St. Mary's College Board of Trustees Meeting, Oct. 27
St. Mary's College of Maryland Board of Trustees will meet on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. The session is open to the public and will start at 10:10 a.m. in the College's Glendening Annex. The agenda and meeting materials will be posted on the St. Mary's College website prior to the meeting: www.smcm.edu/board/calendar/.
The Center for the Study of Democracy Presents Maryland Politics: Can Larry Hogan withstand the Blue Wave?
St. Mary's College of Maryland's Center for the Study of Democracy presents "Maryland Politics: Can Larry Hogan withstand the Blue Wave?" on Thursday, Oct. 25, 4:45—6 p.m. in Cole Cinema, Campus Center on the College's campus. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
Maryland has not re-elected a Republican governor in over 60 years. Despite that daunting history and clear evidence of Democratic enthusiasm as we near Election Day 2018, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan appears set to defy both history and the Blue Wave that is building nationally.
How has Hogan managed to withstand the strong national headwinds? Will Hogan's popularity help other Republicans on the ballot in Maryland? Will the Blue Wave cause so much as a ripple as it hits the Chesapeake Bay?
These are just a few of the questions that will be explored by Bryan Sears, Maryland politics reporter for The Daily Record; Mileah Kromer, director of the Goucher Poll at Goucher College; and Todd Eberly, St. Mary's College associate professor of political science and interim director for the Center for the Study of Democracy.
According to Eberly, "Larry Hogan is the second most popular governor in the country. Hogan has a 70 percent approval rating and a 20 point lead over Democratic challenger Ben Jealous in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of 2 to 1."
St. Mary's College Presents Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist, Native American Scholar and Poet N. Scott Momaday on Thursday, Nov. 15, 8:15 p.m.
The Office of the President presents Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Native American scholar and poet N. Scott Momaday on Nov. 15 at 8:15 p.m. in Daugherty-Palmer Commons on the College's campus. The event, co-sponsored by the VOICES Reading Series and the Theater, Film, and Media Studies department, is free of charge and open to the public.
Momaday has been hailed as "the dean of American Indian writers" by the New York Times. He crafts—in language and imagery—majestic landscapes of a sacred culture. Named a UNESCO Artist for Peace and Oklahoma's poet laureate, he was also a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Arts for "introducing millions worldwide to the essence of Native American culture." Momaday was the first Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, "House Made of Dawn." His most recent volume, "Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems," was released in 2011.
His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the "Mondello," Italy's highest literary honor, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. His works include "The Way to Rainy Mountain," "The Names: A Memoir," "The Ancient Child," and a new collection, "Three Plays," which celebrates Kiowa history and culture. He was featured in the Ken Burns documentary "The West," which showcased his masterful retelling of Kiowa history and mythology.
Momaday is the founder of The Buffalo Trust, dedicated to the preservation of Native American culture and heritage. He has held tenured teaching posts at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of Arizona and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Behind his printed work beats the heart of the oral storyteller, keeping alive—in myths and memories—the peoples persecuted and the land lost. "In the oral tradition," says Momaday, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true."
St. Mary's College Theater, Film and Media Studies presents Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s black comedy "Happy Birthday, Wanda June" Nov. 14-17 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 18 at 2 p.m.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s black comedy "Happy Birthday, Wanda June" opens on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at 8 p.m. and runs through Sunday, Nov. 18 in the Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall, on the St. Mary's College of Maryland campus. Ticket prices are $4 for teachers, students, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6, general admission. To make reservations, email the Theater Box Office at boxoffice@smcm.edu or telephone 240-895-4243.
Produced by the Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies and directed by faculty member Mark A. Rhoda, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June" is playwright Vonnegut's prescient riff on toxic masculinity, as seen through the lens of late-1960s America, a time of political and cultural turmoil.
Written in 1971, the play introduces us to big-game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan, presumed dead for many years, who returns home like Odysseus to an America he no longer recognizes and a wife, Penelope, who's started a new life.
During the war, Harold killed over 200 men and women, including the notorious Beast of Yugoslavia, and countless more animals, for sport. He was later "lost" in the Amazon rainforest while hunting for diamonds with Colonel Looseleaf Harper, a slow-witted aviation hero who had the unhappy task of dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, an act he comes to regret.
Confronted on his unexpected return by two suitors for his wife, a nerdy Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman named Shuttle and a hippie, peace-loving M.D. called Woodly, who later becomes his foe, Harold is aggrieved that his country has become weak. He even finds his son, Paul, who had worshipped his father from afar as a real American hero, has been pampered and grown unmanly, afraid even to walk the park at night.
Harold Ryan, the prolific killing machine, believes all heroes have been replaced by intolerable pacifists, and that in postwar 1960s America, it's his job to make America great again. This is the story of his tragic attempt to do so.
"Happy Birthday, Wanda June" performs Nov. 14-17 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 18 at 2 p.m. An informal talk-back with cast, crew, and director follows the opening night performance. Refreshments provided.
Faculty Exhibition: Finding Elsewhere at Boyden Gallery, through Nov. 10, curated by St. Mary's College Alumna Kate Pollasch '10
Panel Discussion Nov. 4, 4:45 p.m.
(St. Mary's City, Md.) Friday, October 5, 2018—The Faculty Exhibition: Finding Elsewhere is an exhibition of the bravery and faith of studio practices that unhinge notions of reality, that question one's senses and physicality, and unveil illusions of truth and time. Held until November 10, the exhibition is curated by St. Mary's College alumna Kate Pollasch '10. The gallery is open Tuesday- Friday from 1-6 p.m., on Saturday from 11 a.m.-4 p.m., and also available by appointment for class visits. A Panel Discussion with the artists will take place on Nov. 4 beginning at 4:45 p.m. There is no admittance fee to the gallery.
According to Pollasch, "SMCM is an incubator for mindfulness, for dynamic self-discovery and freedom, and for community building unlike most academic environments. As much as this exhibition is not about SMCM in specific ways, working with these six professors reminded me that while the exhibition is Finding Elsewhere, we are all oriented by the centralized anchor of SMCM."
The six artists and St. Mary's College professors in the exhibition, Tristan Cai, Sue Johnson, Giulia Piera Livi, Jessye McDowell, Carrie Patterson, and Lisa Scheer traverse a range of mediums from digital modeling, printmaking and artist books, to painting and installation. While their use of formal choices of composition, color, subject, light and more vary widely, common thread lines run through each artist, pulling individual practices into the warp and weft of a multicenter group exhibition.
Jessye McDowell works across a range of digital platforms to question the divide between nature and digital, between the "natural world" and the "virtual world." The saturated surface, texture and sense of space within her work leaves one questioning; can you experience a place even if it isn't tangible? In creating her 3D rendered work, McDowell samples surface textures and materials, such as fabrics, leaves, and natural patterns, and cascades them across the environment like a tangible skin in a slick hyper-gloss world.
Tristan Cai's work also explores a chromatic composition of phantasmic saturation through digital platforms. Exhibiting two collections of works from A Celebration: The Origin of Life series, Cai's research-based project unpacks scientific developments in evolution and addresses how knowledge and narratives of the facts of human studies are ripe with imagination, assumptions, and created truths. In his second body of work, Cai utilizes source images from San Diego Zoo's chimpanzee shows in the 1970s, restaged primate cognitive study experiments, and scientific texts to destabilize the difference between science, circus and animal entertainment, and imagination.
Through a selection of works from multiple series, Carrie Patterson reorients perception and sight in a similar conceptual way to Cai's interest in how we build our realities into states of source material and narratives. In Patterson's Breton House LightBox, space and physicality are inversed. Each painting is based off 26 windows, representing what is seen within each window and populating that sight with weight, volume, and saturation. In Total Station, Patterson remembers the sensory and physical experience of Mulberry Fields in St. Mary's County, both vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The Mistaken Identity series addresses the subject of what we choose to be concealed and revealed from public reception through twelve artworks made from her artists' proofs between 2004-2014.
Lisa Scheer's abstract sculptural practice elevates steel and aluminum to feel weightless in their forms that contort, tower, and arch outward in space. Scheer's upward arching and swiftly shifting sculptural works defy their very titles, Gone, in their commanding and visually fluid physicality. For they are not gone, they are loyal to our presence in the gallery, frozen with poetic motion and harmonizing with light and shadows to create an environment charged with powerful vulnerability.
Giulia Piera Livi's installation piece might appear strangely familiar, as if pulled from an existing domestic space and brought into the public. Yet, something is not exact, something creates a lingering sensation that this isn't anywhere you have been before and the normative rules of engagement don't withstand. What seems to be a utilitarian garden hose is re-routed to pour out pigment color across a floor, or what might be a functional seat cushion is perched dormant high on a wall. Livi constructs immersive installations that reside between the worlds of functionality, design, imagination, and points of memory.
Sue Johnson unpacks the deeply complex history of domesticity and its relation to gender, economics, and capitalism. Generated from an historical interest with the American Dream, post-World War II and the development of the modern housewife and consumer culture, Johnson creates a visual context for discussing when the American Dream became enmeshed in product purchases and material culture. The Room With A View of Infinity, is part of the Ready-Made Dream project in which a domestic ideal drapes across the gallery with trompe l'oeil believability. In this oversized modern interior, everything has its place and intentionality, and yet the façade reminds us, just as in our own lives, that goods and décor offer a one-dimensional sense of self-completion, of "living the dream."
The mission of Boyden Gallery of St. Mary's College of Maryland is to serve as an educational and cultural resource for students, faculty and staff of the College and the broader Southern Maryland community.
Boyden Gallery and the Fine Art Collection are guided by the conviction that engagement with visual art, media and culture is a key component of a liberal arts education. The Gallery promotes visual literacy, object-based learning and the understanding of visual art in its historic and cultural context through exhibitions, educational programs, interdisciplinary exploration, and community engagement.
For more information, contact the Boyden Gallery at (240) 895-4246 or boydengallery@smcm.edu. Boyden Gallery is located on the 2nd floor of Montgomery Hall at St. Mary's College of Maryland.