David LowEllen Driscoll ’74 is one of three artists this year to receive the prestigious 2010 MacColl Johnson Fellowships of $25,000 each—one of the largest no-strings awards to artists in the United States—from the Rhode Island Foundation. The fellowships are intended “to fund an artist’s vision or voice,” and have been awarded on a three-year cycle since 2005 to composers, writers, and visual artists. Providence-based Driscoll, a professor of sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design, plans to use her award to create three new floating sculptures for the Providence River. Her creations in sculpture, drawing, installation, and public art reflects…
This issue we ask "5 Questions" of Steve Collins '91. Collins is an assistant professor of film studies. He recently completed a new feature film, You Hurt My Feelings. His first feature, Gretchen, won the $50,000 Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has been shown on the Sundance Channel. Q: What courses do you teach at Wesleyan, and what have you learned from working on films that you share with your students? A: I teach an intro to 16mm film production class called "Sight and Sound" where we focus on how to…
In her Encyclopedia of the Exquisite (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), Jessica Kerwin Jenkins ’93 is inspired by exotic 16th-century encyclopedias, which celebrated mysterious artifacts, with emphasis on the elegant, the rare, the commonplace and the delightful. Jenkins’s modern-day version combines whimsy and practicality, as it showcases the fine arts and the worlds of fashion, food, travel, home, garden and beauty. In the spirit of renewing old sources of beauty, and using an anecdotal approach, each entry shares engaging stories. Among them: the explosive history of champagne, the art of lounging on a divan, and the thrill of dining alfresco. The book…
The latest film by director Miguel Arteta ’89, Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight Pictures), opened to positive reviews in mid-February after being well-received at the Sundance Film Festival. The comedy, written by Wisconsin native Phil Johnston, stars Ed Helms (The Office) as an earnest insurance salesman who is asked by his small town firm to attend an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he learns about life in a weekend as he befriends a motley bunch of party-loving conventioneers played by John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire). In her New York Times review, film critic…
Will Galison ’81 has released a new music album, Line Open, featuring his unique gifts as harmonica virtuouso, guitarist, composer, lyricist, singer and arranger. He has co-produced a collection of songs that reflects a wide musical and emotional range and reveals his sly wit and compassionate outlook. The recording features some of New York’s finest musicians, including Steve Gaboury (co-producer and keyboards), Ben Wittman and Shawn Pelton (drums), Tony Garnier and Zev Katz (bass), Marc Shulman (guitar), and Catherine Russell, Elaine Caswell and Sonya Valet on vocals. Galison is known among musicians as a premiere jazz and studio harmonica player.…
Ellen Forney ’89 was recently profiled by Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who noted the artist’s “65 illustrations, doodlings, comic panels, and assorted visual asides” that play an important and integral part in the National Book Award-winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little Brown) by Sherman Alexie. Over a three-year period, Forney worked closely with Alexie who “gave her freedom to explore and contribute” based on her own inspiration. Forney’s illustrations had to reflect the imagination of the book’s main character, Junior, “who is growing up on a reservation in Washington state, … an aspiring…
Alberto Ibarguen ’66, CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has joined the board of directors of AOL, according to The Associated Press. He will serve on the board’s audit and finance committee. Ibarguen replaces William Hambrecht. The company is currently realigning itself as an online news source, and Ibarguen, former publisher of The Miami Herald, provides a valuable addition to the board. The Knight Foundation supports journalism training programs and many digital news delivery experiments. Ibarguen also serves on the board of ProPublica, an independent nonprofit organization that focuses on producing investigative journalism in the public interest.
Tim Devane ’09 was recently interviewed by the tech blog We Are NY Tech.Devane describes himself as a “British-born NYC-living entrepreneur, wanderer, environmental advocate, hustler, business developer, and most importantly writer.” In the interview, Devane discusses why he came to New York City: “New York is where things happen. I was drawn in by the electricity, the excitement, and have been overwhelmed by the shear capacity to create and accomplish that people here exhibit. That goes for tech and for many other areas. It’s like everyone has their noses to the grindstone but they’re looking up winking at you, because…
Historian Marc Stein is the author of the new study Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). The U.S. Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s is typically celebrated by liberals and condemned by conservatives for its rulings on abortion, birth control, and other sexual matters. Stein demonstrates convincingly that both sides have it wrong. Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases, Stein examines more liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity alongside a profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In the same era in which the Court recognized…
Author James Kaplan ’73, the Writing Programs’ 2011 Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer, will speak at 8 p.m. Feb. 9 in the Russell House. Kaplan has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, and also writing fiction, for over three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurley Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and Esquire. In November 2010, Kaplan published…
In a recent article in Time magazine, “Shaking Schools Up in an Already Tumultuous Year,” Andrew Rotherham writes: “With budget cuts looming, and with more states considering radical changes to teacher tenure and other important policies, 2011 looks to be a big year for education, for better or for worse.” Rotherham singles out Michael Bennet ’87, U.S. senator from Colorado and 10 other educational activists for 2011, saying: “These activists are political and apolitical, working to change school systems from within and without, and can be found in the for-profit, nonprofit and governmental sectors.” The article says “Bennet, who was…
The New York Law Journal reports that “Katherine B. Forrest, a litigation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore who specializes in antitrust and intellectual property, has left the firm to join the U.S. Department of Justice today as deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division.” Forrest ’86 will oversee operations for the division’s criminal and civil programs. Her portfolio will also include overseeing international issues and appellate policy for the division. She had been with Cravath since 1990 and made partner in 1998.