Category: People
December 2, 2010|People
Before Danielle Dobies painted the portraits that make up her exhibition, “Faces of Sustenance,” she first had to tackle an equally daunting task.
She had to get to know her subjects.
So Dobies, a 21-year-old art major from Aurora, Ohio, spent much of last year visiting and volunteering at food pantries, shelters and other sites served by the Northern Illinois Food Bank, which distributes food in 13 counties. Her plan was to educate herself about the food bank and its people, then use her art to spread word about its work. But the idea of painting a portrait didn’t seem nearly as difficult as the idea of asking a stranger to pose for one.
“I was really nervous about approaching people at first,” she said as she prepared the paintings for their first public showing. “I didn’t know if they would trust me.”
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried.
“People couldn’t have been more encouraging. When I explained what I was doing, everyone wanted to help.”
More »
November 11, 2010|People
Paul Hack’s favorite tree on campus is the dawn redwood outside the entrance to the Schaible Science Center. Hack, a certified arborist and the College’s grounds supervisor, likes the tree’s textured bark and what he calls “its evergreen qualities.”
It’s not much of a surprise that Hack would express a fondness for a tree that doesn’t shed leaves. Hack and his staff of groundskeepers are responsible for the College’s arboretum campus and its 700 or so trees. And at this time of year that means they are nearly up to their knees in fallen leaves. It’s a situation anyone who has ever cared for a lot of trees can appreciate. John Keats called autumn a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” For Hack, it’s more like a season of endless raking and mulching.
More »
October 28, 2010|People
John Pitman Weber was leaning over a worktable strewn with fragments of ceramic tile, explaining the project that he said would be a kind of farewell present to the College.
Weber, a professor of art, will retire in the spring after teaching at Elmhurst for 43 years. This fall, he and two dozen of his current and former students have been meeting several times each week in the Accelerator ArtSpace on campus to create a series of four large tile mosaics—they’ll cover about 150 square feet in all—to hang in Old Main and the Schaible Science Center. Weber’s student and alumni collaborators have been working in teams to generate concepts for each mosaic, sketch out renderings, and, finally, cut and apply pieces of ceramic tile in a nearly kaleidoscopic swirl of colors. The half-finished pieces spread out on tables around the gallery are thick with visual references to literature, history and popular culture. Lucille Ball makes an appearance in one panel bound for Old Main, alongside a representation of a floor plan for a medieval European cathedral and a textile pattern from Rajasthan.
“It’s a big collaborative soup,” Weber said, as he walked past six of his students gathered around a table to brainstorm ideas for another panel. “We hope the results will be tasty.”
More »
September 22, 2010|People
New York Times columnist David Brooks likes writers who are unafraid, as he says, “to take up the big brush,” and produce ambitious books on momentous topics. That helps explain his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential mid-century theologian (and Elmhurst alumnus, class of 1910) who wrote about God, human nature, evil and war. One of Niebuhr’s books, Brooks likes to point out, was called The Nature and Destiny of Man. “After you’ve finished a book with a title like that,” Brooks asks, “what’s left to read?”
Brooks has been making the case for Niebuhr’s continuing relevance for nearly ten years now. In an essay in The Atlantic in 2002, he called Niebuhr “one of America’s most profound writers on war and international conflict. At the start of World War II and again at the dawn of the Cold War, he wrote sweeping books that helped readers to connect their historical situations with broad truths about God and human nature…Niebuhr’s arguments were big and ambitious, whereas our debates are small and wonky.”
As it turns out, Brooks is not alone in his admiration for Niebuhr. In a 2007 interview with Brooks, then-Senator Barack Obama called Niebuhr “one of my favorite philosophers.”
More »
September 8, 2010|People
The first thing I noticed about Jake Davis when I met the first-year student at Elmhurst’s move-in day a couple weeks ago was that he was lugging a record turntable and a crate full of LPs. You expect to see students hauling every conceivable species of consumer electronics into their new residence hall rooms, but this was different. In this digital age, you don’t get a lot of freshly minted college students carting their favorite music around on vinyl.
It was only after I’d talked with Davis that I found out what that record collection means to him. Davis has been playing guitar since the sixth grade and writing songs since the ninth. For the last few years he has been the main creative force behind a band called Blue Cadet Three. The band’s rootsy, folk-tinged sound, in evidence on the full-length CD recorded and released this year, “Palomino Wildfire,” comes right out of the dusty old records Davis brought with him to Elmhurst. There’s Dylan, there’s Credence, there’s Johnny Cash. Davis has been learning from these masters for years now. Growing up in Nashville, where his father is a recording engineer, Davis was immersed in legendary American sounds. And even though he has left his family and his bandmates back home to study music business at Elmhurst, he wasn’t about to leave his vinyl heroes behind, too. More »