THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 4 l WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016
Field Hockey Takes Two on Week, Defeats Williams See Sports, Page 10 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
Prince Albert Grimaldi ’81 Forms $2 Million Fund Shawna Chen ’20 Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Kellie Jones ’81, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, was named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow on Sept. 21. Jones earned acclaim for curating exhibits that highlighted African American artists.
Jones ’81 Named MacArthur Fellow Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor Art historian and curator Kellie Jones ’81 was named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation on Wednesday, Sept. 21. Along with the 22 other fellows, Jones received the foundation’s “genius” grant, a $625,000 stipend paid over five years. Jones is currently an associate professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University and a fellow at the school’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies. She has curated exhibitions focused on the art of African American and Latin American artists and of the African diaspora. She also wrote “EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art,” a book about her curatorial experiences. Jones graduated from Amherst with an interdisciplinary major, which she described as a combination of black studies, art history and Spanish, and wrote a thesis comparing African
American and Latin American artists. “I really made up what I was doing,” Jones said in an interview. “What was so fantastic about Amherst … was that I had the freedom to do that, the freedom to come up with an area of study and go into it.” At the time, Jones said, the study of art of the African diaspora, African Americans and Latin Americans was not as accessible to students as it is today. Jones said that her academic interests were influenced by her upbringing in New York City surrounded by art and artists. Though she said she did not want to be an artist herself, she was interested in curating art, especially writing about art and bringing the work of underrepresented artists to greater prominence. “Being in an urban high school was very diverse,” Jones said. “But when I was reading art history books, I didn’t see any of the people that I knew as artists growing up — I was lucky enough to have had that experience — in the books, or people like them. And I thought,
‘This is wrong. How can I see all these people in the world, yet they’re not in the books?’” During her undergraduate studies, she designed an independent study course to interview artists she knew in New York, she said, “as a way to find out information about these artists that [she] wasn’t readily finding.” Jones started her career as a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Community arts and ethnically specific organizations were important, she said, because they made different forms of art accessible and “because these highlight the histories that are so important for our country.” After receiving her graduate degree from Yale University, Jones planned to return to “the museum world,” but she received the opportunity to teach at Yale and later at Columbia. She said she accepted these offers because of her
Continued on Page 3
Prince Albert Grimaldi ’81 of Monaco gave the college $2 million to establish the Prince Albert II Foundation Green Revolving Fund (GRF) at Amherst, the college announced on Sept. 21. The fund will support the college in “achieving significant greenhouse gas reductions by providing a regenerative funding source that engages and empowers the campus community to implement innovative energy conservation measures,” Director of Sustainability Lauren Draucker said in an email interview. According to Draucker, Director of International Giving Erika Shelburne worked with Prince Albert to secure the gift. The Office of Sustainability’s past work and achievements started the conversations that led to the donation, Draucker said. Chief Advancement Officer Megan Morey said the commitment was finalized on June 30 after two years of discussions. “Over the last two and a half years, on a number of occasions, Erika and President Martin have met with Prince Albert,” Morey wrote in an email. “As discussions continued about a commitment, it was clear that an opportunity to support the environment was his top priority, and we were delighted that he chose the Green Revolving Fund.” The gift will be used to fund energy conservation projects that reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously creating savings that replenish the fund. It will also support “innovative student-led projects that won’t be expected to replenish the fund, but that support the larger goal of the Office of Environmental Sustainability of learning by doing research and projects on energy savings using the campus itself as a lab,” said Draucker. Plans for the fund will be finalized in the next few months. Though the majority of the fund will go to energy conservation projects, Draucker said that her office is still in the process of finalizing the GRF charter, which will decide the proportions of the fund that will be dedicated to each type of project. The charter will further specify how students can pursue
Continued on Page 3
Student Groups Turn to Hub for Improved Organization Isabel Tessier ’19 Staff Writer An increasing number of student organizations are using the Hub, a newly-launched online database designed to centralize information for student groups, according to the Office of Student Life. The website, which is accessible to all Amherst students, contains a directory of all registered clubs, a news board of upcoming campus events and a portal for event and party registration. The customizable online database is offered by Collegiate Link, a company that provides services to more than 1,000 colleges and universities across the U.S., including four of the schools in the Five College Consortium. Associate Director for Student Life for Student Activities Paul Gallegos and Assistant Director of
Student Activities Emily Lombardo first learned about the database during a meeting with student life offices from other schools in the consortium. One of the main goals of the database, they said, is to make student life resources readily accessible to the entire student body and to make individual clubs’ events and activities more widely known across campus. “It really is a one-stop shop for all things student activities and engagement on campus, if it’s being utilized to its full potential,” Lombardo said. Over the upcoming year, more resources will be added to the website, including a finance module which will allow organizations and students to request funding and keep track of club budgets. Other possible additions include an elections module, survey forms and a phone app of events happening on campus and nearby colleges.
Ultimately, however, Lombardo and Gallegos said that the Hub’s future direction will depend largely on students’ ideas and feedback, which have been positive so far. “In our smaller community here, we can really make this [fit] exactly to student’s expectations,” Gallegos said. “It’s not our vision of it.” Allison Ogawa ’18, a leader of the Amherst Yoga Club, said that she found the Hub useful for organizing the club and providing information to its members. “We operate mostly by putting up our schedule on Facebook, so I’ve found that it’s really nice to be able to post a schedule and have workshops through the Hub,” Ogawa said. Every registered club on campus has a page on the Hub where club leaders can post announcements and track rosters. Student members who
sign up to be a part of the club page can receive updates and information from the site itself or through texts sent to their phone. Leaders can also save documents like club constitutions, bylaws and meeting minutes to the page, preserving them for future members, which Gallegos calls “a huge upside” to the Hub. Ogawa also said that she thought the Hub was underutilized at the moment and that she hopes that the student body shifts over time to take advantage of its resources. The Hub, she said, has the potential to attract a broader audience for campus events and student projects. “Sometimes at this school we have overprogramming, and then people don’t show up to things, which is so sad,” she said. “I think this could be a really fantastic way to streamline and unify advertisement.”