Frew, Jim Barnes and Jim Lyon
12
announced that Mary and Jim Barnes,
parents of Sarah ’00, had made a leadership gift by way of a challenge to establish
The Hartford Area Scholarship. The
Barneses will match dollar-for-dollar all
gifts up to $50,000. Anyone interested
in participating should contact Clayton
B. Spencer ’56, director of development,
at 1-800-959-8238.
AROUND THE POND
pond
Potter Gallery
䉱 Photographer and faculty member Laura Harrington
(second from left) at her Potter Gallery opening with
students Veronica Torres ’04, Roody McNair ’04, Ashley
DeMartino ’04 PETER FREW
䉳 “Tire (d) Tree,” Cyanotype, Laura Harrington
“Place and Preservation,” a powerful solo
show of work by photographer Laura
Harrington, was exhibited in the Mark
W. Potter ’48 Gallery early this year.
Taft faculty member Harrington was
educated at the University of East Anglia
in England and at Muhlenberg College.
She received her master’s degree in photography from Syracuse University and
has been Taft’s photography teacher since
1999. Exhibitions of her work have been
held throughout the eastern U.S.
In an excerpt from Harrington’s statement for the exhibition, she wrote, “This
show brings together some of my early
environmental work with some of my
more recent explorations. I began my first
major environmental photographic body
while working towards an MFA at Syracuse University. I discovered, just miles
from where I was living, Onondaga Lake,
13
AROUND THE POND
one of the most polluted lakes in the
Unites States. I decided to begin researching Onondaga Lake, and quickly became
appalled by the level of pollution routinely
being dumped into the lake. The research
led me into the long and incredible
history of the lake and revealed all those
who, over the years, were responsible
for the lake’s current state. Only after I
had finished this research did I begin to
photograph the lake.
“Recently I have been working
around the theme of preservation.
Preservation is not simply about land
use and management, but also about
personal memory, time, and our relationship to place.
“There is a series with the Kallitypes
that reflects my continuing interest in
how we choose to live, and what we do
with our waste. For example, we turn
cell phone towers into oversized me-
chanical fake trees, as if to try and fool
ourselves into believing in them. We
buy cheap goods at Wal-Mart, and
throw the bags back out into nature to
get caught in the trees, completing a
giant disturbing cycle. But I also see
humor in these images when I come
across a beer bottle impaled on a tree,
and a tire hanging from an improbably
high branch, dangling there, as if mocking the reality of its existence.”
In Pursuit of a Passion:
Kilbourne Grants Enrich Students’ Artistic Interests
By Joanna Szymkowiak ’03 and Emily Marano ’03
This summer, six Taft seniors, Alex
Britell, Peter Granquist, Emily Josephs,
Emily McArdle, Jenn Palleria, and Susie
Tarnowicz, pursued their artistic interests by attending summer programs
through the help of a Kilbourne Grant.
Established by John Kilbourne ’58, the
Kilbourne Summer Enrichment Fund
provides Taft students with opportunities to participate in enriching summer
programs in the arts.
Alex Britell, a cellist in Taft’s
Chamber Ensemble, used his grant to
attend a three-week program of musical
performance and theory at Brown University. At Brown, he was able to play on
his own and in an ensemble with a flutist and a pianist. He remembers his cello
teacher at the program as having “a huge
influence in helping me enjoy playing just
for the sake of playing.” Because of the
manner in which he was taught at Brown,
Britell said, “It changed the way I feel
about music.” Britell has been playing
the cello for ten years, and is currently
writing a symphony for the Chamber Ensemble. In addition to playing the cello,
Britell plays banjo and electric bass. He
is editor-in-chief of the Papyrus and the
head of Taft’s Jewish Students’ Organization as well as a corridor monitor.
14
With the help of his grant, Peter
Granquist studied percussion at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Granquist applied for the grant as a junior because, he said, “It sounded too
good to be true—get money to do what
you love, no strings attached.” He feels
the program forced him to look at his
playing in a whole new way, and showed
him that there is always more to learn.
Granquist continues to take private drum
lessons, and plays in various bands both
in and out of school. He also sings in
Oriocos and Collegium Musicum and
has performed in several school plays.
After taking a pottery course during
her sophomore year at Taft and completing an independent studies project in
pottery during her junior year, Emily
Josephs used her grant to attend a
three-week pottery program called
Snow Farm: the New England Craft Program in Williamsburg, Mass. There, she
studied ceramics, glass blowing, and
even making pots with her feet. “My
experience at Snow Farm exposed me
to not only an environment devoted to
artistic creativity,” said Josephs, “but
also one that encouraged risk-taking and
the boundless possibilities of personal
expression.” After attending the Snow
Farm program, Josephs held a summer
job at a bead shop designing jewelry and
is now completing a second independent
project in pottery. In addition to her work
in ceramics, Josephs is a skier, and is on
Taft’s Volunteer Council.
Emily McArdle is a devoted
dancer who dances with the Nutmeg
Ballet in nearby Torrington year-round
for approximately 36 hours per week,
performing with them three times a
year. Emily chose to attend a threeweek ballet program called the Joffrey
Workshop in San Antonio, Texas. Although her previous dance classes were
rigorous and educational, McArdle’s
summer experience gave her a different perspective on ballet. “The Joffrey
Workshop was the most intense ballet
program I have ever been to,” she said,
“and I learned more about the life of a
professional dancer in just those three
weeks than I have ever learned from
talking to pros or going to Nutmeg.”
She added, “The teachers I had at the
workshop inspired me to change the way
I work in ballet in order to improve
more quickly.” Emily is using what she
learned in other aspects of her dancing,
including in her roles as a teacher and
competitor in Irish Dancing.
AROUND THE POND
Student Art Award Winners
Scholastics Art and Writing Awards are given each year, at the regional and national levels, to students in grades 8–12.
In the state of Connecticut, each art teacher is allowed to submit only four works of art from her students. Silver Keys
are awarded to only 25 works in each category, and Gold Keys are awarded to only 25 works in each category: drawing,
painting, mixed media, sculpture, and more.
In the state of Connecticut, Susie Tarnowicz ’03 received a Silver Key for her pastel drawing, and Ann Kidder ’04
received a Gold Key for her conte drawing. Ann’s drawing travels now to New York, where it will be judged in the
National Scholastics Awards.
Jenn Palleria used her Kilbourne
grant to attend a Cap-21 pre-college summer program at New York University’s
Tisch School of the Arts. During this
six-week program, Palleria commuted
daily to the city and attended vocal
performance, vocal technique, acting,
music theory, tap, jazz, ballet, and improvisation classes. “I decided to apply
for the grant because I thought it would
be a perfect way to get some really intense musical theater training, meet new
people, and accomplish new performing goals,” Palleria said. “My grant
allowed me to meet new people in the
business, and learn about what it takes
to go to school for musical theater. On
top of that, I was in my favorite city,
going to Broadway shows.” Prior to attending this program, Palleria appeared
in many musicals at Taft as well as at
Torrington’s Warner Theater. In addition to acting and dancing, Palleria
studies voice, and sings in Hydrox as
well as Collegium Musicum.
Susie Tarnowicz’s grant allowed
her to pursue her passion for painting and
to study art at the Rhode Island School
of Design during the summer. For six
weeks, Tarnowicz attended daily classes
in visual arts and took drawing, art his-
Left to right, music teacher T.J. Thompson with seniors Peter Granquist, Jenn Palleria,
Susie Tarnowicz, John Kilbourne ’58, Alex Britell, Emily McArdle, Emily Josephs, and arts
department head Bruce Fifer PETER FREW
tory, and design classes. She also learned
about anatomy and the human form
during figure studies classes. However,
Tarnowicz learned the most by critiquing her own works as well as the works
of others. “Being around different styles
was how I learned,” said Tarnowicz.
“Everyone was so interested in and enthusiastic about what they were doing,
and the entire campus was covered in
murals and textiles.” Her most valued
accomplishment was gaining a bigger
understanding of creativity, she said.
“Even though I may not have been doing my best work ever while I was there,
I came back from it and I’m doing my
best work ever now, because I just absorbed so much,” she affirmed.
Established three years ago, the
Kilbourne Grants take Taft students’ talents beyond the brick walls of Taft and
allow them to explore and expand their
passion for art, which they bring back and
use to inspire the rest of the Taft community. “I didn’t know about the Kilbourne
Grant until I listened to the Morning
Meetings last year,” said Jenn Palleria ’03
during her speech to the school on February 11, “and now I can’t imagine where
I would be without my experience.”
15
AROUND THE POND
Taft’s New Director of Development
Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78 announced recently the selection of John
Ormiston, Director, Principal Gifts, at
Yale as the new Director of Development
at Taft. John will succeed Chip Spencer
’56 who will return to his previous job
of Director of Planned Giving.
John Ormiston was selected after an
extensive national search was conducted
by a Search Committee chaired by Steve
Potter ’73 that included fellow trustees
Drummond Bell ’63, Julie Brenton ’81,
Susan Carmichael ’83, Archie Van Beuren
’75, Chip Spencer ’56, and Bonnie Welch,
Associate Director of Development.
John has been at Yale since 1990 and,
before becoming Director, Principal
Gifts, was a regional director in their
$1.7 billion Capital Campaign in which
role he advised the National Campaign
Executive Committee in a focused effort
to raise more than $100 million from the
top prospects. As Director, Principal
Gifts, he managed the university’s relationship with the top donors and
prospects, a group that has provided
major support for the university.
John started working in the Alumni
and Development Office at Yale right
after he graduated and stayed for six
years, concluding as Assistant to the
President for Campaign Affairs. He left
Yale to work for two different sailmakers
as well as a real estate company and a
consulting firm before returning to his
alma mater in 1990.
Operatic Duo
In late January, an extraordinary and rare musical event took place in Walker
Hall. Patricia Schuman, soprano, and David Pittsinger, bass, performed in a
vocal recital. Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78 grew up with Mr. Pittsinger
and welcomed this husband and wife duo to Taft. They have a combined
resume that includes performances in most of the major opera houses and
concert halls of the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. Their
rich and varied performance at Walker Hall included selections ranging from
opera and lieder to a medley of songs from Broadway musicals. A packed
house was treated to an impromptu duet when Pittsinger asked Taft’s own
baritone and arts department chair Bruce Fifer to join him in a song from
Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon.
䉱 Soprano Patricia
Schuman
䉳 Art department
chair Bruce Fifer joins
baritone David
Pittsinger in song.
SAM DANGREMOND ’05
16
John and Jane Ormiston
John and his wife Jane currently live
in Madison, Conn. and will move to
campus in May when he assumes his
duties. Jane is a senior vice president for
Research International in charge of new
business development.
John graduated from Marblehead
High School and Yale, Class of 1971,
where he was an English major and captain of the hockey team. He has been
president of the Yale Hockey Association, a Fellow of Davenport College at
Yale, a member of Wolf ’s Head Society, and a co-chair of Yale Youth Days.
John’s brother, Mike, graduated from
Taft in 1975.
In commenting on John’s appointment, Headmaster MacMullen
said the following:
“That John Ormiston is an experienced and brilliantly successful
development officer is obvious to
anyone who has looked at his career, but what is more important is
how profoundly he understands
Taft and its mission and how
quickly he has already become a
part of this place—in the hallways,
the hockey rink, the office. John has
known and admired Taft for years,
and he left behind an extraordinary
role at Yale because he saw something special here that he wanted
to be part of. We are very lucky to
have someone of his character and
abilities working for the School.”
AROUND THE POND
Art from the Heart
Taft’s Jazz Band
PETER FREW
Taft’s Dance Ensemble during one of many Mothers’ Day Weekend offerings called Art from the Heart that included a play and
performances by the Jazz Band and Collegium Musicum. PETER FREW
Super Sleuth
Who would think that a man dealing
with the grim world of homicide investigation could make a student audience
erupt in laughter by his practical sense
of humor? Dr. Henry C. Lee, a worldrenowned forensic scientist and favorite
speaker here, captivated the Taft community at Morning Meeting in January with
his stories of difficult cases and his wit.
Lee quizzed the Taft audience for crime
scene clues while showing slides of actual investigations. This was Lee’s second
visit to the school where his niece Xia-Yi
(Sandy) Shen ’04 is studying.
Dr. Lee is currently the chief emeritus
for the scientific services and was the com-
missioner of public safety for the state of
Connecticut for over two years. He served
as the state’s chief criminalist from 1979 to
2000. Dr. Lee was born in China and grew
up in Taiwan. Lee began his career with
the Taipei Police Department, where he
became captain. He has worked on famous
cases such as the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, the O.J. Simpson trial, the post-Sept.
11 forensic investigation, and the Washington, D.C. sniper shootings. He solved
some of his cases up to 17 years after the
murder was committed, resulting in perpetrators being brought to justice.
While interrogation was once the
only method of homicide investigation,
䉲 Francois Berube ’04 receives a prize ruler from Dr. Henry Lee.
PETER FREW
Lee noted that investigators now use artificial intelligence and DNA testing
along with a host of other techniques.
“Everything I want to know is already
on the scene,” he pointed out. But to his
exasperation, the crime scene is often disturbed, sometimes by law enforcement
people, erasing valuable clues. His humor pervaded, saying, “Profiles [for a
possible suspect] are okay for mystery
movies, but are not reliable most of the
time.” He added, “Forty percent of the
time, witness identification is erroneous.”
There’s no question he is dedicated
to his work, proven by the fact that he
says he has tried, unsuccessfully, to retire
three times but wants to continue helping with difficult cases around the world.
Lee reflected on his work in Bosnia with
mass graves and helping relatives identify deceased loved ones, “The universal
language is called ‘loving care’ and differences of culture and language don’t
matter.” He ended his riveting talk saying that he’s often asked what the most
important thing in life is. His answer,
shown on a slide to the darkened auditorium, is “a collective vision for the
future,” and the importance of trying to
make things happen.
17
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sport
Winter Highlights by Steve Palmer
BOYS’ HOCKEY 20–3–2
Housatonic League Champs,
New England Semifinalist
Once again, the boys’ hockey team
distinguished itself as one of the best
in the New England prep ranks. Their
19–2–2 regular season included two wins
each against rivals Avon, Choate and
Hotchkiss, and a fourth consecutive
championship at the highly competitive
Lawrenceville Christmas Tournament. In
perhaps their finest game of the season,
Taft defeated top-ranked and undefeated
Deerfield (4–2) to continue its four-year
streak against the Big Green. The Rhinos then powered past Hotchkiss with
an 11–2 win in the first round of the New
England tournament before coming up
short against two-time defending champ
St. Sebastian’s in the semifinals, a 3–1
loss. Seniors Todd Ogiba, Casey Ftorek,
and Ryan Ahern were selected to the AllFounders League Team, and goalie John
Curry, along with Ftorek, was named to
the NEHPSA All New England Team.
䉳 Will Blanden ’03 drives to the basket in
Taft’s season opening victory over Gunnery.
Blanden led the league in rebounding and
was second in scoring. PETER FREW
18
S
With a host of highly talented upper
mids, including leading scorers Keith
Shattenkirk, Todd Johnson and Alex
Meintel, Taft should once again be a force
to be reckoned with; the boys’ four-year
record of 84–9–5 speaks for itself.
BOYS’ BASKETBALL 17–7
New England Quarterfinalist
The boys’ varsity basketball team finished
with a school record 17 wins and made
the New England tournament for the first
time in six years. The regular season included sweeps of Kent and Hotchkiss and
a thrilling 83–81 win at home late in the
season against then 18–2 KingswoodOxford. That victory along with a key
win over Avon ensured their number 6
ranking in New England. The team
bowed out in the first round of the
tournament with a tough 64–61 loss to
Loomis, but this was the finest basketball team at Taft in many, many years,
perhaps ever. Seniors Robbie Madden,
Michael Bryan, Kofi Ofori-Ansah, and
Adam Kowalski were a big part of this
squad’s tenacious defense and perpetual
hustle. Junior guard Brian Baudinet, a
Second Team League All Star, averaged
over 15 points per game and may well have
a shot at becoming Taft’s first 1,000 point
scorer next year. Post graduates Brandon
Miles and Will Blanden were central to
the team’s success, both being named to
the Tri-State All-League team. Miles led
the league in free throw average (81 percent), pulled down nine rebounds per
game and did much of the inside work all
winter. Will Blanden was simply one of
the best players in New England this year,
leading the team in points (20.5 per game)
and rebounds (10.3 per game), and coming up with big plays at both ends of the
court whenever Taft needed it.
GIRLS’ HOCKEY 17–4–1
Founders League Tri-Champs,
The girls’ hockey team pulled out a series
of wonderful wins throughout the middle
of the season to earn a number 4 ranking
in New England. Their determined string
of 11 straight victories included triumphs
over several of the strongest prep teams this
year: Loomis (2–1), Choate (1–0), Pomfret
(2–1), Deerfield (2–0), Tabor (4–3) and
undefeated Cushing (1–0). That this team
played with heart and perseverance goes
without saying, and with that midseason
momentum, Taft battled past Pomfret
with another 2–1 win in the quarterfinals
of the New England tournament before
dropping a 5–2 decision to Cushing.
Nicole Mandras was named to the All
New England Team (one of only seven
players), and was also a Founders League
All Star along with teammates Jennifer
Sifers and Kim Pearce. Captain-elect
Jaclyn Hawkins led the team in scoring,
followed closely by Pearce and Patsy
Odden Award winner Shannon Sylvester;
middler goalie Lacey Brown compiled an
impressive 1.18 goals-against-average.
GIRLS’ SQUASH 9–2
Founders League Champs,
2nd New England Tournament
The girls’ squash team followed up their
finest finish in New England last year (3rd
place) with an inspiring second place finish this year. Though the girls could not
overcome seven-time New England
champ Greenwich Academy during the
season (a 2–5 loss) or at the tournament,
Taft did defeat rival Deerfield (5–2) and
blanked Hotchkiss, Andover, Loomis,
Choate, and Westminster in dual matches
(7–0 for each match). Uppermid Supriya
Balsekar and lowermid Sydney Scott both
marched through the season undefeated
and went on to win the No. 1 and No. 2
draws at the New England tournament.
Balsekar did not lose a game at the tournament in defending her individual title,
and there is no doubt that she is the finest
high school player by some measure.
Syd Scott may well be the second best
P
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Hannah Baker ’03 stretches for a backhand.
PETER FREW
individual player in New England with
her present ranking as the top player
under 17 in the nation. Seniors Hannah
Baker and Katherine O’Herron both
also made it to the final in the No. 3 and
No. 7 draws at the tournament to help
the team to their second place finish. The
2003 team set the standard for girls’
squash at Taft as a talented, spirited, and
undaunted group of athletes.
GIRLS’ BASKETBALL 18–6
After a slow start this winter, the girls’
basketball record stood at 6–5, yet this Taft
team surprised many opponents as they
battled their way to twelve straight wins,
a 17–5 regular season record, and a No. 5
ranking in New England. The impressive
run by Taft included second-chance wins
over tournament-bound Choate and
Loomis and was based on flawless team
defense and the play of uppermid center
Katie McCabe who averaged 23 points
and 9 rebounds a game during that
critical stretch. The New England tournament began with a strong 47–40 win
over Exeter, but the girls then could not
get by two-time New England champ
Tabor in the semifinals. Senior Katie
Franklin led the team in steals and assists
at point guard, while classmate Caitlin
Grit regularly scored in double figures and
was the team’s second leading scorer.
19
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BOYS’ SQUASH 13–1
New England Champs,
Founders League Champion
The boys’ squash team brought home the
New England title for the fifth time in
seven years, but this championship was
perhaps the most tense and hard-fought.
Taft’s triumph over a very talented
Brunswick team (167 pts to 164 pts)
was one of the closest finishes ever, and
the heroics at the end were provided
by seniors Gary Khan (No. 2 draw) and
Alex Ginman (No. 7 draw) who both
prevailed in 3–2 championship matches.
Captain-elect Tucker George also won
the New England No. 3 draw, avenging his only loss of the season with a
flawless 3–0 victory. Highlights of the
team’s spectacular regular season included a 5–2 win over Chestnut Hill
Academy (CHA’s first loss in over 2 years)
and a competitive trip to Scotland where
the Taft boys played against the University of Edinburgh and some of Scotland’s
best junior players. The trip was hosted
by John and Bridget Mackaskill (parents
of Ben ’04 and John ’02) and John and
Jennifer Harding-Edgar (Georgina ’03).
Lower middler Michael Shrubb went
undefeated during the season and
finished second at the tournament
The boys’ varsity squash team during their Thanksgiving Scotland tour visit the Ivy Wu
Gallery at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. PETER FREW
(No. 4 draw), while senior captain
Auloke Mathur played in the No. 1 slot
for much of the season. Mathur’s best
match was a dominant win over
Brunswick’s top player, though Taft
lost the dual match 3–4 for their one
loss. This was Taft’s ninth consecutive
Founders League title.
Patsy K. Odden Girls’ Invitational
Hockey Tournament
The girls’ ice hockey tournament held
at the start of the Christmas vacation
has been going strong for two decades.
This year, the contest was renamed in
honor of Taft’s longtime coach and
women’s ice hockey pioneer Patsy
Odden. The holiday event began in
1983 and was co-hosted by Taft and St.
Paul’s, with each school winning the title
in the first two years. Taft then went on
to dominate the yearly event by winning
eight straight titles. Along the way,
coach Odden and Taft took over the
tournament permanently and expanded
it to include eight teams. The three-day
event begins with a formal dinner in the
Armstrong Dining Hall, and many of the
visiting girls stay with Taft students in
the dorms. In recent years, Taft, Tabor
䉳 Patsy Odden drops the puck to start the
Patsy K. Odden Girls’ Invitational Hockey
Tournament held at Taft in December.
PETER FREW
20
Academy, Hotchkiss and Loomis have all
won the championship, and Groton, St.
George’s, Andover and Lawrenceville
have been regular competitors.
Patsy Odden is well known among
the girls’ hockey ranks throughout New
England, and in fact the Prep School
Championship Trophy bears her name—
an honor that came out of her incredible
25-year coaching career for Taft. In those
years, she built a dominant program that
compiled a 371–99–13 overall record, including three consecutive New England
titles (’91, ’92, ’93) and a two-year undefeated streak. Yet, Patsy Odden’s legacy
goes far beyond the impressive numbers
and championship banners, with two
former players having earned Olympic
gold medals and over 95 percent of her
players going on to play college hockey.
It is clear that the passion and dedication she had for the game was and is
carried on by so many that she coached,
including Taft coach Jessica Clark ’94 and
Harvard coach Katie Stone ’84. Odden
helped to spread the movement for
women’s ice hockey beyond our borders
with numerous international trips, and
some of her teams even won major tournaments in Germany and Russia. In fact,
Taft played the German National team
(4–2 loss) and the Unified Russian
National Team (1–1 tie) in the ’92–’93
season. The game and her players have
always been first in Odden’s heart, and it
is fitting that this wonderful holiday
event is named in her honor.
Alumni in the Arts
The alumni community of Taft holds more artists than anyone might imagine—
so many, that choosing a few of you to highlight was both a delight and a challenge.
We applaud the work all of you are doing in and around the arts, and hope you will
find these few stories of eight visual artists entertaining and inspiring.
Alumni in the Arts
䉱 Deane G. Keller ’58
䉳 “Figure Study, Cairo,”
charcoal, 60 in. x 34 in.
Deane G. Keller ’58
Figure as Metaphor
By Loueta Chickadaunce
“To draw is to know by hand—to have
the proof that [St.] Thomas demanded.”
—John Berger
22
A name well known to all Taft students
who frequented Mark Potter’s art room
was Deane G. Keller ’58, an extraordinary
artist whose father, Deane, was a distin-
guished painter, teacher, and member of
the Class of 1919. His father was a profound influence for Deane. Mr. Keller’s
teaching was passionate and clear; it made
him direct, sometimes blunt, in his criticism, while consistently offering ways to
improve. It was an approach Deane found
again at Taft. “If something goes poorly,
fix it. Taft gave that to me,” he said.
I spoke with Deane while he was
busy selecting work for a March show
at the Carriage Barn Arts Center in New
Canaan, Conn. The exhibition is mostly
figure drawings inspired by his travels in
Egypt and Syria. The drawings are large,
around 60 in. x 34 in. His work of the last
15 years has been mostly drawings, with a
few paintings scattered among them.
Deane is both patient and insistent when
he talks about art. “Drawings don’t lie,”
he noted. “The quick and casual shows,
the struggle shows, the substance or lack
of substance shows. Drawing keeps you
on a sure course of recognizing and organizing your own thoughts.”
He quoted John Ruskin, “Art is
about gathering and governing.” The
gathering, Deane explained, is about
attaining the raw material, the field
sketches; it is about addressing life as you
discover it. He has thousands of drawings done on location. They represent the
start of countless ideas. “You govern with
䉱 “Drapery Study,” 1998, oil
䉱 The Keller family at work: Deane’s brother, Bill, posing for a portrait which Deane G.
’58 is working on, with their father Deane ’19 offering criticism.
art, with your sense of design,” determining the work’s strength, its density.
Choices are made according to one’s own
sensibilities. His work occurs in the combination of the rawness of reality with
the classicism of design. Nothing is made
with the use of photographs. Drawing is
not reproduction. “You have to assemble
all of the assets that you have. All of the
dimensions of your life come together
when you draw.”
The figure represents all things coming together for Deane—what he sees and
what he knows. Early in his career he was
given a solid grounding in traditional
drawing technique. At the age of 24, he
was encouraged by his father to spend a
year in Italy, living with an Italian family
and studying in an atelier in the east end
of Florence (the same atelier as Fred
Brownstein ’64; their Italian stays were
about ten years apart). In the east end
of Florence, the bells of Santa Croce,
which houses the tomb of Michelangelo
Buonarroti, can be heard. His studies with
Nara Simi in that small atelier formed the
building blocks of his life. It was training
“that had not been greatly jostled and
modified by modernist trends.”
“My father made sure that I had a
range of experience so that I had the
appropriate skills with which to find
my own style. I spent 30 years discussing art with him; he always had
suggestions and recommendations. He
died in 1992, before he saw any of these
large drawings.” Deane speculates that
his father would only ask that his son
know why he was creating drawings this
size. He maintains that the exploration
of light and form is more direct this
way. “Reduction in size reduces its
impact. When you don’t translate the
figure down in size, there is a more visceral appreciation of it. The figure for
me is a metaphor for feeling. I can address what is in my mind and my heart
through drawing.”
Another origin of these life-sized
drawings would be from his countless
anatomy lectures (he has taught anatomy
since 1979), for which he draws at a
scale large enough for everyone to see.
Presently he lectures on it twice a week
at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts
in Old Lyme, Conn., and at the Art
Students League in New York. His
students visit the gross anatomy labs at
Yale School of Medicine to experience
and to draw “the harness of musculature.”
Deane and his wife, Dorothy, have
traveled extensively for the last 24 years;
the north coast of Africa, Italy, France,
Greece, Holland, Spain, Turkey, and Syria
have seen him furiously note gestures
and poses in his drawing books, while
Dorothy adds to her extensive slide collection for art history lectures at St. Joseph
College, where she is department chair.
Standing in spaces famous in the
histories of Alexander the Great and
Lawrence of Arabia adds another dimension to the work that develops from his
drawing books. Last summer they were
in the Archaeological Museums of Cairo
and Athens. Moving from one marble to
the next, Deane found them jarring in
their energy. He laments that these sculptures have become somewhat remote and
iconic for us. Even the most ancient of
those sculptors were interested in the
evocative power the figure holds. Deane
Keller certainly feels their kinship.
Loueta Chickadaunce is a painter who holds
the van Beuren Family Chair and teaches
in Taft’s Arts Department.
23
Alumni in the Arts
䉳 “Still Dreaming,” 1994,
marble, 23 in. x 13 in. x 22 in.
Fred X. Brownstein ’64
One Man’s Journey in Art
By Kate Jellinghaus ’89
The artist’s path is rarely a straight one.
Particularly in this postmodern era—in
which eclecticism in art reigns supreme—
it is intriguing to see how each artist
comes to find his or her place within the
larger context of art history.
For sculptor Fred Brownstein ’64,
like so many other Taft graduates who
went on to become artists, things began
24
rather unexpectedly, in the studio of
Mark Potter ’48. As an upperclassman,
Fred had wandered into Potter’s studio
one afternoon and dabbled in painting.
Potter, quick to react, was immediately
encouraging. Even though Fred never
officially took an art class at Taft, Potter
ran up to him on the day of graduation,
put his hands on Fred’s shoulders and
exclaimed, “Fred, don’t make a mistake!
Take some art classes in college!”
Apparently, these words got through
to him. Despite being a premed student
at Tulane, every free elective Fred took
was either drawing or art history. After
four years of study, he gave up medicine
and headed for the San Francisco Art Institute. These were exciting years to be
out West: 1968–1970. Already, art in San
Francisco “had a long and wild history
of being on the cutting edge of it all.”
It was influenced by the raucous political and cultural events that swept the
nation and was shaped by artists like
Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Bill Allen,
Allan Kaprow, Manuel Neri, and William Wiley. “It was a good time for me,”
Fred said, “because I got to experiment
with the extreme ends of things—with
abstract painting and conceptual art—
and to see that I gradually became
dissatisfied with it.”
In spite of the pressure to create “art
built on art” (the self-referential art of
the conceptualists) or art built directly
on “what was happening right then”
(with its inevitable political slant), Fred
found himself longing for the missing
piece in his arts education up to that
point. Wanting to explore the relationship between art and art tradition, he set
off on a boat to Holland. The trip was,
as he describes it, a self-education tool—
an attempt to connect with past artists
through following in their footsteps and
trying to see what they saw. “I went to
Arles,” he says, “to see if I could stand in
the same field as Van Gogh and see what
he was looking at—try to understand
what he was looking at.” This experience
deepened his sense that “art is greater than
all of us,” and that we can connect with
past artists despite the passing of time. It
also convinced him of his need for more
rigorous figurative study.
䉱 Fred Brownstein ’64 working with Taft’s Advanced Art and AP Studio Art students on
their life-size self-portrait sculptures in clay. PETER FREW
䉱 “Shared Vision,” life-size bronze,
54 in. x 37 in. x 33 in.
Fred continued his travels. In Vence,
France, he met the Canadian sculptor
Jim Ritchie, and there he got his first
piece of marble and did his first carving. He then set off to Italy—“where
marble comes from”—on a trip that he
says changed his life. He describes his
wonder upon visiting the marble quarry
in Seravezza: “We turned the corner
and there was the marble rising up
ahead of me—it was like being hit
in the face!” Fred quickly became enamored of sculpting in marble. He
stayed in Italy for the next 16 years
(1975–1991), spending four years as an
apprentice to learn how to carve marble
the Italian way and many more studying the figure under the respected
Signorina Simi. Fred’s wife Stella, an
artist herself, also spent these years
studying drawing and painting in the
Simi studio. During this time, the
couple supported themselves by living
frugally, working and gradually winning
commissions for their work. These 16
years of work and study proved crucial
to Fred’s becoming a sculptor and to his
finding a place for himself in the long
need for helping others. For Fred, the
line between the craft and the art itself
is undefined: “To be a good artist, you
must be a good craftsman.”
Fred also speaks passionately about
the greater role of the artist. “There are
archetypal figures, in the Jungian sense—
such as the ‘doctor’ or the ‘priest’.” The
artist, he continues, “whether a caveman
or Renaissance artist,” is someone who
has fully accepted this archetypal identity. “The concept is that one must
prepare oneself to be a good tool so that
we may be used by Art [in the greater
sense] to make our art,” he states.
“The art moves through us or through
our hands into the material of our work
to create the artwork.” Ultimately it is
the acceptance of this receptive creative
process that art, and becoming an
artist, is all about.
tradition of figurative sculptors working in marble and bronze.
Fred now has a studio in southern
Vermont and is on the faculty of the
Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in
Connecticut. He was recently promoted
to fellow of the National Sculpture
Society. His daughter Vanessa ’06 is a
student at Taft and on regular trips to
campus, Fred volunteers his time to
critique student sculpture in art classes.
Fred acknowledges that fewer and
fewer people work in this very rigorous
and academic tradition, and that in
some respects it is a dying art form. Yet,
he feels himself deeply rooted in these
traditions, and expresses a sense of
personal responsibility to keep this
knowledge from being lost. “I want to
take this tradition and help push it into
2003, 2010—to make sure that it won’t
die! You never know what your artistic
mission will be. It may not be what the
New York art world tells you you’re supposed to think.” He speaks fervently
about education—on the need for the
“ownership” of knowledge (what the
Italians call padronanza), and on the
Kate Jellinghaus ’89 is currently completing her M.F.A. in painting at the National
Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria. She
was Taft’s Rockwell Visiting Artist in the
fall and exhibited her work in the Mark
Potter Gallery.
25
Alumni in the Arts
䉳 “Last View,” 1999, oil, 47.5 in. x 39.5 in
Langdon C. Quin III ’66
A Light-filled Palette
By David Morse
Langdon Quin was in his junior year,
studying premed at Washington and
Lee University, when he made the break
that was to change his life.
“I think it was organic chemistry
or something equally daunting” that
prompted him to pay a visit to Mark
Potter ’48, his former teacher and
mentor at Taft. “That’s when I really
decided that I wanted to pursue art for
as long as I could.”
26
Langdon, who graduated from Taft
in 1966, had been passionately involved in art while a student there,
thanks to Potter’s inspiration. Along
with a handful of other similarly motivated students, Langdon had spent
nearly all his Saturdays in the art studio.
After going back to visit Potter, he
decided to get out of premed. He
completed a B.A. in art at Washington
and Lee, earned an M.F.A. at Yale’s
School of Fine Arts, and went to Italy
to paint for a year and a half under a
Fulbright Hays grant.
Today, he has established a reputation as a serious fine artist, with several
one-person shows to his credit, and
representation in galleries on both
coasts—in Kraushaar Galleries, an
uptown gallery in Manhattan, and
Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San
Francisco. He is an associate professor
of painting and drawing at the University of New Hampshire, and is painting
as intently as ever.
His paintings are representational,
whether observed or imagined. They
include carefully composed landscapes,
figures, and still lifes. He is especially
interested in light—in the psychological qualities of light—his palette
influenced alternately by the cooler
range typical of New England and upstate New York, where he lives during
the academic year, and the warmer
Mediterranean light in Umbria, Italy,
where he has a second home.
He credits Taft for providing his early
foundation as a painter. The influence
of Mark Potter, he says, ultimately had
“less to do with his specific aesthetic,
and more to do with his example as a
person, and as a citizen and a human
being and a person that was passionate
about what he did.”
Langdon had come up from Atlanta,
Ga., and saw little of his parents. “I was
on my own. I was a southerner. And I
had an accent. I had to get over the
adolescent trauma of realizing that
people were listening to me half the
time just to hear me talk, because it
sounded so strange to them. I think I
worked very hard at losing my southern accent and something about my
identity there.
“Potter was as good as it gets, in
terms of finding a kind of role model in
䉱 Langdon Quin ’66 with son Dino ’05
䉱 “The Slaughter,” 1978–80, oil, 48 in. x 36 in.
the absence of a father nearby. We were
completely enamored of this man.”
Not surprisingly, Langdon’s own
early work was heavily influenced by his
mentor. “I worked very much in his vocabulary—his aesthetic and vocabulary
for a couple of years, or at least the best I
could do, trying to emulate or simulate
that. I soon realized it just wasn’t me; the
things that he did beautifully were particular to him and his vision. It took a
while and it was very painful to sort of
wean myself away from his influence.”
After studying at Yale and working on his own, Langdon acquired his
own vision. His work makes use of a
generally brighter palette—sometimes
recalling the frescos on church walls in
Italy, sometimes employing boldly
saturated, flat expanses of cerulean blue
or crimson. His subjects often explore
tensions between the erotic and the
everyday, between order and chaos.
Some of the spatial drama underlying Langdon’s work, however, seems
to spring from those early years at Taft.
In an essay written for a Mark Potter
retrospective at the Findlay Gallery
in 1997, two years after the painter’s
death, Langdon recalls Potter as an
“athletic” presence, whose sketchbook
jottings declared that a painting “should
move out expressively towards the
spectators, clubbing them with the big
design, the big movement. Move the
eye around aggressively.”
Langdon came to the realization
that “I had left the superficial aspects
of his imagery…but I never left the
kind of guiding spirit of what was underneath. And so although I learned
different things and had other very
powerful influences…he was really
there all along. It just transformed into
a different kind of underpinning for
my studies.”
He observes that Taft, today, with
its more culturally and geographically
diverse student body, is “even more
nurturing in all of these dimensions
than it used to be. I’m a fan still.” His
son, Dino ’05, is a mid at Taft.
David Morse is an independent journalist
based in Connecticut and the author of a
novel, The Iron Bridge, and essays that
have appeared in numerous magazines.
Langdon Quin works shown here courtesy
of Kraushaar Galleries, NYC. Quin’s work
will be exhibited at Taft’s Mark Potter
Gallery sometime in 2004.
27
Alumni in the Arts
Alan R. Smith ’67
An Affinity for Expanses
䉱 “5424 feet, Highest Point in Nebraska,
Kimball County,” 1996
䉲 “Carhenge, Box Butte County,
Nebraska,” 1999
By Linda Beyus
Asked when he became interested in
photography, Alan Smith says, “I can’t
remember a time when I didn’t have a
camera. I can remember having a little
plastic Brownie camera [as a kid]. My
folks got me my first 35 mm camera—
an Argus C3—before I went to Taft,” but
he was more interested in science in those
days. Smith remembers a small darkroom
somewhere in the science building, but
no photography classes then.
He says he always enjoyed art but
loved science as a student. “I found there
28
was a disconnect between the eye and
the hand when I tried to draw or paint,”
Alan noted. “I used the camera to bridge
the disconnect.” The combination of
technology and art suits him perfectly.
Alan’s affinity for science early in his academic career is explained by the fact that
his father, Russell, Class of 1936, was a
geology professor. His father eventually
taught at the University of Nebraska,
after they had lived in parts of the Midwest, which is how Smith ended up in
Nebraska. Alan now lives in Lincoln and
teaches photography courses at nearby
Doane College.
Drawn to wide vistas and vacant
landscapes, Alan likes getting away—
“a bit of a loner,” he says. A photographer
of beautifully graduated shades of black
䉱 “Lancaster County, Nebraska,” 1999
and white, he says he is “no more content than when I’m outdoors under a
great sky.”
Alan’s favorite subjects are landscapes and buildings in the central
Plains, primarily Nebraska, as well as
the Native American Southwest with
its petroglyphs, pictographs, and ruins.
Some of his black and white images are
of vanishing wooden grain elevators
and old buildings, as well as highways
and horizons in wide open landscapes.
In his photos, Smith says he is trying to get across a sense of place. “The
central Plains are somewhat of an acquired taste,” he explains. His feel for the
Plains is expanded by reading writers like
Willa Cather, and then shooting.
One photo is titled “5424 feet,
Highest Point in Nebraska, Kimball
County.” A dirt road with two tracks
curves gently into the distant horizon
while a fenced-in marker notes the fame
of the little rise of land at a quite high
elevation, yet which appears mostly flat.
The juxtaposition of endless fields of grass
and the pinpointed preciseness of the
marker naming an exact height in a precise spot halts the viewer. A desk next to it
holds a ledger full of visitors’ names plus,
Alan says, “a note taped inside saying you
can get a certificate that you’ve ‘climbed’
the highest point in Nebraska from a chamber of commerce in the nearest town.”
䉱 Photographer Alan R. Smith ’67 in his studio
Color photography also interests
Alan, who is doing some color digital
work—“you don’t need to deal with labs.”
He’d like to do some platinum and palladium printing that “lasts forever.” He uses
hand-coated liquid emulsions on paper he
makes himself. Alan currently works in a
6 cm x 7 cm and 6 cm x 4.5 cm format.
Some of his favorite photographers
include the early Western survey photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and
others who hauled their enormous cameras with glass plates through the Plains
and wilderness in the late 1860s–1870s.
Their phenomenal work encompassed
that of William Henry Jackson, whose
first surveys of Yellowstone contributed
to its becoming a national park. Alan
also has great admiration for the work
of Ansel Adams.
He recalls a wonderful story told to
him by the photography historian Beaumont Newhall who, along with Ansel
Adams, was escorting William Henry
Jackson through a show of Jackson’s
work at the Museum of Modern Art.
Viewers were “oohing and aahing over
the large prints” when, Alan says, Jackson
was complaining of lugging heavy cameras on mules around the West. Jackson
pulled a little Kodak camera out of his
pocket with glee and said, “but now I
can shoot with this, and in color too!”
In his courses at Doane College,
Alan teaches a “Fundamentals of Photography” course, in which he hits them
with history of photography right off
the bat. He notes, “Students think
photography may be trivial,” but he
impresses upon them that their lives
are affected every day by photographs
relating to politics, religion, purchasing,
and family events. “These are not trivial
subjects,” he affirms.
Studio 15, Smith’s studio, is located
within the Burkholder Project, an artists space in Lincoln that has art and
design studios and gallery spaces for
showing work. He also exhibits his photographs at University Place Art Center
in Lincoln. Making a living doing fine
art photography is an uphill battle in
the central Plains. “In cities and on the
two coasts it’s more accepted,” Alan observes, “but as a fine art, it’s not well
accepted [here].” He continues to do
photography because he enjoys it and
the subjects he chooses to shoot.
Alan is now doing some work for
“his alter ego”—taking shots of live
bands, as he did in his younger days, at
a local blues bar and for regional blues
festivals. Some of his photos are on the
Roomful of Blues web site.
Alan Smith’s web site will soon be
revamped but some of his exquisite and
expansive black and white images are
viewable at www.alanrsmith.com.
29
Alumni in the Arts
Putting Vision to Words
By Anne Gahl and Jackie Maloney
Susan Condie Lamb ’77 spends her days
at her easel transforming children’s stories
into vibrant watercolors. A children’s book
illustrator for the last 13 years, with some
years off for full-time mothering, Susan
has created the artwork for several books
for HarperCollins, Dutton Children’s
Books, and Greenwillow Books. She is
currently working on her second book for
HarperCollins, by Gloria Houston, due
for publication in spring of 2004, as well
as a family story of her own.
As a student at Kenyon College in
Ohio, she was heavily encouraged by her
30
family to pursue a liberal arts program,
steering her toward a more “normal”
career path, rather than a career in art.
However, coming from a long line of
artists, her artistic desire was so strong,
that in 1985 she received her master’s in
fine arts from Yale in costume and set
design, and began her career as a theatrical, costume, and set designer in New
York City. There, she worked for designers on Broadway, in opera, and in film.
Though she had found this work to
be a rewarding experience, “After five
years of dealing with actors, unions, and
extremely long workdays, I felt like a
doctor on call,” Susan said. She realized
that it was time to return to her roots,
and focus more on drawing and painting.
Around that time, a friend introduced
her to the world of magazine illustration,
and she began to do some magazine
art. Another friend, a children’s book
author, introduced her to an editor at
HarperCollins, and though Susan did not
have a typical illustrator’s portfolio, she
brought along her theatrical portfolio,
which contained costume and set renderings for everything from Shakespeare plays
to opera, mostly done while at Yale. The
editor and she hit it off—he especially
liked her costume sketches. He suggested
she look over the manuscript for My GreatAunt Arizona by Gloria Houston, to see
what illustrations she might come up with.
There was no promise of work at the time,
and although she had been advised never
to work for free, she decided to give it a
try. The editor loved her ideas and so she
began work on her first project. It took a
couple of years to come to fruition, but
the book was published in 1992 and was
very well received. It continues to sell and
has won numerous state awards. Her last
book, Prairie Primer A to Z by Caroline
Stutson, was described by the publisher,
Dutton Children’s Books, as “a rhythmic
alphabet book that perfectly captures the
flavor and feeling of the Midwest at the
start of the twentieth century.” Susan’s style
of painting captures the era eloquently
with humor and dreamy realism.
On reminiscing about Taft, Susan
told us, “Last year we had a triple reunion
at Taft. My father, Charles Lamb ’42,
returned for his 60th reunion, my sister,
Ashley Lamb Fischer ’72, returned for her
30th, and I came back for my 25th.” Her
sister, Ashley, talented in her own right,
did not pursue a career in the art industry, but helped Susan form her interest in
art from childhood. Susan was also greatly
influenced by the late Mark Potter ’48,
her art teacher at Taft. “He was one of the
best teachers I ever had and I feel that I
received an incredible gift from him.”
The challenges of the theater gave
Susan the background to put vision to
the words. “In the theater world, the
words of the play along with a director’s
Lamb illustration in My Great-Aunt Arizona
vision give inspiration for the costume
and set designs,” she notes, “and so it is
with illustrations for a book.” If a manuscript does not immediately inspire her,
she chooses not to become involved in
the project, but if it does, she usually
begins with scribbling thumbnail
sketches in the margins right away, and
often finds that she stays with those initial drawings for the finished artwork.
Though she has done some illustrations
in pen and ink, or pencil, she works
mostly with watercolors.
For her current project with
HarperCollins, a book about an “everyday
hero,” similar to the character in My GreatAunt Arizona, she traveled to Asheville,
N.C., to gain inspiration by walking in
the footsteps of the character and to see
her world. “It’s important to me,” Susan
states, “that, in today’s edgy world, stories
about special people whose lives are about
making contributions to the world and
human connections get told.”
In between her painting, Susan is
a full-time mom to Charlie, 13, and
Ella, 9, who she is raising in Connecticut
with her husband, still-life photographer,
Christopher Bartlett.
Anne Gahl is Director of Alumni Relations at
Taft and Jackie Maloney is Assistant Director.
Illustration from My Great-Aunt Arizona
used by permission of HarperCollins.
Text copyright © 1992 by Gloria Houston.
Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Susan
Condie Lamb.
31
Alumni in the Arts
Rachel Bullock ’84
Shifting Images
By Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
Rachel Bullock ’84 spends much of
her day surrounded by paper. But she
doesn’t work in an office. Instead, the
papers she’s surrounded by combine
into lyrical, dreamlike images of charcoal and chalk.
Rachel conceives of her pictures and
begins working on individual sheets of
paper, each one forming a part of the
image. Her works are large—upward of
five and six feet in height and width.
“I like working large,” she said. “I
like getting into (my art). It can surround
you, like a window.”
As she creates, she places the separate
32
pieces of paper on the floor, collaging
them together.
“I’m trying to get some kind of movement,” she said. “I seem to work on them
for such a long period of time…it feels
like the process gets a lot more organic.”
As she works, the overall image can
change, sometimes dramatically. One
image, called “Bordersong” is a prime
example. It depicts four musicians,
playing in a snow-covered park with
buildings dim in the background. It is a
far cry from where it began, Rachel said.
“‘Bordersong’ started off with a
whole lot of women with guns,” thanks
to the violence of the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on New York City,
she said. “It went through five or six
changes. Each drawing goes through its
own story. Even if I have an idea…it takes
on a life of its own.”
She was flying back to New York
from Switzerland the day the planes hit
and because her studio overlooked the
World Trade Center, Rachel had a hard
time dealing with the aftermath.
“I’ve always looked in that direction,”
she said. “It was very strange coming back
and trying to get back to work.”
In fact, the trauma forced Rachel
to push back a planned exhibition for
several months. She is currently showing
a collection of her recent work at the
Dillon Gallery on Long Island. It can be
seen online at www.dillongallery.com
䉱 Rachel Bullock ’84 in front of “Ice Chain 1”
䉳 “Rooftop,” 2002, charcoal and chalk on
paper, 60 in. x 76.25 in.
䉴 “Girl and Ginger,” 1996, charcoal, chalk,
and acrylic on paper, 74 in. x 46 in.
Though she was always creative,
Rachel said she hadn’t intended on becoming an artist.
“I’m much more of a mountain girl,”
she said. “Maybe a park ranger, or environmental research.”
But after moving to New York City,
she began “dabbling” in oil painting. She
then moved to Norway and began working in the studio of noted Norwegian
artist Even Richardson.
“I did a lot of work in the corner of
his studio,” she said. “It was a good education for me, to be working like that in
somebody’s studio.”
She eventually got her own studio,
and after a couple of years, she returned
to the United States. She worked in oils
until she developed an allergy to the
paints, then moved into acrylics, charcoals and chalks. She said she’s starting
to get back into oil painting now that
the formulations have evolved.
“I’m very much wanting to expand
and get into different mediums and materials,” she said. “Charcoal is very physical.”
The ideas for her pictures come from
inside. Many, such as “Martine in the
Snow,” feature female figures floating or
swirling in water or snow. Others depict
violence, yet even these have the dreamlike quality of a slow-motion event.
“I get lots of pictures in my head that
just seem to present themselves,” she said,
“sometimes clearly and sometimes not
so clearly. I’ll just keep leaning toward
certain subject matter.”
Snow features prominently in her
current collection, perhaps a reflection of
her future plans. In June, Rachel and her
husband, Jason Brandenberg, will move
to Bern, Switzerland.
“A lot of [my art] I understand more
in retrospect,” she admitted. “When I
look at it a year later, a half a year later, I
look at it a lot differently.”
Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84 is an
award-winning journalist who lives in Fort
Wayne, Ind.
33
Alumni in the Arts
Jonathan Selkowitz ’84
Skier Turned Photographer Finds Olympic Gold
By Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
Jonathan Selkowitz ’84 is living a dream.
He spends his days—and sometimes
his nights—traversing snow-covered
mountaintops, making breathtaking
photos of Olympic athletes in action.
His work has graced publications
such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Ski, Skiing, Powder, Freeskier, Backpacker and
Outside Magazine. But had it not been
for a timely fall, Jonathan might just have
been another Wyoming ski bum.
Growing up in Pittsfield, Mass.
Jonathan said he dreamed of skiing the
high Western mountains—so different
than the smaller hills of western Massachusetts. As a Taft student, Jonathan
and Duke Sullivan ’83 founded the Taft
34
Ski Club. After graduating from Colby
College, Jonathan went West, settling
in Jackson, Wyo.
“I worked as a ski coach and ski
instructor for the first six years or so,”
Jonathan recalls, but he got tired of the
seasonal employment. In fact, he was
ready to chuck it all and go back to school
to prepare for a teaching career.
That is, until the fall that injured
his knee.
“I tore my ACL and needed to get it
rebuilt,” he said.
When he was sidelined from the
slopes, Jonathan was taking photography
classes, trying to learn more about what
had been—up until then—just a hobby.
His parents had given him a Ricoh 35
mm camera as a college graduation gift.
“I was an enthusiastic amateur,” he
says. “My earliest photo experience was
taking pictures of my cat as a kid.”
But Jonathan’s work wasn’t your
typical snapshot variety. The workers at
his local photo lab liked his work enough
that they recommended he apply for a
job as an assistant to local commercial
photographer David Swift.
“From that very first day, whoa, I
loved it,” Jonathan said. “It was something I could understand. I could visually
grasp it…I could see how it worked.”
Working with a commercial photographer, Jonathan learned the ins and outs
䉱 Jonathan Selkowitz ’84 behind the lens
TIM HANCOCK
䉳 Bode Miller on the Downhill portion of
the Combined Event of the Salt Lake City
2002 Olympics where he took home the
Silver Medal JONATHAN SELKOWITZ
䉴 Apollo Ohno in the Men’s Short Track
Speed Skating at the Salt Lake City 2002
Olympics JONATHAN SELKOWITZ
of composition, lighting, framing, and
other photographic techniques, along
with the business aspects. But something
was missing, he realized.
When the World Cup ski races
came to Park City, Utah, Jonathan recalled, he knew what he wanted to try:
sports photography.
“Now, I’m a photographer, and I
used to be a ski coach—I can do this
stuff,” he said.
Meaning, his knowledge of what a
skier thinks and does in a race gave him
a unique perspective on what would
make perfect photos. He went to Park
City and “blasted a whole bunch of rolls”
of film just to see how well he could shoot
the speedy skiers.
“I had a long way to go,” in perfecting the style, he admitted. But he
persevered, and thanks to advice from
other professionals, Jonathan began to
develop his individual look.
“One of my objectives is to create
visual motion in still images,” he said.
“The background is definitely one of the
most important parts of the shot. It’s a
hunting-gathering process. You’re hunting
for the terrain that’s going to produce the
most dynamic movement. You’ve got to
look for those shots, and then you’ve got
to find the angle. It’s like a recipe that
you’re always playing with and adjusting.”
He spent four and a half years with Swift
before going out on his own and starting
SelkoPhoto, his own freelance sports photography business (www.selkophoto.com).
SelkoPhoto combines Jonathan’s two
loves: snow sports and photography. But
those loves nearly got him killed in April
2002. Jonathan was preparing to shoot
several athletes for advertisements when
he and his dog Wylie got caught in an
avalanche in Togwottee Pass, northeast
of Jackson,Wyo.
“Wylie was sitting right next to me,
and I took a picture of a tree against the
sky, when all of a sudden I heard this
gigantic crack like 20 two-by-twelves
snapping in half,” he said. “As soon as I
looked up, I saw the crack [in the snow]
above me. It was like somebody had
pulled the rug out from under me. We
were right in the middle.”
Remembering lessons from the various avalanche-survival classes he’d taken,
Jonathan kicked off his skis and tried to
swim with the snow, doing his best to
keep atop the massive slide.
“The whole surface was heaving and
thrusting around me…the noise was like
a bowling alley being dragged across a
parking lot,” he said. “I was getting ready
to get rid of my camera, and I thought I
hope somebody finds this camera and that
these are interesting pictures. I thought
there was a good chance [of dying].”
But fate was with him and his dog.
The two ended up shaken but unhurt
some 1,000 vertical feet below.
Jonathan continues to ascend the
mountains, using his skills as a skier to
know when and what to shoot. His
photos, skillful combinations of timing
and composition, spotlight the grace and
athleticism of pro athletes. Sharp details,
and rich, saturated colors highlight facial expressions and rippling muscles of
athletes such as speed skater Apollo Ohno
and skiers Bode Miller and Tommy Moe.
In each shot, Jonathan says he tries
to capture the dynamics of the sport. And
when he gets the shot, he knows it.
“Sometimes I howl,” he admitted with
a laugh. “When you’ve been working with
an athlete…and you envision it a certain
way—there’s certain times when it happens
and you just know. There’s a great intrinsic
satisfaction of having it all come together.”
Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84 is an
award-winning journalist who lives in Fort
Wayne, Ind.
35
Alumni in the Arts
Palmer West ’92
The Making of a Filmmaker
By Ryan Nerz ’92
When Palmer West ’92 signed up
for Rick Doyle’s “Video I” class as
a Taft middler, he wasn’t thinking
Hollywood. He was just trying to fulfill
an arts requirement.
Palmer remembers the day Doyle
approached him, at the end of pottery
class. “He asked if I’d ever done any
video. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I wasn’t doing so well
in pottery, so it seemed like a good time
to change my artistic focus.” If not for
this encounter, he insists he wouldn’t
be what he is today—a producer of
independent Hollywood feature films.
The first day of class, Doyle showed
Bridge on the River Kwai, one of Palmer’s
36
favorite films. He dissected scenes in
minute detail, showing each camera
angle and pinpointing continuity problems. “He would say, ‘See, how the
cigarette’s in his left hand on this shot,
and then you cut back and it’s in his
right hand?’ He demystified the movie
magic, and showed its imperfections.”
Palmer’s first attempt at movie
magic was called Fresh Man. It starred
classmate Charles Blumenstein as a
freshman hero who drinks a potion that
strengthens him against the brutalities
of the senior class. In a pivotal scene,
Fresh Man spins his nemesis—played
by Leonard Tucker ’92, a Taft teacher—
on his finger like a basketball.
His senior year, West was nominated for a regional Emmy award for
acting in Doyle’s short film, Looking for
Lake Fairies. Spurred by this success,
and uninspired by the technical emphases of film schools like N.Y.U. and
U.S.C., he pursued a theatrical acting
degree at the Univ. of Montana.
“Theater’s been around longer than
religion, and I wanted to figure out
why. So I went to a theatrically-based
school, and fell in love with the craft
of telling stories.”
After graduation, Palmer moved to
New York to start a production company
with his sister. Sibling Entertainment’s
first feature, Saturn, was a nightmarish
learning experience. The director was
difficult, the film went over budget,
and Palmer couldn’t sell the final product. But the experience had an upside.
During postproduction of Saturn he
䉳 Actress Ellen
Burstyn in Requiem
for a Dream,
produced by
Palmer West
䉴 Still from
Waking Life, a film
done entirely as
paintings
met Darren Aronofsky, the director of
his next film.
After reading Aronofsky’s Requiem
for a Dream script for the first time,
Palmer was shell-shocked. “It was one
of the most depressing stories I’d
ever read.” Adapted from the novel
by Hubert Selby Jr., the screenplay
chronicled the harrowing downfall of
four drug addicts. But Aronofsky broke
the movie down scene-by-scene, convincing Palmer it needed to be grim to
have resonance. Effects like dilating
pupils, spinning rooms, and living
refrigerators would allow the audience
to get high with the characters, then
accompany them down a long, queasy
slide to the lowest of lows.
It worked. The message was so
strong, in fact, that a prominent critic
at the Cannes Film Festival walked out
of a press screening feeling nauseous.
Still, despite a limited theater release
due to its “unrated” status, the film was
a critical success, garnering praise for its
innovative style and a Best Actress Oscar
nomination for Ellen Burstyn. “People
have the wildest reactions to that movie,”
Palmer said. “From bitter anger, that we
put them through that…to epiphany.”
Meanwhile, he had broken away
from his sister, who was focusing on
documentaries, to start Los Angelesbased Thousand Words Productions.
Knowing his next project would help
define the company, he employed his
filmmaking motto: “If you’re going to
fail, fail boldly. Don’t fail making You’ve
Got Mail.” This led him to Waking Life,
an animated philosophical fantasia by the
Austin, Texas-based director, Richard
Linklater, known for cult classics like
Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
Linklater envisioned Waking Life
as a 90-minute moving oil painting.
To accomplish this, he shot the movie
digitally using live actors, then had it
hand-painted by 30 animators in Austin.
Each minute of footage took as many
as 250 hours to paint, using an updated
form of “rotoscoping,” the animation
technique used in films like Snow White.
The result is a beautifully realized daydream that sacrifices plot to examine the
ethereal nature of existence.
A producer of artistically risky
films, West still understands that those
who survive longest in filmmaking
“realize it’s a business, and try to slip
their art into the business.” That said,
his latest offering, The United States of
Leland, leans more toward the artistic
than the commercial. Co-produced
with Kevin Spacey and recently featured at the Sundance Film Festival,
the story unravels the twisted motives
of a teenager imprisoned for murder.
And this fall, Thousand Words will
release its most commercial film to
date, The Clearing, starring Robert
Redford and Willem Dafoe. “It’s packaged as a Robert Redford kidnapping
movie,” Palmer said. “But I see it as a
lot more than that.”
Though he admits that producing
and financing feature films is a form
of high-stakes gambling, all signs point
to a stacked deck for Palmer West’s
future. Still, he doesn’t forget his past.
He thanks Mr. Doyle in the “Special
Thanks” section at the end of each
film, and credits Taft for instilling selfsufficiency. “Taft teaches you to stand
on your own two feet. And in a cutthroat industry like this, that’s an
important attitude to have.”
Ryan Nerz ’92 is a freelance writer whose
work has appeared in the Village Voice
and Esquire.
37
PETER FINGER
The
PETER FINGER
Picture yourself back in your assigned
seat: it’s Bingham Auditorium on a Tuesday morning, and it’s not the seat up in
the front that you earned as a senior,
but the first seat you had as a new student. You are about to listen to six
students speak, for three minutes each,
on their experiences as recipients of the
Kilbourne Grant, a summer arts enrichment program created and endowed by
John Kilbourne, Class of ’58. These
students have spent a portion of their
summers pursuing their passions all
over the country in endeavors such as a
drumming program at a college of music, a painting program at an art school,
a dance workshop with a world-famous
dance company, a pottery program at a
New England craft workshop, a program in musical theater in New York
City, and an intensive cello playing
workshop (see article page 14). Each one
different, each one challenging and
wonderful. If you didn’t realize it when
you chose Taft over other schools, by this
time it is glaringly apparent: the arts are
vibrant here. Our program is so fully
integrated into our community that
seldom a day goes by without an opportunity to engage in some form of
artistic expression.
From the ballet barre in the Pailey
Dance Studio to the potters’ wheels in
the Humanities Art Room, from behind
the curtains in Bingham to the small
circle gathered around the Steinway in
the choral room, art is alive at Taft. Everywhere you look on the Taft campus
there is evidence of this vitality. You
marvel at the student drawings, paint-
ings and photographs that adorn every
inch of free wall space around the
school, or visit Loueta Chickadaunce’s
art room and feel as though you have
stepped into a one-room schoolhouse,
with a beginning student learning the
basics of charcoal and perspective next
to the student analyzing his own bone
structure to create a self-portrait bust
for Advanced Studio Art. Walk into
the viewing room and catch Claudia
Black’s advanced placement art history
class, or pass them in the hall on their
way to New York for a field trip to a
Taft Today
By Bruce Fifer
at
39
museum, while back in the studio Joanna
Schieffelin demonstrates the craft of
throwing a pot to a group of anxious
learners in a pottery class. Next you
enter the Mark W. Potter ’48 Gallery
where you are moved by an environmental photo exhibit with striking and
reverberant images, the work of photography teacher, Laura Harrington. Visit
her photography studio and meet students engaged in learning the process of
developing in one room while, in another, students explore the art of digital
photography. In the Black Box you find
an acting class or a new production by
Helena Fifer or Rick Doyle, always different in scale, design, and concept. As
you walk towards the Jigger Shop, the
sounds of T.J. Thompson’s Chamber
Ensemble and Jazz Band fill the hallways. You might catch the refrain of an
early Chuck Berry song coming from
Taft Dance Ensemble, 1991
40
the History of Rock and Roll in the
music classroom, or the tinkling of piano keys as beginners tentatively learn
their pieces in the piano lab. This area,
though relatively small in size, is always
a wonderfully noisy and lively part of
the school, with 10 adjunct instrumental teachers and several students all
coming and going throughout the week.
Further along, the rhythmic movements
of Elizabeth Barriser’s dance ensemble
reflect in the mirrored walls; perhaps her
Dance for Athletes class, a large and enthusiastic group of young men and
women learning to move like dancers,
will meet in a later block. Finally, you
walk back towards Lincoln Lobby,
where the majestic echo of Collegium’s
voices resounds through the main hallway of C.P.T., reminding all who come
to Taft that music is an integral part of
our lives here.
An Arts Department this alive requires
modern facilities and strong continued
support from its community. In our
never-ending quest to maintain the
superb standards that currently exist, the
Arts Department ceaselessly strives to
meet its mission, in the words of Horace
Taft: “to educate the whole person.”
Many of you will make, or have
already made, the arts your career,
perhaps because of your time here at
Taft. For others, what you saw, heard,
and did while at Taft may have increased
your enjoyment and appreciation of the
arts. In either case, there continues to
be a dynamic world of performing
and visual arts both inside and outside
of these brick buildings.
Bruce Fifer is head of Taft’s Arts
Department and holds the Music
Department’s Marvin Chair.
Reunion
Schedule of Events
Thursday, May 22
6:30 p.m.
Cocktails and Dinner, Class of 1943
Watertown Golf Club, Watertown
9:45–10:55
Cocktails and Dinner, Class of 1953
Heritage, Southbury
Roman Comedy, Richard Cobb, H003
Calculus I Honors,
Ted Heavenrich, W305
UM English, Christopher Torino, A213
8:00–3:00
Taft Golf Tournament,
Watertown Golf Club
11:00–11:45 French III Honors, Alison Carlson, C023
Int. & Adv. Drawing,
Loueta Chickadaunce, H016
Historical Fiction,
Steven Schieffelin, W306
11:00–1:00
School Lunch
9:00–11:30
12:00
Class Luncheons,
Classes of ’33, ’38, ’43, ’48, and ’53,
3:30
Boys’ Thirds Lacrosse vs. Pomperaug
10:30–11:30 Taft Today and Tomorrow with
Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78
and selected students, Choral Room
4:00–5:00
Early Registration, Main Circle
11:45
Assembly and Parade, Main Circle
5:00
Service of Remembrance
Christ Church on the Green
12:30
6:00
Old Guard Dinner, Headmaster’s House
176 Guernseytown Road
6:30–
Reunion Class Dinners
Classes of ’58, ’63, ’68, ’73, ’78, ’83, and ’93
Alumni Luncheon
The Donald F. McCullough ’42
Field House
• Announcement of new Alumni Trustee
• Presentation of the Citation of Merit
• Remarks by Headmaster,
Willy MacMullen ’78
12:45
Children’s Program,
McCullough Field House
2:00
Boys’ Varsity Baseball vs. Choate
Boys’ Varsity Tennis vs. Kent
Friday, May 23
Saturday, May 24
Student Guided Campus Tours,
Main Circle
7:00–8:00
School Breakfast
7:30–12:00
Registration, Main Circle
Alumni vs. Boys’ Varsity Lacrosse
7:50–11:45
Classes meet
The following are a sampling of the many
classes open to alumni:
Student Guided Campus Tours,
leaving from McCullough Field House
7:50–8:35
Integrated Science II,
Laura Erickson, W121
American Social Justice,
Lynette Sumpter ’90, ISP1
Current Events,
Jonathan Willson ’82, W216
2:30
24th Annual Fun Run, 1 Mile Run
William Weaver Track
5:30
Headmaster’s Supper, MacMullens’ Home
176 Guernseytown Road
7:30
Class Reunions, Classes of ’88 and ’98
Taft Bulletin
The Taft School
Watertown, CT 06795-2100
860-945-7777
www.TaftAlumni.com
Non-profit Org.
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Alumni in the Arts

Transcription

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