The Pomona College Glee Club, under the direction of Professor Donna Di Grazia, performs in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome during the group’s spring tour of Italy.
Culture
Buonasera Glee Club
This May, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice will ring with the voices of the Pomona College Glee Club, as the group brings its annual concert tour for the first time to Italy. Each year after the end of the spring semester, the Glee Club takes a little piece of Pomona on the road, performing in venues across the country and around the world. Last year’s East Coast tour included a performance at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. (below). The last time the troop went transatlantic was in 2012, when they performed at venues across Poland, England and Germany, including the famous Thomaskirche in Leipzig (Bach’s home church for nearly 30 years), St. James’s Piccadilly in London, and the Berliner Dom in Berlin.
For Sagehens abroad or those who plan to be abroad in May, here’s the complete schedule (all are concert performances unless otherwise noted):
- Basilica San Nicolo, Lecco (Lake Como region), Italy—May 19, 9 p.m.
- Chiesa San Salvador, Venice, Italy—May 21, 7 p.m.
- St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice, Italy—May 22, noon (featured choir at mass)
- Chiesa di Santa Caterina, Pisa, Italy—May 24, 9 p.m. (concert sponsored by UNESCO.)
- Basilica Santa Trinita, Florence, Italy—May 25, 9 p.m.
- Chiesa San Marcello, Rome, Italy—May 27, 9 p.m.
- St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Rome, Italy —May 28, 5 p.m. (featured choir at mass)
Artwork by James Hueter ’46 Acquired by The Huntington Library
The sculpture-painting, “The Figure Rising,” by artist James Hueter has been acquired by The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA, for their permanent collection of American Art. James studied art at Pomona and received his M.F.A. at CGS. He has been an active artist since then and continues to show and work. A 60-year retrospective of his work, curated by Steve Comba, associate director of Pomona College Museum of Art, was shown at the Claremont Museum of Art in 2009, and he will have a show at Bunny Gunner Gallery in Claremont in May 2016. See photo of James with his work at the Huntington. He and his family had a private tour of the gallery space in Jan. with Hal Nelson, curator of Decorative Art, and Jessica Todd Smith, chief curator of American Art.
New Work by Linda Kawasaki Yoshizawa ’78
A new work by Linda Kawasaki Yoshizawa ’78 was included in the visual arts portion of the 10th annual “East Meets West” art and poetry exhibit, integrating visual and literary arts, held in the Civic Center at the main Livermore, California, library. Yoshizawa is a printmaker from the San Francisco Bay Area whose artwork reflects the mixing of two cultural sensibilities—American and Japanese. Her nature-inspired drawings are used as symbols of our own struggles and yearnings. She uses colors, values, and textures to elicit mood, questions, and a sense of serenity. Her monotype printing technique balances serendipity and design with a personal aesthetic that reflects her Japanese-American identity. An art major at Pomona, she is a member of the California Society of Printmakers and the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. Her work is included in many personal and corporate collections across the country, including Kaiser Permanente in San Ramon and Pleasanton, California.
Vertigo@Midnight Art Exhibit Explores Afrofuturism
THE ART EXHIBIT “Vertigo@Midnight: New Visual AfroFuturisms & Speculative Migrations,” on view Feb. 23 – 
March 6, at Pomona College and Scripps College, invites viewers to contemplate the visceral, spiritual, emotional and political dimensions of diaspora.
The artists from around the world include Chakaia Booker, Michele Bringier, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Krista Franklin, Renee Stout, Lee Blalock, Chris Christion, Oluwatobi Clement, Sydney Dyson, Sharon Grier, Karen Hampton, Zeal Harris, David Huffman, Lek Jeyifous, Ademola Olugebefola, Glynnis Reed, Cauleen Smith, Jaye Thomas, Sheila Walker, Jessica Wimbley and Saya Woolfalk.
The artists are linked through their interest in and reimaginings of race, gender, the body, space and time. The artwork collected here considers the tensions and joys of identity through multiplicity, remixed histories, storytelling, memories, fragmentations and reinventions, disorientation and vertiginous boundary crossings.
The Vertigo@Midnight exhibition is hosted by two campus galleries – the Pomona College Studio Art Hall Chan Gallery, (370 N. Columbia Ave., Claremont) and the Scripps College Clark Humanities Museum (981 N. Amherst Ave., Claremont). The opening reception, with readings by Kima Jones, Peter Harris, and 5Cs students, will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 25, at 4:15 p.m., at the Clark Museum. Both museums are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday, 12 – 5 pm.
Curated by Pomona College Prof. Valorie Thomas, “Vertigo@Midnight” opens dialogue about disorientation and equilibrium through her theorizing of African Diasporic Vertigo as a cultural idiom that crosses borders, cultures and languages.
Related Events:
- Feb 21, Film/Performance, 8 p.m., King Britt presents “Brother From Another Planet (Recontextualized),” Smith Campus Center (Edmunds Ballroom, 170 E. Sixth St., Claremont)
- February 27-28 & March 6-7, Film Screenings, AfroFuturisms and the Speculative Arts, 12-6 p.m., Crookshank Hall (140 W. Sixth St., Claremont)
- March 4, Artist Talk, Jessica Wimbley, 1:15 p.m. with reception at 4 p.m., featuring a dance performance by Sesa Bakenra (Claremont McKenna College ’15), Pomona College Studio Art Hall, Room 122.
- March 5, Artist Talk, Claude Fiddler, 4:15 p.m., Pomona College Studio Art Hall, Room 122.
- March 6-7, Film Screenings, AfroFuturisms and the Speculative Arts, 12-6 p.m., Pomona College Studio Art Hall, Room 122.
For more information on AfroFuturisms and the Speculative Arts, contact valorie.thomas@pomona.edu.
—Cynthia Peters
Story Quilt Exhibit Reveals Reactions to Trayvon Martin Shooting
“AMERICAN SPRING, A CAUSE FOR JUSTICE,” 23 story quilts that narrate the Trayvon Martin shooting in 
Florida, will be on display at Pomona College, beginning Feb. 23. The quilts come from the Fiber Artists of Hope Network and reveal reactions to Martin’s death in 2012 and hopes for a better America.
The exhibition will be open Feb. 23 to March 8, 2015, at the Pomona College Bridges Auditorium (450 N. College Way, Claremont) and is free to the public. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, Feb. 26, with lectures at 6 p.m. and the reception at 7 p.m.
The exhibition is open on Monday–Wednesday and Friday-Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. On Thursdays, the exhibition will be open 1-7 p.m. in connection with the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Art After Hours program. On Sundays, the exhibit will be open 12-3 p.m.
Story quilting expands on traditional textile-arts techniques to record, in fabric, events of personal or historical significance. Through the accessibility of their colors, patterns and symbols, the quilts of ”American Spring: A Cause for Justice” relate narratives that enable conversations about sensitive topics from our national history, furthering the discussion of racial reconciliation in America. This exhibition is curated by Theresa Shellcroft and is organized by the Fiber Artists of Hope in Victorville, Calif.
The quilts have been exhibited to the Congressional Black Caucus, in Atlanta, Baltimore, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Marion (IN), Philadelphia, Victorville and Washington, DC, among other locations.
Associate Dean Jan Collins-Eaglin saw the quilts at the African American Quilting Guild meeting in Los Angeles last year. “Each quilt tells a story,” she says. “They’re very evocative and interpretations of what happened. I really wanted our students to be able to see them. Then there were the shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York.
“Through art, we can heal, and this has that power. We can begin to talk about what these artists hope for, and what we hope for. There are so many little details in the quilts, and as you look at them more closely, you begin to talk about them.”
—Cynthia Peters
Big Laughs for Joel McHale at Little Bridges
Comedian Joel McHale entertained a packed house of Claremont Colleges students at Little Bridges on Saturday night.
McHale, who is the host of “Talk Soup” and stars on the sitcom “Community,” did his research, commenting that Claremont is like Tolkein’s Shire and ribbing the audience on the differences between the colleges. From his time hosting E!’s “The Soup,” McHale shared stories of angering reality TV stars like Tyra Banks and the Kardashians, as well as shared a tribute joke for Joan Rivers, before segueing into stories about raising young sons.
He even took a crack at Pomona’s beloved mascot: “Cecil the Sagehen is not very intimidating. It’s like, ‘We’re gonna beat you… if you were to eat us and we were undercooked. We’re gonna salmonella you all over the field!’”
The event was co-sponsored by the CUC Holmes Fund; Bridges Auditorium, which produced the event; and Bridges Hall of Music, which hosted the event. Each of The Claremont Colleges received a set amount of free tickets, distributed through the respective college’s student affairs staff.
Pomona College often hosts top-bill comedians, including Wanda Sykes, Eddie Izzard and Aziz Ansari in recent years.
Pomona Pair Mix Alt-Pop, Entrepreneurship and Environmental Activism
Skylar Funk Boorman ’10 and Merritt Graves ’10 have spent their years since Pomona successfully combining their love of music with the fight against climate change.
Their outlet is Trapdoor Social, a band self-described as “Los Angeles Alternative Energy Rock and Sustainability Activism.” They recently released their second album and have been touring, doing shows throughout the Midwest and West Coast. The music videos for their alt-pop songs from their first album “Death of a Friend,” which featured Death Cab for Cutie’s well-known drummer Jason McGerr, have drawn large viewership online and radio airplay.
Boorman and Graves channel their anxieties about climate change and other environmental issues into Trapdoor Social’s music, with lyrics and melodies ranging from stormy to upbeat, nervous to hopeful. “We really do want to create an anthem for the environmental movement — a popular song that has a message that gets people pumped about social responsibility and leaving a great legacy,” says Boorman.
The pair met at Pomona on Orientation Adventure and developed a friendship through such courses as Green Urbanism and Farms and Gardens in the Environmental Analysis Program under the tutelage of Professors Rick Hazlett and Char Miller, who has attended several of Trapdoor Social’s performances, describing even their unplugged gigs as “electric.”
Boorman was active in music while at Pomona, singing in Men’s Blue and White and taking music theory courses. Graves managed his own hedge fund from an office in the Claremont Village while using profits to found his company Farmscape.
“One day in Intro to Environmental Analysis, Rick Hazlett was talking about L.A sprawl. And it just clicked that we’d never get to go back and redesign L.A with the appropriate density, but we could make the best of the error by farming the sprawl,” Graves remembers.
Now, Farmscape operates more than 150 farms in the Los Angeles Area. With 12 employees including seven full-time farmers, Farmscape designs, installs, and helps to maintain urban farms that range in size from rooftop garden plots to a larger farms used by restaurants. Graves also helped create the company Agrisaurus, a web app that helps gardeners to plan and manage their own plots.
Integrating community work is important to the pair. They held a presale for their second album as a fundraiser, working with partners Everybody Solar and Grid Alternatives to donate their profits toward the purchase of solar panels for Los Angeles nonprofit Homeboy Industries, which re-trains former gang members in Los Angeles.
Among all the activities, Boorman and Graves work to find time for their songs. Striking a balance in music with an environmental message can be difficult, Graves says. “On one hand we don’t want to be preachy and play into stereotypes, but on the other hand we don’t to play so coy that the message is lost.” A growing fan base indicates that the duo is on the right track.
The Summer of Turrell
The master of light and space delivered the remark with a smile. “I have a business of selling blue sky and colored air,” James Turrell ’65 told a group of arts reporters after they had previewed his long-awaited retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But if he counts exhibitions as sales, business is extraordinarily good this year. While Dividing the Light, Turrell’s Skyspace at Pomona College, continues to attract students, alumni and visitors to Draper Courtyard, celebrations of his work are popping up from coast to coast.
The centerpiece of the “Turrell festival,” as LACMA director Michael Govan calls it, is a trio of major museum exhibitions in Los Angeles, Houston and New York. LACMA’s James Turrell: A Retrospective is a five-decade survey, composed of 56 works, including sculptures, prints, drawings, watercolors, photographs and installations. “This is the largest exhibition of works by this artist assembled anywhere at any time,” Govan says. And it will have an unusually long, 10-month run (ending April 6, 2014), so that the expected thousands of visitors can experience the artist’s mind-bending installations as he wishes—slowly, silently, and singly or in small groups. As the museum director reminds guests, “The slower you go, the more you get.”
Rendering by Andreas Tjeldflaat. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Turrell traces his interest in light to an art history class at Pomona, where he began to see the beam of light emitted by a slide projector as something to look at, not just a means of illuminating something else. As his work evolved, light became his primary material and a path to perceptual discovery. The retrospective follows his career from early light projections in darkened rooms to holograms and “immersive environments” that surround viewers with other-worldly orchestrations of colored light and deceptive space.One large section of the show is devoted to Turrell’s Roden Crater project, which began to take shape in 1977 when the Dia Art Foundation provided funds for the artist to buy a dormant volcano near Arizona’s Painted Desert. With a goal of transforming the crater into an observatory of celestial events and perceptual phenomena, he intended to complete the job around 1990. Challenges of fundraising, engineering and construction have repeatedly extended the project. Now Turrell jokes, “I have said I would finish in the year 2000 and I will stick with that.” He likens himself to a graduate student who can’t seem to complete a doctoral thesis. But his biggest obstacle is the need for an unspecified amount of money, which he concedes is in “the millions.”
Despite persistent delays with Turrell’s magnum opus, the museum exhibitions attest to his productivity in other areas. Over the years, he has made a wide variety of drawings, prints and sculptural pieces related to the crater, as well as installations including floating volumes of projected light, environments that heighten perceptual awareness, and spatially disorienting Ganzfelds. None of his architectural Skyspaces are at the museums because of the difficulty of cutting holes in their walls and ceilings, but he has completed 82 of these structures, each tailored to a specific site. He has also developed Perceptual Cells, designed for one or two people to recline while watching a constantly changing program of phased and strobed light. In the cell at LACMA, called Light Reignfall, a single viewer lies on a narrow bed that slides into a closed chamber.
In Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts has devoted a huge portion of its gallery space to James Turrell: The Light Inside (through Septembber 22). Named for the subterranean installation that connects the museum’s two buildings under a street, the show is entirely drawn from the MFAH’s extensive collection. The museum acquired its first Turrells in the mid-1990s and went on to amass a holding that spans the artist’s career. While some works in the exhibition are familiar to the museum’s core audience, Tycho, a 1967 double-projection, is making its public debut. So is Aurora B, a 2010-11 piece from Turrell’s Tall Glass series, in which LED light is programmed to produce subtle shifts of color on rectangular panels of etched glass over long periods of time.
In New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim has turned its spectacular rotunda into a Turrell. Called Aten Reign (and scheduled to remain in place until September 25), the installation is billed as “one of the most dramatic transformations of the museum ever conceived.” Turrell has converted the soaring central space of the Frank Lloyd Wright building into an enormous cylindrical volume of fluctuating light, both natural and artificial. Instead of opening to the sky, Skyspace-style, Aten Reign surrounds visitors with concentric lines of glowing color, which lead to the glass-covered oculus at the apex of the historic structure. Adjacent galleries offer more conventional works by Turrell as a complement to the dramatic installation.
The three exhibitions evolved from tentative plans for a traveling retrospective, says Govan, a long-time Turrell associate and former director of the Dia Art Foundation. Leaders of the Los Angeles and Houston museums began a conversation that expanded to include the Guggenheim. “But then we realized that James Turrell exhibitions don’t travel in the typical way because you end up building most of the works on site,” Govan says. The solution was “to do three shows all at once, but with different content.”
Serious Turrellians must see all three, of course. But that isn’t all. Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery has opened a new space at 1201 S. La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles, with Turrell’s assistance. The inaugural show of his work has closed, but he has a continuing presence in the gallery’s lighting and a Skyspace, furnished with comfortable chairs. And in Las Vegas, he has designed an installation for The Shops at Crystals, a high-end fashion center that’s encased in an explosive arrangement of angular walls. Turrell’s outdoor spectacle of changing colored light is attuned to the arrivals and departures of trains at the adjacent monorail station.
Govan calls the Los Angeles museum’s show “a little bit of a homecoming” for “a local boy gone good.” Turrell, who was born in L.A. and grew up in Pasadena, is pleased that his work has settled into an exceptionally large chunk of LACMA’s real estate—an entire floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and about a third of the Resnick Pavilion—for an unusually long time. But when reporters and critics question him about his artistic vision, he gets back to his favorite subject: human perception.
“I am very interested in how we perceive because that is how we construct the reality in which we live,” he says. “We all have perception that we have learned. I like to tweak that a little bit, or push you on that. In the Skyspaces, we all know that the sky is blue. We just don’t realize that we give the sky its blueness. We are not very well aware of how much we are part of the making of what we perceive. That’s what I enjoy giving to you. Basically, I have always thought that I use the material, light, to give you perception.”
This summer three major American museums are presenting exhibitions highlighting the achievements of James Turrell ‘65, best known for his large-scale light installations.
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
James Turrell: A Retrospective
Through April 6, 2014
The first major Turrell retrospective survey gathers approximately 50 works spanning nearly five decades, including his early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional holograms. A section is also devoted to Turrell’s masterwork in process, Roden Crater. www.lacma.org
THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
James Turrell: The Light Inside
Through Sept. 22, 2013
Titled after the museum’s iconic Turrell permanent installation The Light Inside (1999), and centered on the collection of additional work by the artist at the MFAH, the Houston exhibition makes several of the artist’s installations accessible to the public for the first time. www.mfah.org
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
James Turrell
Through Sept. 25, 2013 Turrell’s first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980 focuses
on the artist’s explorations of perception, light, color and space, with a special focus on the role of site-specificity in his practice. At its core is a major new project that recasts the Guggenheim rotunda as an enormous volume filled with shifting natural and artificial light. www.guggenheim.org
When Brubeck played Pomona
This noteworthy letter from Andrew Hoyem ’57 appears in our spring issue, which will soon hit mailboxes and appear online:
When the great jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck died on Dec. 5, 2012, a day short of his 92nd birthday, some members of the Class of 1957 reminisced about their having sponsored a concert by the Brubeck quartet in Little Bridges 58 years earlier.
This was mainly the doing of our classmate Marvin Nathan, who was a big fan of Brubeck and had gotten to know the members of the quartet the summer after our freshman year, in 1954, when the musicians had a three-month gig at Zardi’s in Hollywood. Nathan went to the club nightly during the vacation and returned to college full of enthusiasm for the new style of jazz played by Brubeck. Marvin recounts: “That Christmas I gave the four of them their first matching set of ties, handkerchiefs and cuff links, which, I think, they wore at the Pomona concert.” He made the arrangements directly with Brubeck, and a committee of the Class of ’57 was formed to produce the concert. Brubeck was the first to play college dates, lifting jazz out of smoke-filled clubs. Those were simpler times: no agent or manager or record company was intermediary. We just asked Brubeck, and later, for another concert sponsored by the class, Andre Previn; they said yes, turned up with their sidemen and played and got paid.
But paying the musicians required a paying audience. Steve Glass ’57 and subsequently professor of classics at Pitzer College, recalls that early ticket sales for the Brubeck concert were going slowly. His classmate and future wife Sandy was in charge of publicity and she was worried. In those days, West Coast/Cool Jazz was a relatively arcane phenomenon. Then, shortly before the concert, the Nov. 8, 1954 issue of Time magazine had Dave Brubeck on the cover, only the second jazz musician to be so featured (after Louis Armstrong), and the place was packed.
For the program I drew caricatures of the musicians: Brubeck (piano), Paul Desmond (alto sax), Bob Bates (bass) and Joe Dodge (drums). Marvin Nathan wrote the notes. Reflecting on the concert, he writes: “We caught the group at its acme, in the wake of the remarkable recordings of Jazz at Storyville and Jazz at Oberlin, which, for my money, are the two greatest albums Dave and Paul ever did.”
Marvin left Pomona after two years to study jazz saxophone at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music but decided the instrument should be left to the likes of John Coltrane and instead became a humanities professor. All of us amateur promoters remained jazz aficionados. Why, just this morning I refolded my fedora into a pork-pie hat and set off looking the hepcat I wished to be.
— Andrew Hoyem ’57