Family Relations Blog

Quick Facts:

Areas of Study: Studio/Visual Arts

Div III: Assembly Required

Div III Committee: Nathaniel Cohen Gregory S. Kline

About the Photo: Markowitz’s sculpture, a sphere made of 500 feet of electrical wire and 800 cable zip-ties, was among student art selected for display at the December 2011 annual dinner of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

For Nicole Markowitz 08F, her Division III (senior) project had her living in a world of her own creation.

Markowitz, as the artist, “made up my own world and deemed myself the ruler of it,” she says. “Anything became possible to me, it was liberating.”

Her Division III, “Assembly Required,” is a collection of sculptures and drawings, assembly instructions for creating optical illusions, and imaginary machines. Her sculptures are oftentimes crafted from everyday objects like bike chains and electrical wires. Her drawings are made with electrical tape on plexiglass.

“The work employs nonsense as a mode of redefining how we look at current existing models of reality, functionality, and necessity, inverting our notions surrounding function and value,” Markowitz says. “It kind of all stemmed from this personal battle I was having against traditional art and what I’m supposed to be doing. In challenging that, I was unearthing these larger conceptual issues. There are a lot of layers to my work and a lot of them that are created subconsciously.”

The perceptive leap the viewer must take to believe in the inventive artwork is rewarding for the viewer, she says: “For the viewer who can understand and accept nonsense, a machine will manifest.”

Professor of Art William Brayton lauds Markowitz, calling her “tough,” and “bold.” “She’s extremely motivated and professional,” he says. “Her artwork demonstrates the tedious and time-intensive processes that she works with. Her Division III exhibition was one of the strongest that any of us had seen in a long, long time.”

Markowitz, who had not studied art until college, credits Hampshire with helping her find and cultivate her inner artist. “I don’t think I would be doing art if I went to any other school,” she says. “I don’t think being anywhere but this environment would challenge me to dig deeper conceptually. I learned how to be an artist here.”

Wednesday, May 16 through Saturday, May 19

Division III Studio Arts and Photography Group Exhibition
Harold F. Johnson Library Center, Main Gallery

Come experience a sampling of Division III studio artwork and photography. This exhibit will have extended hours until 6 p.m. on Friday, May 18 and will open at 10:30 a.m. on the morning of commencement.

Thursday, May 17

Mandatory Graduate Informational Meeting
3:00-4:30 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall Main Lecture Hall

All graduating students are required to attend this informational session for commencement.

Blessing on the Journey for Graduating Students and Their Family and Friends
5:00 p.m. in the Merrill Living Room

Spiritual Life welcomes graduates, their friends, and family to come and share in blessings for the journey ahead.

Div-Free Dance Party Celebration
(hosted by alumni and family relations and the graduate gift program)
8:30 p.m.- Midnight in the Red Barn

Come celebrate your alum status! Alumni and family relations invites graduates to a free dance party for all graduating students. Join classmates for tapas, drinks, and dancing until midnight.

Friday, May 18

Division III Presentation and Performance Showcase
12:30-4:30 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall

These may include academic presentations and readings. View schedules with specific times and room numbers, or pick up a schedule in the Franklin Patterson Hall lobby beginning at noon on Friday, May 18.

Community Commencement Reception
(Hosted by the office of the President and dean of faculty office)
4:30-6 p.m. in the Robert Crown Center

Join the graduating students, their friends and families in celebrating their commencement with light hors d’oeuvres, refreshments, and live music.

Saturday, May 19

Commencement Ceremony
11 a.m.-1 p.m. on the Library Lawn
Celebrate the academic achievements of the graduates! Please arrive early to ensure good seats, as there are no tickets. Air-conditioned overflow seating is available in the Main Lecture Hall of Franklin Patterson Hall.

Celebratory Picnic Lunch
1-3 p.m. in the Charles R. and Polly Longsworth Arts Village under the Solar Canopy

Join the 2012 graduates for a light lunch immediately following the ceremony.

Diplomas Dispersed
1-3 p.m., Cole Science Center Foyer

Students pick up their official diplomas!

Sunday, May 20

Student Residences Close
10 a.m.

Student move out of mods and dorms.

Lynn Miller, professor of biology, is one of the “founding faculty” of Hampshire. His Ph.D. (biology) is from Stanford. He has taught and studied at the University of Washington, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His principal interests are genetics (human and microbial), molecular biology, and evolution.

Courses:

Fall 2012: Natural History of Infectious Disease

Did you ever wonder why Jewish grandmothers who make gefilte fish from Norwegian sturgeon so frequently are parasitized by tapeworms? Maybe not, but who gets parasitized, when, and by what is highly significant to understanding the history of humankind. In this seminar we will read and think about the failure of modern (Western) medicine to eliminate most of the tropical diseases of Homo sapiens. We will also introduce the workings of Hampshire College. We will read R.S. Desowitz’s Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus (2002) and P.J. Hotez’s Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, and other articles from the medical and scientific literature. Each student, for an evaluation, must write three essays and give one seminar on the public health, medical, social aspects of one of these parasitic diseases (malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis, kala-azar, Guinea worm, etc.) focusing on the disease in one particular tropical or subtropical country. You are encouraged to work in small groups on one parasite. All students are expected to participate in the seminar, to write three essays from the original literature, and to lead one seminar. During the seminar, we will spend time thinking and working on the skills needed for successful college-level work: reading, study habits, seminar skills, and writing. Collaborative work is expected throughout.

Spring 2012: Ever since Darwin

Humans vary: some short, some tall; some fat, some thin; some prolific, some nearly or completely sterile; some clever, others dull; some successful and others failures. How much of this variation is due to variation in the genes, how much due to different environments, and how much due to developmental variation not coded for or predetermined? Although this question has been studied ever since Darwin, many molecular biologists, geneticists, and “evolutionary psychologists” (as they term themselves) have concluded that it’s all in the genes. However, no genes have been found that affect most of the variations listed above. Why have so many become so hereditarian in outlook? In this seminar we will read a tiny fraction of the recent literature on the attempts of some to “geneticize” everything from children’s alleged dislike of spinach, to various addictions, to “brain modules” evolved on the African savannah. The principal texts are Lewontin’s The Triple Helix and McCabe and McCabe’s DNA: Promise and Peril. All students are expected to participate in the seminar, to write a series of three essays from the original literature on a single topic of interest, and to lead one seminar. During the seminar we will spend time thinking and working on the skills needed for successful college-level work: reading, study habits, seminar skills, and writing.

Hampshire College graduates Evan Viera 02F and Chris Bishop 00F spent more than three years developing and creating their 11-minute animated film Caldera. They recently were informed that it has won the Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica’s computer animation category, one of the top prizes in the field.

Caldera Trailer >> 

“It just feels crazy,” says Viera. “It’s such a high honor. Many of the films we’ve been inspired by in the past have won the same award.”

Caldera, premiered at the 2012 SXSW film festival in March.

The film tells the story of a young girl struggling with mental illness, who goes off her medication and leaves a bleak metropolis to immerse herself in a vibrant oceanic cove. The Caldera website notes that the film “venerates the brilliant minds forged in the haunted depths of psychosis.”

Much of Caldera was produced at Hampshire College in collaboration with Bit Films, an animation studio developed on campus by media arts and sciences professor Chris Perry that invites student involvement at all stages of a production. Production was made possible through Hampshire’s computer graphics incubator program, a project Professor Perry launched to let students intern with visiting artists who are given access to the College’s technological infrastructure.

“Without Hampshire and what it gave us, we wouldn’t have been able to make this film,” said Viera, who noted that more than 30 current students, alums, and others worked on Caldera over the years.

Viera and Bishop, who both have taught classes at Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had studied with Perry, and collaborated with him on other Bit Films productions including the 2009 award-winning short The Incident at Tower 37. This time around, though, Viera took the lead, serving as director, composer, co-writer, and co-producer (with Perry as the other co-producer). Bishop was co-writer, animation supervisor, and story artist. Bishop and Viera initially discussed the project while teaching animation in Beijing, China.

“Both of us just poured ourselves into creating this idea. It wasn’t a strategic thing. We had no idea how it was going to happen, but we had a giant drive that was not going to die,” said Bishop.

Perry agreed.

“This is a terrific acknowledgement of the creative vision and leadership of Evan and Chris, certainly, but it is also a great celebration of the model that so many students have participated in throughout the years at Hampshire,” he said.

Prix Ars Electronica is organized by the Austria-based Ars Electronica, and their website states that in awarding prizes they are “constantly on the lookout for what’s new and exciting, what’s radically different, what’s making an impact right now.” The award to Caldera will be presented at the Ars Electronica 2012 festival in Linz, Austria, in September.

More information on Prix Ars Electronica >> 

Caldera also was chosen as the 2012 Best Animated Film of the Rome Independent Film Festival and an official selection of the Stuttgart Animation Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Jeff Sharlet 90F’s Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between has been chosen as the common reading for fall 2012 incoming students at Hampshire College.

In Sweet Heaven When I Die (the title is taken from a lyric by singer and banjo player Dock Boggs), Sharlet engages themes of faith and doubt on an intimate level throughout the 13 collected essays, investigating the drives and beliefs of others while trying to uncover what, if anything, he believes himself. He discovers a country of prophets, fundamentalists, radicals, revolutionaries, and many others along the way. Sharlet enters the worlds of all of them, and returns with portraits of their ideas, aspirations, and journeys.

Listen to his reading at Hampshire College from November 8, 2011 >>

The College will send a copy of the book to all new students to read over the summer. Then, discussions of the common reading selection, and a campus visit by the author, will be part of new student orientation.

Sharlet’s book was chosen from dozens of nominations submitted by the campus community.

Author’s website >>

Sharlet is a graduate of Hampshire College. He teaches creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. Previous books include the bestsellers The Family and C Street, which received the Molly Ivins Prize. Sharlet is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and Harper’s.

Publisher W.W. Norton & Co. says of Sweet Heaven When I Die: “No one explores the borderlands of belief and skepticism quite like Jeff Sharlet. … From Dr. Cornel West to legendary banjo player Dock Boggs, from the youth evangelist Ron Luce to America’s largest ‘Mind, Body, Spirit Expo,’ Sharlet profiles religious radicals, realists, and escapists.”

More about the book >>

Eli Plenk, like many Hampshire students, had a long and twisting road to Hampshire College. He enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon the year following his graduation from high school, but felt frustrated by the traditional academic style and what he felt was a narrow focus on “dead white guys.”

“I needed to go west and get away, first,” Eli said. “Coming to Hampshire kind of felt like coming home, not just geographically, but ideologically.”

During a leave of absence from Reed, Eli worked as a farm workers union organizer in Oregon. He said the experience was invaluable and while he is excited to get back to organizing outside of Hampshire’s “bubble,” he said taking time away from school has made him appreciate being a student.

“If I didn’t want to be in school I wouldn’t…I’ll spend the rest of my life doing stuff like that so for now I want to get that educational foundation,” Eli said.

Eli has been doing activist work since a very young age, having been raised by parents who he calls “mild mannered for being crazy radicals.” At twelve he was featured in The Nation in an article on anti-war activists.

In high school, Eli engaged politically in his community, working for Sub/urban Justice in its second year. There, he began to interrogate the question of what it means to do radical work from a position of privilege, with his writing on the topic included in Speak Up!, a book of stories by students addressing race and racism in schools across New England.

“The best schools are always diverse schools,” Eli said, secure in his vision for continued work organizing with youth and finding new radical possibilities for education.

By: Barbara Morrison F10

Leticia Contreras 08F and Akil Hugh Gibbons 08F were recently awarded funding for their Division III (senior) projects through the Sander Thoenes Award.

These annual awards to students working in journalism, international relations, or peace studies honor the memory of Hampshire alumnus Sander Thoenes 87F. Preference is given to projects conforming to the spirit of Thoenes’ career as a foreign correspondent.

Gibbons received $1,000 to support his documentary film Paper City, which focuses on the western Massachusetts city of Holyoke. In 2011, Holyoke had the highest school dropout rate in the state as well as one of the highest poverty rates. Gibbons says the film is intended to inform and empower middle school students in the community, helping them “understand their own self-determination within the societal circumstances.”

Contreras received $500 for “viviendo entre la herida abierta” (translated as “living within the open wound”), a project that used photography and oral histories to examine the lives of three generations of Mexican-American/Chicana women from Texas and California. It was a project that grew partly by trying to bridge her experiences growing up in Texas and those at Hampshire, which she says has proved to be an ideal educational environment for her.

“I was excited to be around other folks who wanted to learn and explore ideas,” said Contreras.

By her second year at Hampshire, Contreras knew she wanted to focus on US/Mexico relations, and took many courses in Latin American policy, photography, and Spanish. She spent the fall of her third year in Mexico, and when she returned the following semester decided to use oral histories “to better understand how our environment shapes our identities.” The stories she collected influenced her research as well as the conceptual photographic and video-based installation that made up her Div III project.

“Everything I do is for the community I come from, the Mexican and black working to middle class community. I’m a first generation college student, and I want to build a foundation for the younger people in my family,” said Contreras, who was thankful for the Thoenes Award as well as guidance from Hampshire offices like the Career Opportunities Resource Center, Community Partnerships for Social Change, and the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program.

“There are ways to find funding for your passions. The installation was very pricey, but I was able to connect with a lot of resources.”

After graduation, Contreras will work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Knoxville, Tennessee (where she will also exhibit her Div III installation).

“I want to use my piece to build a curriculum around retracing our histories and showing how art can be a tool for social change, to bridge communities, and start a dialogue,” she said.