BC’s Dylan Enright (’12) and Jeff White (’12) Found Nonprofit RIGHTSIDE

At the 2012 Arts Festival, BC students Dylan Enright (‘12) and Jeff White (‘12) arrived at the Craft Sale with a heaping box of T-shirts to sell. After a few hours, the sea of festival-goers in O’Neill Plaza was peppered with the yellow and white flashes of Rightside shirts. By the second day of the festival, they had sold out completely.

At BC, Jeff majored in Finance and Economics, and Dylan in Economics and Environmental Science. As graduation loomed, they were buried deep in the job search. Even after the offers from big firms rolled in, however, they didn’t feel right.

Artists at work at Edison K8 School in Brighton, MA

Jeff and Dylan turned down high-profile jobs in business to open Rightside, a non-profit that prints children’s original artwork on T-shirts, using 100% of the sales to fund school art initiatives. Students at Brighton, MA’s Edison K8 School designed the shirts Rightside sold at the 2012 Festival, and this year’s selection will include designs from the students of six other schools in the area.

Jeff White with a Kindergartner at Edison K8 School in Brighton, MA

“From the outside looking in,” said Dylan and Jeff, “our educations served us well…our parents were ecstatic at the job offers, our teachers proud.” Something was missing, though. They found their calling in creativity.

Jeff had taken a class on Expressionism in the 20^th Century that got him thinking about the importance of creativity in education. He learned that “artists like Kandinsky and Munch were eager to distance themselves from their inhibitions in order to paint more like children. Children have an incredible creative capacity, unbound by over-thinking and a fear of being wrong. They paint what they feel, what they imagine.”

Creativity, Jeff and Dylan thought, is a skill nurtured less and less frequently in American schools. While schools acknowledged the importance of math and science, Dylan and Jeff felt that attention to the arts was lacking. Without the “sense of originality and critical thought that an arts education provides,” all the business and technical skills they learned would languish. Successful figures in technology and the sciences, they thought, can only make big impacts in the world by combining their technical prowess with pioneering creativity, with imagination (think Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerberg).

Artists at work at Edison K8 School in Brighton, MA. Featured artist Destiny at the head of the table.

“Despite this, as school budgets are cut as a result of economic recession, arts programs are usually the first to go.” They saw two roadblocks for the arts in schools, “a lack of funding, and a lack of exposure.” They put their heads together to come up with a solution.

Since their sophomore year, entrepreneurship projects had brought Jeff and Dylan together, so it was natural that they joined forces in their mission to bring art back to schools. When they decided to enter the Boston College Venture Competition, a program in which participants pitch business ideas in an effort to win thousands of dollars in start-up costs, Rightside was born.

Rightside started out simply. At Edison K8 in Brighton, MA, “every student received a piece of paper and supplies with instructions to create ‘anything.’ We got back 900 pieces of artwork, two of which we printed.” The first winners were kindergartener Destiny, with her abstract painting, and fourth grader Calvin, with his duck drawing.

Kindergartner artist at the Mendell School in Roxbury, MA

With the students’ creations in hand, Dylan and Jeff printed their original artwork on T-shirts. 100% of the proceeds from shirt sales go directly into the school art program from which it came.

For Dylan and Jeff, the shirts work to benefit the schools, not only through sales, but also by increasing awareness support of arts education. “We sell the shirts not just to raise money for art programs in schools—where a lack of funding has led to a detrimental decline in art programs—but also as billboards of the inherent creative powers of children….We sought to harness and showcase this expressive genius.”

For the Arts Festival in April, their goal is to beat their record of 75 shirts sold in 48 hours at last year’s Festival. “We are looking forward once again to showcasing Rightside and the creativity of these kids.”

This year, they hope to continue bringing their program to other schools in the area, “an art class for every child once a week,” and they wouldn’t mind growing Rightside to support themselves and their employees full-time along the way.

Dylan and Jeff’s words of advice for current BC students:

We hope that BC students will be reminded that imagination is as important as accounting, physics, and statistics, and that they will actively foster their creativity every day. Take an art history course, a painting class, or just write haikus in your free time. The right side of the brain is where we will create the next iPhone, the solution to the energy crisis, or cures for cancer. Math, science, and English are pertinent to getting a good job, but creativity will provide you with the tools to innovate and ‘make a dent in the universe,’ as Steve jobs would say.

Rightside will be at the Craft Sale on the Stokes Lawn (outside the Stokes Art Tent) during the BC Arts Festival, Thursday, April 25 – Saturday, April 27, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM. See current 2013 Arts Festival Schedule.

To learn more about Rightside and the schools it serves, visit their website. Don’t forget to check out T-shirt designs and shop.

Contact Rightside to donate.

Artists at Jackson Mann school in Brighton, MA

Robert Polito (’73) Receives Arts Alumni Award

At the Arts Council, we couldn’t be more proud of our 2013 Alumni Award recipient. Poet, essayist, and biographer Robert Polito graduated summa cum laude from Boston College in 1973 with a degree in English. Since graduation, he has built a distinguished career at the intersection of poetry and scholarly literary and cultural studies.

Born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts, Polito went on to Harvard University after his time at BC, earning an MA in 1975 and a PhD in 1981. After serving as Assistant Director and Acting Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at New York University, Polito joined the New School in 1992. In 1994, he became Director and Nonfiction Coordinator of the New School’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Building on his already burgeoning record of publications, awards, honors, and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, he will become the second president of the Poetry Foundation in July 2013 (Poetry Foundation).

A respected poet and scholar, Polito is perhaps best known for his work in midcentury American literature and culture, particularly film noir and crime fiction. His editing projects in those genres include Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (2009); The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (2004); Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s (1997) and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (1997). His 1995 book Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award in Criticism. The biography explores the life and work of the pulp crime fiction writer, particularly his mid-career crime novels.

Polito’s poetry reads as the cornerstone of his scholarly and nonfiction pursuits. “Poetry—and what I’ve learned through reading and writing it,” says Polito, “is at the center of everything I do. This is true of my nonfiction as well as my teaching.”

Polito’s collections of poetry includeHollywood & God (2009) and Doubles (1995). In Hollywood & God, his poems exist at the intersection of narrative and lyric, pop culture and literary tradition (Poetry Foundation). “You open your mouth and a tradition dribbles out,” he says in “Hollywood & God,” “But that’s mimesis.” His poems confront popular culture’s influence on contemporary poetry and intellectual thinking. In “Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie,” he expresses a contemporary experience of a barrage of stimuli with intellectual yearnings for making meaning and creating:

Leave a message if you can’t reach me
To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt

When I think I read new things I want
A life where I read and think new things

Please refrain from talking during the movie

“For me,” says Polito, “and many other poets in my generation, popular music provided the education in sensibility that high culture offered to previous writers.” Indeed, Polito is invested in the future of poetry in America. For him, American poetry is in “a fascinating moment,” as poetry has grown up around local cultures, “each with its own magazines, presses, websites, blogs, and reading series, almost along the indie rock model.”

Before taking over as president of the Poetry Foundation this summer, Polito will spend time at his alma mater, participating in special programming in the annual Arts Festival (April 25-27, 2013) and in the English Department. In the coming months, check the Festival Schedule for programming details, and the Arts Awards page for more information about the Arts Awards Ceremony, Friday, April 26, 2013. Congratulations, Robert Polito, and go Eagles!

BC Visiting Lecturer Sammy Chong’s AMIDST to run in Bapst Gallery

Sammy Chong, Visiting Lecturer (Painting)

Sammy Chong, visiting lecturer in the Boston College Fine Arts Department, will show an exhibition in the Bapst Gallery throughout the month of February. In the exhibition, Amidst, Chong explores the ways people experience the world in urban spaces.

He confronts the idea that close contact with millions of strangers can, paradoxically, leave the individual feeling distanced. “Common spaces make objective the different forms of solitude that are linked to the ever-expanding modern urban centers,” says Chong, “As we are forced to inhabit public spaces with others, the visible distance between people can be a reflection of an intangible, yet deeper, personal disjunction.”

CHECKED, 2012, Mixed media on plexiglass, four panels, 23” x 38” x 11”

In addition, Chong considers the meditation or suspension we might find in the safety of isolation in modern technology. Imagine, for example, a person on a crowded train, surrounded by people and yet absorbed in a smart phone.

“The name of the show,” says Chong, “connotes both the inner mindset and the physical environment we find ourselves in when we are on the move, in our routines. Instead of uncomfortable feelings of alienation and loss, I attempt to gain awareness of the meditative nature of being both immersed in and removed from the activity around us.”

GOLDEN CALF, 2011, Mixed media on plexiglass, three panels, 20” x 24” x 9”

Amidst is a multimedia collection of three-dimensional paintings on plexiglass. Each layer of plexiglass is meant to be viewed both as an individual painting and as a part of a multidimensional work.

In Chong’s pieces, the plexiglass layers emphasize the day-to-day collision of human experiences and indicate the metaphorical separation between people in public spaces. Chong uses the plexiglass to imply this separation—“its transparency points to the invisible barriers which isolate individuals from one another and from the self.”

Unlike two-dimensional images, the three-dimensional complexity of the pieces encourages viewers to take an active role in making meaning of the whole.

ENDLESS, 2012, Acrylic and oil on plexiglass, two panels, 19” x 36” x 36”

The exhibition also evolves from Chong’s theological and philosophical interests. Chong, who currently teaches “The Art of Portraiture” in the Fine Arts Department at BC, holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and fine art. As part of his Jesuit education, he studied philosophy at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Columbia, and theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, MA. He began his work as an artist as a self-taught painter, but now holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

SIX ITEMS, 2011, Acrylic and oil on plexiglass, three panels, 18” x 25” x 9”

On Tuesday, February 5, at 4:00pm, an opening reception will take place in the Bapst Gallery. Admission is free and open to the public. Amidst will run February 4 – February 28, 2013. For more information, email arts@bc.edu, or call 617-552-4935.

BC’s “Screaming Eagles” to Perform at 57th Presidential Inauguration Parade

Boston College “Screaming Eagles” Marching Band performing at the 2009 Arts Festival.

Monday, January 21, 2013, the Boston College “Screaming Eagles” Marching Band will perform for President Barack Obama in the 57^th Inaugural Parade. The marching band is a 155-piece student group, the largest and most visible student group on campus (About the Band). The “Screaming Eagles” will perform BC’s fight song, “For Boston,” joining the ranks of other performance groups along the 15-block parade route in Washington, D.C.

Boston College “Screaming Eagles” Marching Band performing at the 2009 Arts Festival.

Band Director David Healey said, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We’re thrilled to be able to go to Washington in order to support the country and the Office of the President on this historic day.”

The band is honored to perform at President Obama’s second inauguration, but this isn’t the first time they have played for the President. The band performed for him in 2005, when he spoke at BC as Senator of Illinois; President Obama “was very complimentary of the band,” said Healey.

A Band Member at the “Instrument Petting Zoo” at the 2009 Arts Festival.

Founded in 1919, the “Screaming Eagles” have supported BC in many prestigious settings, from BC football games and domestic bowl games, to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the Emerald Isle Classic in Dublin, Ireland, and even with the local rock band, “The Dropkick Murphys.”

At the Arts Council, we are honored to have the band members representing Boston College in the nation’s capitol. “These are some of the brightest students in the country and they make a huge contribution to the University as members of the band, spending hundreds of hours in rehearsal and performances. They are a very talented and dedicated group of students. We’re all extremely proud of them,” said Healey.

“Screaming Eagles” Performing at the 2008 BC Arts Festival.

See Announcement from the BC Office of News and Public Affairs for more information.

BC Alumna Lydia Panas: New Exhibition and Published Monograph

At Gallery 339 in Philadelphia, PA, curators of an upcoming photographic exhibition of buildings were stumped when it came to naming their exhibition:

Initially we thought, “Photos of Buildings,” hmmm . . . “Buildings and Photographs” . . . “Photos of Architecture” . . . After several similarly uninspired permutations, it seemed that this process was telling us something; an exhibition of just buildings could be a little dry. But what else goes with buildings? The answer came courtesy of The Talking Heads, who released the album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food” in 1978.

The exhibition, “More Photos About Buildings and Food,” displays the work of 32 photographers who explore the inherently tricky subjects of buildings and food. “Portraiture considers the mystery of the individual and street photography captures the theater of the public realm, but buildings and food contain none of these vivifying characteristics; they must be brought to life.”

The show includes photographs by Boston College alumna Lydia Panas (BC, Psychology ‘80). Panas is an award-winning photographer based in Pennsylvania. With her backyard as her studio, she has been practicing portrait photography for 20 years. After recording and depicting her children throughout their early lives, she began looking at other friends and family. “In each frame packed with detail, she is searching for clues in her subjects’ gestures, poses and glances that will lead to an understanding of how they relate to each other, and how they see themselves. They are complex emotions that guide us. Sometimes what we try to conceal is the most revealing.”

Panas’s, quirky, introspective contributions to the “More Photos About Buildings and Food” exhibition merge the still-life genre with her work in portraiture, and deliberately imitate the old Dutch Masters and early religious works. In Panas’s photos, the subjects wear masked, subtle expressions and hold single items of food. Their clothing is often eclipsed, or is unmarked and plain. “The viewer is forced to deal with expression, gesture, posture, and not much else. There is no context, no location, no status, no circumstance.”

The photos are eerily intriguing—they draw the viewer in with their sharp focus, but evade any definite interpretation or meaning. The viewer cannot think about the food item without taking in the subject’s face, gesture, and expression, but the faces mask intense emotion. Panas says of the portraits, “The pictures are focused on emotions that are very subtle. I ask the viewer to connect to a feeling . . . Sometimes the way the food is held is a clue . . . There is an ambiguity which makes the encounter unclear.”

This combined intensity and ambiguity is part of the mesmerizing quality of Panas’s photos. “Are they offering or withholding?” Panas asks, “I am fascinated by these ideas.”

In 2012, Panas published her first monograph, The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag), which Photo District News recently named one of the best photo books of 2012. On Wednesday, October 31, 6-8pm, Panas will lead Portrait Night at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215). The evening will include a presentation, discussion, and book signing. Copies of The Mark of Abel will be available for purchase. For more information, visit the PRC website.

“More Pictures of Buildings and Food” will run at Gallery 339 September 12–December 22, 2012. For more information about the exhibition, visit Gallery 339, or call 215.731.1530.

Click here for more information on Panas’s presentation, discussion, and book signing at the PRC, or call 617.975.0600.

BC Profs Curate Paul Klee Exhibition at McMullen

Paul Klee, Nomad Mother, 1940.

Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art
McMullen Museum of Art
September 1–December 9, 2012

Paul Klee (1895–1940) was an early twentieth-century painter known for his cerebral, introspective style. Born in Bern, Switzerland, Klee was a painting master at the renowned Bauhaus, a German school of art, design, and architecture. Also a respected theorist, Klee attracted the attention of many of the most prominent European philosophers of the twentieth century. As the artist himself acknowledged, Klee was, “perhaps, without really wanting to be, a philosopher.”

Paul Klee, Äliup, 1931.

Professor John Sallis, in consultation with Professors Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe, curated the exhibition Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art, which will be on display in the McMullen Museum this fall. The exhibition is the first to focus on the relationship between Klee’s artistic oeuvre and contemporary philosophical thought, exploring the ways in which Klee’s groundbreaking theories of nature, words, and music translate into form, line, and color in his artwork.

Klee completed over 9,000 works during his lifetime, and Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art represents his prolific output with a collection of more than 65 watercolors, drawings, etchings, illustrations, and oil paintings. In addition, the exhibition includes facsimiles of his complex notebooks and personal writings.

Paul Klee, Eidola—Erstwhile Philosopher, 1940

Klee was profoundly affected by his experiences with nature, and the exhibition explores how Klee’s early appreciation of interaction with the natural world affected his works and teaching style. His notes, sketchbooks, and diagrams from his Bauhaus classes (1921–1931) appear in the exhibition, providing insight into his multifaceted, complex philosophies. His themes include creation and visibility; the ways in which line, form, and point capture movement and balance; notions of fantasy and the imaginary in art; art’s relationship with words and music; and theories of existence.

The exhibition also covers a dark era of Klee’s career—his 1933 work depicting the Nazi invasion of Germany. Laden with violent imagery, these works portray Klee as an astute critic of society, particularly of political events that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. The Nazi regime branded Klee’s art as “degenerate,” his work was denounced in the newspapers, and he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany, prompting him to return to his hometown of Bern for the remainder of his life.

Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art concludes with a display of later works that bring the union between art and philosophy full circle. A 1940 sketch of a philosopher whimsically recalls Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, for example. As curator Sallis notes, Klee complicates the distinction between artist and philosopher “because [he] delves beneath the surface, because he seeks to make visible the hidden origination of things from their primal ground.”

Paul Klee, Printed Sheet with Pictures, 1937.

The exhibition includes an audio tour and a theatre showing films depicting Klee’s life and works. The McMullen Museum has also published a catalogue with contributions from 15 prominent art historians and philosophers, with color reproductions of each work in the exhibition, as well as a new translation of Klee’s famous lecture, “On Modern Art.”

An international conference on Klee will be held at Boston College on October 17–19, featuring Peter Schubak in a concert performance of works inspired by Klee. All events are free of charge and open to the public. Visit http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/centers/ila/events/klee.html for more information on the conference and concert.

McMullen Museum of Art
Exhibition Hours and Tours:
September 1 – December 9, 2012
M – F: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Sa – Su: 12 – 5 p.m.

Note: Extended hours and dates closed are listed at http://www.bc.edu/artmuseum
Free Docent Tours: Available on Sundays at 2:00 p.m. starting September 2.

Paul Klee. Untitled. c. 1937.

Faculty Member Andrew Krivak Wins Chautauqua Prize for “The Sojourn”

Boston College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program faculty member and noted writer Andrew Krivak is the inaugural winner of the Chautauqua Prize, a new national literary award, for his first novel, The Sojourn. The Chautauqua Prize celebrates books that offer a rich and rewarding reading experience and recognizes the winning author for his or her significant contribution to the literary arts. “I feel honored to be part of this new tradition at Chautauqua Institution, and to be recognized by a place with such a long-standing commitment to art and literature in America,” Krivak said.

From andrewkrivak.com:

Inspired by Andrew Krivak’s personal family history, The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a shocking family tragedy to return with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When war comes, Jozef joins his cousin and brother-in-arms as a sharpshooter on the southern front, where he must survive a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy.

As poetic as Cold Mountain and The English Patient, this novel grips readers with chilling scenes of death and survival as it evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amid the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

Krivak is also the author of A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912, winner of the 2009 Louis Martz Prize. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, he grew up in Pennsylvania, has lived in London, and has taught at Harvard, Boston College, and the College of the Holy Cross. Krivak lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts. The Sojourn is his first novel.