The Pomona College Museum of Art has a new building under construction, and now it also has a new name, in honor of Janet Inskeep Benton ’79, whose lead gift of $15 million is helping to fund the new structure.

Opening in fall 2020, Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College or, more simply, The Benton, will provide a space for some of SoCal’s most compelling and experimental exhibitions. The 33,000-square-foot facility is under construction where the campus meets the lively Claremont Village and the city’s civic center.

For decades, Pomona College has played a key part in shaping innovative artists on the edge of L.A., including Helen Pashgian ’56, James Turrell ’65, Peter Shelton ’73, the late Marcia Hafif ’51 and the late Chris Burden ’69. The Benton’s collection will include pieces from all of these alumni, and future exhibitions will carry forward the College’s emphasis on cutting-edge art in the Los Angeles region.

“The Benton will be a rewarding visit for all who seek to venture beyond the expected and to explore the diversity of California,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “This new museum will benefit our students, our community and the SoCal art scene in which our campus has long played an important role.”

Designed by Machado Silvetti Associates and Gensler, the new structure with cast-in-place concrete walls is accented with wood, glass and a distinctive sloping roofline. Built to LEED gold standards of sustainability, the U-shaped museum will define a central courtyard, with a pavilion for events.

Construction of the $44 million facility, located on the west side of College Avenue between Bonita Avenue and Second Street in Claremont, is set to be completed by fall 2019, launching the yearlong process of moving the museum’s extensive collection to the new facility and installing opening exhibitions.

The new building replaces the existing Pomona College Museum of Art. Housed in a ’50s-era facility, PCMA continues to operate across the street from the ongoing construction. Exhibitions there will continue through May 2020, with the new museum set to open later that same year.

The Benton will continue the current museum’s Project Series, focused on contemporary SoCal artists, which has included exhibitions from Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Ken Gonzales-Day, Amanda Ross-Ho and many others. The museum also has been part of the Getty Foundation’s celebrated Pacific Standard Time projects in collaboration with institutions across Los Angeles.

Built on three levels, the new building is conceived and designed as a teaching museum, fostering instruction within collection areas and exhibition spaces, creating opportunities for active encounters with original works of art.The Benton will provide state-of-the-art storage and ease of access for a growing permanent collection of over 14,000 objects.

“Pomona College has long been at the center of artistic excellence and experimentation for Southern California,” said Museum Director and Professor of Art Kathleen Howe. “The Benton continues our commitment to presenting vibrant contemporary art, intimately engaged with the issues of our day, while bringing the art of the past into an ongoing dialogue with the present.”

The Benton will house an extraordinary collection of Native American art; the Kress Collection of Renaissance panel paintings; significant collections of photographs, prints and drawings; and a growing contemporary collection. Four complete series of etchings by Francisco Goya, as well as works by historically important regional and international artists such as Karl Benjamin, Rico Lebrun and José Clemente Orozco, are included in the collection.

A longtime supporter of the museum’s programming, Janet Inskeep Benton is also a member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees. A history major at Pomona, Benton went on to earn an M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. After working in product management at General Foods Corporation in the mid-1980s, she left the workforce to raise her family and serve on various not-for-profit boards in her Westchester County, New York, community.

She is currently board chair of the Jacob Burns Film Center, a not-for-profit art-house theatre complex and media-arts education center. In 2000, Benton founded the Frog Rock Foundation, a philanthropy focused on improving outcomes for underserved  children.

Benton is most excited about the new museum as a gathering spot on campus where both intellectually and personally enriching experiences happen. “Art is a powerful force, opening up the mind to so many possibilities—new ideas, varied perspectives, interesting questions, emotional responses, reconsidered thinking,” said Benton. “My hope is that the new museum creates a stimulating environment for students to explore and engage with art in a deeply meaningful way.”

Only blocks from the Claremont Metrolink train station, The Benton will be a focal point for artistic expression on a campus that is also home to a Turrell Skyspace, “Dividing the Light” (2007), which draws visitors from near and far, and muralist José Clemente Orozco’s “Prometheus,” widely regarded as a masterpiece. Nearby are the Claremont Museum of Art and galleries at Scripps and Pitzer colleges, as well as in the Claremont Village.

“The new museum will serve as a lasting connection point between the College and community, and also with the entire region,” said President Starr. “Southern California is known as a place of boundless artistic innovation. Pomona College is part of that unfolding story, and we plan to continue to help shape it.”

Pomona College has also announced plans for a new athletics and recreation facility to replace the Rains Center for Sport and Recreation, with construction to begin in 2020.

The new center will be 15,000 square feet larger than the existing one, expanding it to 94,000 square feet. More than half of the rebuilt facility will be new construction, and other parts of the structure will be updated and reconfigured to enhance the building’s usability.

Two principal gifts of $10 million each kick off the major fundraising campaign to raise a minimum of $29 million that will offset a total project cost estimated at $55 million.

Preliminary designs for the building by the architectural firm SCB include expansive use of glass throughout, with multiple outdoor patios. “This new athletic center will reflect our ongoing commitment to athletic excellence,” says Interim Athletic Director and Chair of Physical Education Jennifer Scanlon, “but just as importantly, it will also signal in a very visible way our dedication to the physical education program and to health and wellness across this campus community.”

The Rains Center has been home to Pomona-Pitzer’s athletic programs and served as the campus recreation and fitness center since it was built in 1989, but in recent years the program has outgrown its home, as more people than ever are using its facilities.

With 21 varsity sports, Pomona-Pitzer fields three more teams than it did when Rains opened. In recent years, the program has seen an unprecedented level of success, finishing in the top 40 of the Division III Learfield Directors’ Cup each of the past three years and winning the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference men’s all-sports trophy in 2017–18 for the first time in program history.

In addition to supporting 450 varsity athletes, the building’s expanded spaces will serve more than 900 intramural athletes, 550 club athletes and student physical education classes, as well as provide fitness and recreation opportunities for students, faculty and staff.

The plans call for a new and larger recreational fitness area,     including additional space for cardio workouts. The studio space available for fitness classes will be doubled. In addition to a general-use weight room, there will be a strength and conditioning center, and locker rooms will be “right-sized” to provide sufficient space for the groups that use them, with separate facilities for faculty and staff in addition to varsity teams.

The men’s and women’s varsity basketball teams and women’s varsity volleyball team will continue to play in the new facility, once complete, with Voelkel Gym remaining largely intact and a new two-court practice and recreational gym added above the fitness area.

“This will truly be a transformational building for our community,” Scanlon says. “In addition to providing an up-to-date home for our fine varsity teams, it will be a draw for health-minded students, faculty and staff and reflect the College’s deep commitment to promoting health and wellness all across our campus.”

Over the past year and a half, a strange, disconnected structure has arisen at the center of what was once a remote parking lot on Pomona’s South Campus. Its concrete walls enclose nothing. Odd slabs and pillars of concrete surround it in no discernable pattern, and yet it includes a number of striking architectural features, making it a puzzle for passersby. It may look pointless, but according to Brian Faber, the project manager overseeing the construction of Pomona’s new Benton Museum of Art, this odd assemblage of architectural details is an important part of Pomona’s building process—a mock-up where the structural elements of the Benton’s new home can be tested, evaluated and, if necessary, adjusted before they are set in stone, so to speak, in the new building.

“This wall, this piece of wood, this piece of glass—you can build it or install it here, and then the architect can come out and look at it and say, ‘This looks good’—or ‘This is horrible,’” Faber explains. “If something goes wrong here, it’s OK. You can figure out how to fix it. But if you do it on the building, you just have to live with it.”

The mockup tested a range of details involving the poured-in-place concrete walls, such as the spacing between boards in the wooden frames, which is mirrored in the board lines that give the exterior walls their signature look.

Other elements tested in the mock-up include two types of openings and the Western red cedar columns—both free-standing and inset—for the new museum’s arcades.

The funds to pay for a mock-up like this one are included in the cost structure of each new building on campus.

The low concrete pillars just inside the wall on the right were used to test a range of finishes on the wooden frames, which affect the color and texture of the finished concrete.

The slabs of concrete that litter the ground around the mock-up were used to test different polished finishes for concrete floors, ranging from low to high polish.

The last week of May, when the mock-up is no longer needed, it will be torn down to make room for a mock-up for the next construction project.

There are seemingly endless tips for time management, but Vicky-Marie Addo-Ashong ’20 and Andrew Phillips ’19 seem to have found a novel one.

They leave themselves practically no free time to manage.

The two accomplished Pomona College students are both two-sport athletes—not to mention captains of both of their teams.

“I’ve never considered myself a person who likes to have a lot of free time. If I do, I just sleep a lot,” says Addo-Ashong, a track and field athlete who holds the Pomona-Pitzer record in the triple jump but says her true love is volleyball.

Phillips finished his career as a defensive back on the football team with a second consecutive win over Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in the Sixth Street Rivalry game last fall and is a senior utility player for the baseball team this spring.  What’s more, he’s a premed student who already scored well on the MCAT after taking the seven-and-a-half-hour test last August—the day before he arrived on campus for football camp.

“My time management has definitely  improved over the course of my college  career,” says Phillips, suggesting it hasn’t   always come naturally. “There are always times where you are like, ‘Aw, I should have done something productive there.’”

Full Calendars

Addo-Ashong, a public policy analysis major and mathematics minor from suburban Washington, D.C., is very active on campus. She’s a campus tour guide—“I love being at Pomona, and I love being able to show it to other people,” she says—a member of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, and one of five students on the President’s  Advisory Committee on Sexual Violence  Intervention and Prevention, which is in its first full year. “That’s been really interesting and important. Being part of that process, I’ve found that to be something I care  about a lot,” she says.

Addo-Ashong also works as a research assistant to her academic advisor, Pierre Englebert, professor of international relations and politics. And last year, she was one of the leaders of a sponsor group and commissioner of sports for the Associated Students of Pomona College.

Need a nap yet?

Phillips is also involved in the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and president of a campus club, the Claremont chapter of Health Guardians of America, a group working to eliminate obesity on college campuses.

What’s more, Phillips has an added degree of difficulty in managing two sports as a neuroscience major preparing to apply for med school. That’s because lab classes—a crucial part of his coursework—often don’t end until after practice begins.

“When I was getting recruited, the Division I schools said you have to do econ or history or something like that; basically, you couldn’t take labs,” Phillips says. “So that was part of why D-III. The coaches are really understanding about labs and the importance of academics. Also, the two-sport thing, that’s something special about D-III, for sure.”

This spring, Phillips has a genes and behavior lab on Tuesdays that starts at 1:30 p.m. and gets out around 4, but practice starts at 3:15. Usually that means putting in extra work before practice or staying late, taking extra batting practice or such. Sometimes, the conflicts are more extreme.

“My junior year, I had a biochemistry lab, which is the lab that takes the most time, I think. I took that during football season, and so I remember a couple of practices where I’d literally be in lab until 6 p.m., and the coaches didn’t get mad or anything.”

With med school in mind, Phillips also has made use of his summers and breaks. He trained as an emergency medical technician after his first year at Pomona and shadowed emergency room doctors at hospitals in  Torrance and San Pedro after his sophomore year, along with working in a research lab at Caltech. Last summer, he also worked as an emergency department scribe at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, taking medical notes on a laptop as doctors and nurses treated patients. He has continued that work over college breaks. Phillips is considering orthopedics as a specialty partly because of his interest in sports, but the adrenaline of the emergency room also  has appeal.

“I enjoyed that—the idea that you didn’t know exactly what was coming in,” he says. “The pressure situation.”

Being a Captain

Team captains, often three or four players who share the role, are sometimes chosen by a vote of teammates and sometimes by coaches. They are leaders on and off the field of competition, counselors for teammates and go-betweens with coaches.

Being a captain “has taught me a lot about understanding where my teammates are at, where my coaches are at, how to navigate both of those and act on the   interests of my teammates with my coaches and discuss things,” says Addo-Ashong. “I think it’s being able to balance the interests of the people I’m working for  and working with.”

Last summer, she interned at Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group in Washington, D.C., in the Global Trade Watch division. She envisions returning to Washington after graduation to work for a couple of years in a field adjacent to politics or public service before likely returning to graduate school.

“I have a broad range of interests, and I’m not really sure what I’ll end up doing,” she says. “Everything from country development to justice policy interests me, so I just plan on seeing where life takes me.”

First, with one volleyball season and most of two track seasons to go, she has a goal: After finishing 20th in the triple jump at the NCAA Division III track and field championships last year, she hopes to make the top eight to become an All-American before she’s done. Addo-Ashong also is a standout in the 100-meter hurdles, recording the second-fastest time in the nation up to that point this season at a March meet.

Phillips will continue scribing after graduation while applying to enter med school in 2020, and he envisions taking the skills he learned on the field and in locker rooms into his professional life.

“For me, one thing I’ve needed to work on and develop is having the tough conversations with people you’re close with. All my best friends play on those sports teams, so having to talk about why they shouldn’t quit or why they’re not playing right now, those have been kind of tough,” he says.

“I would say that’s been a difficult part for me. And that’s something that as a doctor you have to have—tough conversations. That’s a really helpful skill, for sure.”

It was an eventful winter for Pomona-Pitzer sports as Sagehens swept the SCIAC tournament championships in men’s and women’s basketball and dominated the conference once again in swimming and diving.

The men’s basketball team claimed both the conference title and the tournament, with a historic season featuring program bests for wins (26), conference wins (15), win-streak (18) and highest national ranking ever (No. 9). The team also advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament with a 58–37 win over Texas-Dallas before losing to second-ranked Whitman College in round two.

After finishing second in the conference, the women’s basketball team won their first SCIAC tournament championship and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2002. Although they lost in the   first round to the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, the team finished with 22 wins, topping 20 wins for only the seventh time in program history.

The men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams also swept the SCIAC championships for the second time in as many years. The women went on to place seventh at the NCAA championships, with the men taking 11th overall. The teams combined to end the year with 20 All-Americans.

The Pomona-Pitzer men’s cross-country team finished the NCAA in seventh place overall, while the women’s program finished 32nd at the national championships.

The men’s water polo team went undefeated in conference play and breezed through the SCIAC tournament to reach the NCAA, where they fell to Long Beach State in the opening round. They finished the regular season 22–8 and held noteworthy victories over UC Irvine and Princeton. This is the third straight year the men’s water polo program are conference tournament champions.

As this issue was going to press, the women’s water polo team had just finished their second consecutive undefeated conference season.

Picture This: Like the rest of Southern California, the Pomona campus saw unprecedented swarms of migrating painted lady butterflies this spring, due to the superbloom in the desert areas where they breed.

—Photo by Kristopher Vargas

4/7 Day

As Sagehens around the globe—from Claremont to Hong Kong—volunteered for community service projects in honor of 4/7 Day, the campus celebration was designed for a lighter purpose—to give current students a chance to shed some of their mid-term stress. For a day—Sunday, April 7—Marston Quad took on a carnival atmosphere with everything from a zipline and a rock-climbing wall to a petting zoo and a range of food trucks—all in honor of Cecil’s favorite number, 47.

Photos by Kristopher Vargas and Jeremy Snyder ’19