Tucked away inside the costume shop of Pomona’s Seaver Theatre is a collection of more than 150 historic garments—mostly women’s clothing dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. They’ve been used over the years, and many have grown delicate with age.

That caught the attention of Michael Mao ’19, a history major and theatre minor with an interest in costume design. With Theatre Professor Sherry Linnell serving as his advisor, Mao decided to combine his fields of study with a research project that encompassed two summers, culminating in the creation of a digital archive of the garments.

Mao spent much of the first summer of his project, in 2017, researching the background of the garments and comparing them to historical catalogs and books about typical women’s fashion of the times. He also noted, whenever possible, important details such as style, fabric, construction and trim.

The next step was photography of the garments. Linnell wanted Mao to consider them as three-dimensional objects, much like sculptures. This posed a challenge for Mao, who enlisted the help of Instructional Technologist Jason Smith.

Smith helped him acquire the necessary equipment—a manual camera with a timer, kit light reflectors and lightboxes—and together they assembled a pop-up studio with white and black backdrops against which to photograph the clothing.

Each garment was photographed from the front, back and sides in quarter turns, with additional photographs for interesting details or trims. After taking the photos, Smith spent time editing them to ensure their visual quality.

The digital image database will serve as a lasting resource for theatre and dance students to continue to engage with these historic garments, even though many of them have grown too delicate to pull out in person.

In keeping with recent tradition, on the mid-March day that the College sent out acceptance letters to a new class of Pomona students, the staff of Pomona’s Offices of Admissions and Financial Aid rang the Sumner Hall bell 23 times to celebrate the Class of 2023. Here are a few facts about the new group of Sagehens:

726 first-year students admitted to the College

26 transfer students admitted, including 10 from community colleges

49 U.S. states represented, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico

47 countries represented

57.9% of class are domestic students of color

13.5% of the class are international students

20.3% of the class are first-generation students

9 are military veterans, representing the Air Force, Army and Marine Corps

6 participated in the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS)

Danny DeBare ’22 engages in a community-building exercise with Fremont Academy students.

Every Friday at 3 p.m., after the school bell signals the end of the school day, about 30 middle school students at Fremont Academy in the city of Pomona make their way to the cafeteria. The students are not ready to go home just yet—they’re sticking around for Pomona Partners.

Pomona Partners, the College’s longest-running community engagement program, turned 25 last fall. The program continues today through the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, with more than a dozen Pomona College students volunteering every semester to host a series of  activities and experiences with seventh- and eighth-graders.

This academic year, the focus is on critical environmental justice. Students also engage in conversations on other topics, like student activism as a result of school shootings, and share on-campus activities like games, videos, acting workshops, one-on-one interactions and group interactions, as well as two annual field trips, including one to the Pomona College campus.

It’s Friday, and this week’s farm-to-table special at the Sagehen Café is a vegetable and mushroom risotto with organic beets, carrots, joi choi, zucchini, yellow squash, garlic and onions, most of it grown and harvested nearby at the Pomona College Organic Farm. For the past five years, the on-campus restaurant, housed in Pomona’s Smith Campus Center, has offered a Friday special made with fresh, organic ingredients from the student-run farm. If you want to try it, though, you may need to arrive early, because according to the café’s general manager, Cheryl Yarck, it usually sells out.

The first season of Sagecast, titled “Backstories,” features Pomona faculty members discussing how they came to study what they study, teach what they teach and love the field they love. Sagecast offers our extended community a chance to listen in on vibrant intellectual conversations—whether on the train, in the car, at the gym or at home. Listen at Pomona College Sagecast or look us up on the podcast sites of Apple, Google or Spotify. Here’s a look at season 1:

A team of math students from Pomona and Harvey Mudd took home one of the three top prizes at UCLA’s 2019 DataFest, winning for Best Use of External Data. Given a data set from the Canadian women’s national rugby team, Amy Watt ’20, Adam Rees ’20, Ethan Ashby ’21, Connor Ford ’20, and Madelyn Andersen (HMC ’22) found something important hidden in the data.“The really creative thing they did was to find flight information from looking at the social media proathletes,” explains Pomona Math Professor Jo Hardin. “They were able to come up with a very clear relationship between fatigue and flying.”

Three Pomona seniors will follow their passions around the globe as recipients of Watson Fellowships, claiming three of the 41 $30,000 grants awarded nationwide. Here are Pomona’s winners:

• Eli Cohen ’19 plans to explore the relationship between technology and daily life in India, Norway, Spain, Malta and Burma.
• Blake Plante ’19 will study aspects of corporeal mime and physical theatre in France, Canada, Spain, Japan, Italy, England and South Korea.
• Jeremy Snyder ’19 will visit China, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile to capture on film the real and conceptual characters evoked by rivers around the world.