Culture

Pomona Pair Mix Alt-Pop, Entrepreneurship and Environmental Activism

March 21, 2014 by Emma Paine '14 Comments Off

trapdoorphoto1

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

June 24, 2013 by Suzanne Muchnic Comments Off

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

March 15, 2013 by Andrew Hoyem '57 Comments Off

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

Students give vinyl records a spin at KSPC

April 23, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Digital rules these days in commercial radio, but the turntables are still turning at KSPC (88.7 FM). Last Friday, the campus radio station held a “Vinyl 101” workshop to “encourage students who didn’t grow up with records to get to know” the medium, says station director Erica Tyron. “There are a lot of things that we have that were never re-issued digitally.”

While visitors hung out and played old records from the station’s still-extensive collection, Tyron noted that some students find working with LPs a tad intimidating because of the direct contact with the surface of the record: “People just get nervous that you’re going to break something.”

Not so for jazz deejay Nathan Schauer ’12, who likes records, in part, because they make it easy to play a particular part of a song. When Schauer was growing up, his dad sometimes played LPs, but “I never really knew how vinyl worked until I started here.” He is one of the roughly 30 percent of KSPC deejays who still make use of the vinyl collection. And with the medium’s recent comeback, the station is even seeing more new releases arrive in LP form these days.

Still, for student deejays the thrill is often found in thumbing through the well-worn album sleeves of yore. “It’s a lot of fun to just find something,” says Ella Schwalb ’14, who has an underground music show. “You don’t really know what to expect.”

Sharon Paul ’78 will take the baton as Pomona hosts choral festival for first time

February 18, 2012 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival.

“I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.”

Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, this month, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival, set for Feb. 25. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history. Per tradition, the host school’s choral director selects the festival’s clinician.

Donna Di Grazia, Pomona’s choral director and music professor, knew exactly who she wanted. Di Grazia, who is coordinating the festival, points not only to Paul’s talent as a musician and choral conductor, but also to the fact that her “professional work serves as a terrific example of how a liberal arts education can set a foundation that can lead to a significant career in the performing arts.”

Paul, who entered Pomona at age 16, is equally pleased. “I’m so excited, I feel silly. I’m so happy to be coming back,” says Paul, who lives in Oregon with her husband of 16 years and their seventh-grade son. “I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time at Pomona, and the further I get in my career, the more I realize how seminal that time was. I can’t wait to walk the campus, be in the music building, just remember.”

Paul has directed choirs around the globe—Berlin, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore and elsewhere. Holding an M.F.A from UCLA and a D.M.A. in choral conducting from Stanford University, Paul currently serves as professor of music, chair of vocal and choral studies and director of choral activities at the University of Oregon. For eight years prior, she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and conductor of the organization’s acclaimed ensembles, Chorissima and Virtuose. Paul joined the SFGC following what she called a “quirky career move,” having left a tenured professor position at Chico State to do so.

As clinician of the 2012 festival, which will bring together about a dozen Southern California collegiate choirs to perform for each other, Paul will provide expert critiques of each choir’s performance, lead a two-hour master class comprised of eight singers from each ensemble and conduct these top vocalists in a performance. She also will coach student conductors during the master class. Visiting performers will find in Paul an engaging conductor and teacher, enduringly influenced by her former instructor, Leonard Pronko, a Pomona professor since 1957. “He was the most engaging educator I’d ever seen, and that stuck with me,” Paul says.

Still Backing Up the Bard

October 7, 2011 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

English Professor Emeritus Martha Andresen, a seven-time winner of Pomona’s Wig Award for excellence in teaching, has been keeping quite busy since her “retirement” in 2006. Pomona Web Editor Laura Tiffany reports the Shakespeare scholar has been lecturing and working on a book, Caught in the Act: A Passion for Shakespeare, among other pursuits. On Oct. 4, the Shakespeare Center of L.A. honored Andresen with a special Crystal Quill Award “for her stellar international reputation for Shakespeare scholarship, publications and teaching.”

Also receiving Crystal Quills were attorney Bert Fields, author of Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare, and film director Roland Emmerich, who also has waded into the who-wrote-Shakespeare? debate with his new film Anonymous. “Both Emmerich and Fields suggest that someone other than the celebrated man from Stratford might have written Shakespeare’s plays,” notes LAStageTimes.com.

But Andresen is having none of that, telling Tiffany: “Not the Earl of Oxford, not Frances Bacon, Lord Stanley, or Queen Elizabeth, but William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, wrote William Shakespeare’s plays!”

Shakespeare Center founding Artistic Director Ben Donenberg told LAStageTimes.com that Andresen’s “position that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare also added a nice dimension to the awardees, but the primary reason is her contribution to the legacy of Shakespeare enthusiasts that she cultivated in many walks of life.”

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