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BENNINGTON MAGAZINE
Ashley Brenon Jowett
Editor and Chief Writer
Kat Hughes
Art Director and Designer
David Morelos Zaragoza Laguera
Photographer
Jeffrey Perkins MFA ’09
Vice President, Communications and Marketing
Natalie Redmond
Associate Writer
CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan Lethem ’86
Charlie Nadler
Nate Padavick
Louise Roug MFA ’23
Laura R. Walker
ON THE COVER
Details from the studio of Pat Adams, former Bennington College faculty member in painting.
TO SUBMIT
Bennington Magazine welcomes letters, opinions, essays, interviews, thought pieces, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, captioned work samples, and personal and professional updates. Please send submissions, proposals, and story ideas to magazine@bennington.edu. All will be considered. Due to limited space, we may not be able to publish all submissions.
Bennington Magazine is printed on stock that is Forest Stewardship Council® and Preferred by Nature™ certified, and is designated Ancient Forest Friendly™. The cover is made from 30% sustainable recycled fiber and the
Dear Alumni and Friends,
Over the past academic year, Bennington and colleges and universities across the country have been thinking deeply about freedom of expression. We are considering how we can share our ideas in ways that are respectful to all and where, precisely, voicing our own opinion restricts the rights of others to voice theirs.
These are complex and nuanced questions that we are working hard to answer through a multi-constituency working group, including faculty, staff, students, and members of the Board of Trustees. This fall, the group will set forth policy recommendations that will help Bennington make complicated decisions about free speech.
While policy recommendations are deeply important to our campus community, their meaning goes far beyond our idyllic mountain landscape. College campuses, designed as they are to be boundless hubs of ideas, are places where new ideas—from medical and scientific discoveries to literary and political theories—are conceived, take root, flourish, and spread. Not all ideas are worthy of proliferation, but some are not only worthy but critical, and it’s hard to tell the difference until they are tested. We cannot afford to stifle expression out of fear or anxiety.
Moreover, the multiplicity of ideas is at the very heart of American democracy. Through exposure to different points of view and the rigors of dialog, we are able to interrogate our assumptions and reaffirm or change our minds and our votes. College campuses serve as a rare and enduring example of how to live well among those who disagree with us.
For this reason, visiting a college campus, especially during times of international turmoil, requires a certain mettle. You must be prepared to hear ideas you disagree with and to share ideas that counter those you oppose. I hope you will visit and support Bennington because you value the exchange of ideas and understand the importance of it as well as we do.
I remain steadfast in the belief that we—Bennington’s alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and current students—are the link between the desperate needs of the world and the myriad yet-unimagined-butever-hopeful possibilities. Thank you for all that you do to support Bennington and please consider how you can help us bring its important work to more people.
Sincerely,
Laura R. Walker President | Bennington College
P.S. As we go to press, I have just announced a major collaboration with the dance program made homeless by the closure of the University of the Arts. Read the news in The New York Times via the QR code at right, and look for more on this exciting development at bennington.edu and in the spring issue of Bennington Magazine.
Usdan
First & Foremost
1
Celebrating the Class of 2024
On June 1, 122 members of Bennington College’s Class of 2024 gathered, along with their family members and friends, faculty, staff, and leadership at the End of the World on Commons Lawn to celebrate the 89th Conferring of Degrees. Graduates hailed from twenty-eight states and eighteen countries and ranged in age from 19 to 53.
2 Breaking a Sweat for Sweat
From May 3-5 at Bennington College, Drama faculty member Shawtane Bowen directed a production of Sweat by Lynn Nottage.
“The characters in this play are fictional, but they are based on real people from a real American town,” said Bowen. “The play explores what happens when work disappears and how people become dehumanized, fractured as they’re being exploited by big business and the one percent.”
3 Jason Moon ’13 Named a Pulitzer Finalist
Jason Moon ’13, a senior reporter and producer on New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR)’s Document team, was selected as a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting.
Moon shares the honor with his NHPR colleagues Lauren Chooljian, Alison MacAdam, Daniel Barrick, and Katie Colaneri for the team’s work on The 13th Step, a narrative podcast series that investigates the corruption and sexual abuse within New Hampshire’s largest addiction treatment network.
“Bennington taught me that art can make the world better,” said Moon. “That’s what my colleague Lauren Chooljian and I tried to do with this reporting. We’re very humbled by the recognition.”
In addition to his Pulitzer-nominated work on The 13th Step, Moon is also the host of the hit NHPR true crime podcast Bear Brook, which was named one of the best podcasts of 2018 by The New Yorker magazine.
Moon began his career in public radio while a student at Bennington by taking on Field Work Term experiences working with John Gregory from This I Believe; Jay Allison, who produces and airs stories for All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life; and Viki Merrick, producer of The Moth Radio Hour.
3
From left: Senior Reporter and Host Lauren Chooljian, Lead Editor Alison MacAdam, Senior Producer Jason Moon ’13, and NHPR’s Senior Editor of Podcasts Katie Colaneri at the 2023 National Edward R. Murrow awards.
4 Your Bennington Bookshelf
A Publishing Pioneer’s Legacy
A book about Judith Jones ’45, one of Bennington’s most luminous alums, was published by Atria Books on May 28, 2024. The Editor, by Sara B. Franklin, describes Jones’s fifty years of work at Alfred A. Knopf, where she introduced chefs and cookbook authors Julia Child and James Beard to the world, and at Doubleday, where she is known for having rescued Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl from the reject pile. Throughout her career, Jones worked with notable authors including John Updike, Ann Tyler, Langston Hughes, JeanPaul Sartre, Albert Camus, and many others.
Exploring the Divine and the Carnal in Daily Life
Published in September by Grove Atlantic, Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro MFA ’09 was named one of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024. In Quatro’s latest release, two strangers—an off-the-grid modern day prophet and a teenage girl in trouble—strike up an unlikely friendship in what the publisher hails as a “propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith.”
Vivid Vignettes
In Bitter Water Opera, the debut novel by Nicolette Polek ’16— who returns as a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Fall 2024—the past and present collide when a long-dead legendary dancer returns to guide and challenge a film studies professor who is struggling the throes of personal despair. Named a New Yorker Best Book of 2024, this publication from Graywolf Press “describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions.”
A Monster-Slaying Fantasy Romance
As a Nebula Award-winning author, John Wiswell ’05 is known as a master of fantasy fiction. He makes his novellength debut with Someone You Can Build a Nest In (DAW, April 2024), a love story between a human and a monster—told from the monster’s perspective. Monster hunting, shapeshifting creatures, and the scariest thing of all—toxic in-laws—abound in this rollicking fantasy/romance.
Resilient Wartime Women
It’s 1938 in Paris, and an opera star has ceded the limelight to talented up-and-comer Yvonne Chevallier, who will enrapture audiences at the preeminent German opera festival and win the unwanted attention of Adolph Hitler. The Paris Understudy (Alcove Press, September 2024) is the debut novel by Aurélie Thiele MFA ’25. The novel, writes the publisher, is “a love letter to the arts and a stark depiction of the choices we make to survive.”
Yearning for New Beginnings
Looking for short stories that pack a punch? A New Day by Sue Mell ’78, a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, was published in September by She Writes Press and offers thirteen stories tied together with characters struggling through desire and loss. “Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, A New Day’s stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression,” writes the publisher.
5 Line Dancing, but Make It Subversively Bennington
In April 2024, Bennington’s Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS) and Carriage Barn Music Series combined forces to offer the First Annual Catamount Country: A Subversively Bennington Line Dance & Hoedown.
This jam-packed night of boot scootin’ and grape-vining in Greenwall was preceded by a day-before all-levels line dance tutorial for those who wanted to learn (or perfect their best version of) Texas Time, Tush Push, High Horse, and other favorites. The all-in Barn Dance was a welcoming way to start!
Guest dancer and instructor Jeannette Sharp Oakes, host of a line dance event in LA, led the clinic. Alexa Curran ’24 designed the posters for the event, and Kayetan McInerny ’24 served as DJ.
The dance joyously celebrated Bennington’s queer, BIPOC+, everyone-is-welcome country scene and featured a costume contest along the theme of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter/Rodeo Queen. Sadie Levinsohn ’24 and Christine Frye ’24 tied for first place. Second went to Stella Feldschuh ’25 and third to Alexa Curran ’24.
“I first started queer line dancing in the nineties as a gay rodeo buckle bunny!” said faculty member in art history Vanessa Lyon. “Right after COVID, I found myself re-obsessed with country dancing at Stud Country in L.A. It was, and is, so fun and such a good way to build community, I’ve been wanting to do a Bennington hoedown ever since. So, when Cowboy Carter hit, my stellar colleague, band leader, and ethnomusicologist Joseph Alpar and I were ready to co-host—which we couldn’t have done without the invaluable support of my VALS ‘deputy,’ Sawyer London ’24. We brought in Jeannette Sharp Oakes and danced the night away to all the good songs—Chappell Roan included! I hope it’s the first Catamount Country of many!”
6 Museum Fellows Visit the Olympics of the Art World
From May 16 to 23, Bennington College 2024 Frankenthaler Museum Term Fellows had the opportunity to travel to La Biennale Arte—the 60th international art exhibition hosted in Venice, Italy.
Lorena Fernández Camba ’25, Ximena Maldonado Mayans ’25, Adam Matthewson ’25, and Grace Muller ’25 traveled along with Program Director and faculty member Elizabeth White and visiting faculty member Antonio Sergio Bessa to Venice, where they were met by Rachael Pullin, Manager of Educational Initiatives for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The Foundation’s generous support made this experience possible for the cohort.
Fellows spent two days at the central exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, where several members of the group were able to hear Julia Bryan-Wilson, president of the international jury of the Biennale, speak about the works on view. Additionally, the cohort visited a number of the national pavilions and events around the city, including the German Pavilion (part two) on the island of Certosa and the Holy See Pavilion, which staged its works inside a women’s prison on Giudecca.
When they weren’t taking in the best of the contemporary art world, Fellows made time for some sightseeing, enjoying a vaporetto water bus trip up the Grand Canal, taking a group photo in Piazza San Marco, and—of course—eating gelato!
7 New Trustees
Bryn Mooser ’01 and Eddie Ubell ’09 were named to the Bennington College Board of Trustees at the May meeting. Mooser is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmaker and media entrepreneur who founded the immersive media company RYOT, which was acquired by Verizon in 2016. He built the industry-leading documentary studio XTR and streaming platform DOCUMENTARY+ as well as the AI animation studio Asteria. Ubell is the founder of Sunshine Enclosures, one of the foremost branding agencies and sustainable packaging manufacturers in the cannabis industry.
“Bennington is an institution and a community that is very important to me,” said Ubell. “As a student, I was taught how to take charge of my education and follow my own path. At the end of that path, I discovered myself. In today’s world, Bennington College’s unique approach to the liberal arts is more crucial than ever. I chose to join the board because I want to ensure that generations of students to come will be able to benefit from a Bennington education, as I have.”
Mooser said, “Bennington taught me how to think creatively and gave me the confidence to build across different disciplines. Some of my fondest memories were sitting on Commons Lawn at the End of the World and discussing big ideas and bigger dreams with my fellow students in those late spring days when the air filled with the fragrance of lilacs. I’m excited to be able to try to give back and try to deepen the connection from the entertainment industry to the college.”
8 Williamson in Europe
Philemona Williamson ’73 had her first solo museum exhibition in Europe with the Passerelle, Centre d’art contemporain, in Lesneven, France, May 30–August 26. What was most remarkable to her were the many people who attended the opening: families, students, other artists, the mayor…. “This appeared to be an activity for the entire town,” she exclaimed, delighted.
Much of what attendees noted resonated with Williamson’s sense of her work. “Yes, I am a Black American woman painter, but my narratives are much more universal. I felt that they looked at the universal part of the narrative first, as opposed to this specific Black American female point of view. I found that refreshing.”
Her work was featured in a group show at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco July 13–August 23 and will appear in a group show at Galerie Semiose in Paris in the fall. ●
Saving Democracy Together
THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS AND A BENNINGTON EDUCATION
By Ashley Brenon Jowett
Almost a century ago, under the looming threat of fascism, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Americans about global conflicts pitting representative governments founded on individual liberty against emerging fascist dictatorships. Reflecting on John Dewey’s progressive education philosophy, FDR said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
Bennington College arose out of that treacherous political climate as a pioneer in progressive, liberal arts education. Like Dewey and FDR, its founders believed in the proposition that education offers the best hope for continually reinvigorating democracy’s core values of representative government, inherent equality, and human freedom. Bennington aimed, and still aims, as its Commencement Statement vows, to contribute to the development of “free citizens, dedicated to civilized values and capable of creative and constructive membership in modern society.”
In the early spring 2024, faculty members in the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, including Brian Campion, Susan Sgorbati, and Eileen Scully, began thinking about how they could honor Bennington’s legacy of responsibility to American democracy while leveraging their successful annual public policy forum to answer the needs of the current moment, including providing necessary context about the upcoming presidential election.
“There was the sense, from the students especially, that we had to do something,” said Sgorbati. They began by launching a three-week, one-credit course for students that would be used to formulate a seven-week class that was open to all. Sgorbati continued, “We did what Bennington does best: we used a highly collaborative approach to create a solution that brings people together.”
Throughout a three-week, one-credit course, students had deep, often emotional, discussions based on prompts such as what does democracy mean to you, and how would you like to see it change? “We considered these fundamental questions and determined that we, as young people, don’t know where to go for information about voting rights and how to participate in democratic processes,” said Will Greer ’24. Students completed research projects and learned about how they could be more involved. “What was most important to me is that we were not just theorizing. We were planning things out and learning about how we could make a real-world impact,” Greer added.
With information from the students, Campion, Sgorbati, and Scully envisioned the seven-week class open to everyone across the country, especially Bennington alumni, that would bring a bipartisan group of political leaders into direct contact with those hoping for a purposeful direction toward the American democratic ideal.
Student discussions informed what guests and information would be presented throughout the seven-week course.
Susan Sgorbati
“We did what Bennington does best: we used a highly collaborative approach to create a solution that brings people together.”
Guests include Andrea Bernstein, Casey Bohlen, Ciji Dodds, James H. Douglas, Anthony Paul Farley, Richard Haass, Svante Myrick, Kesha Ram Hinsdale, David Rohde, Andrew Weissmann, and others. The class was designed to deepen the understanding of democracy while reigniting participants’ commitment to civic responsibility. It began on September 5.
“As a historian, I’m deeply concerned by the striking similarities between our current era and the turbulent thirties, which so profoundly alarmed Franklin Roosevelt and galvanized the founders of Bennington College,” said Scully. “Our innovative course, Saving Democracy Together, aims to reach Gen Z with both urgency and optimism and provide a meaningful and hopeful step toward safeguarding our democratic values.”
Through guided discussions and curated readings led by expert guests, participants probe the essence of democracy and devise strategies for meaningful engagement. Topics include foundational documents of the U.S., the nexus of education and democracy, media influence, social justice debates, economic crises, technological instability, environmental stewardship, and the global drift into authoritarianism.
In addition to discussion, each session of the seven-week class welcomes an expert guest of national significance and an interview from someone working on democratic issues on the ground, especially those from battleground states. As is the case in all Bennington classes, participants have access to accomplished practitioners and lively discussions.
“It’s not too late to join,” Sgorbati said. “We hope to have a robust group of alumni eager to continue their studies at Bennington and use what they learn to make a positive impact for themselves and others.” For more information about joining the class, visit bennington.edu/democracyclass. ●
Voting and Gen Z: Abraar Arpon ’26
Inspired by American democracy and its potential, his faculty members, and his fellow students, Abraar Arpon ’26, who studies Computer Science and Public Action at Bennington, built a website that aims to make voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election easier for everyone. The site, myballot.info, aggregates information from 571 government websites to provide the answers to the most frequently asked voting questions in one place. Myballot.info monitors these websites’ downtime and reports and updates the links in almost real-time.
“As a member of Gen Z, I know Gen Z voters don’t want to read through pages of complex web text to get the answers they need,” said Arpon. “If we make all of the information easily available to all people, they are more likely to vote.”
The site is non-partisan and does not request or collect users’ information. Answers include how one registers to vote in their state, the voter registration deadlines, how one checks to see if they are registered, valid forms of ID, how to vote in absentia, and others.
Arpon hopes that the site will help strengthen democracy in the United States and sees strong democracies as a counterweight to radicalization.
“There are people out there who have more understanding than me, more money than me, more power than me, more influence on people…” Arpon said. “This is something I can do to support democracy in America. You cannot have a radical society if it is truly democratic.”
Using Bennington’s Strengths to Define Its Future
THE ADAPTIVE FRAMEWORK
By Ashley Brenon Jowett
“Typical college master plans are linear,” explained Andrew Schlatter, former Vice President for Facilities Management and Planning. “They depend on completing projects in order. So, as soon as circumstances change to make one project irrelevant, the whole rest of the plan is broken and needs to be reworked.”
When Bennington needed to refresh its architectural, facilities, and landscape plan, leaders and partners—including Reed Hilderbrand, its landscape architecture partner for the last 20 years and WXY Architecture + Urban Design of New York City—thought about how it could be done differently. What if we drew upon Bennington’s own pedagogical method, its rich history, and its culture? The outcome is a remarkable report that is both flexible and capable of serving as a decision-making tool for many years to come. It’s called the Adaptive Framework.
The idea resonated with Donald Sherefkin, recently retired Bennington College architecture faculty member, who also served as a member of the framework’s workgroup. “The College’s founding documents indicate that there should be ‘no grand buildings.’ Instead, throughout the whole history of the College, they adapted,” he said. Pointing to the Barn as an example and smiling at the audacity of the College’s founders, he said, “they took an existing building [designed] for animals and turned it into the administrative center of the College.”
The Adaptive Framework acts as a companion to the 5-year strategic plan, which was also completed throughout 2023. “Bennington College’s campus is known as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country,” said President Laura Walker. “This innovative and creative planning framework is a reflection of our willingness to do things differently and our commitment to using College resources in the most meaningful ways.”
GROWING KNOWLEDGE
accesses the nearby communities off campus. They wanted to learn everything they could about the campus, including all of the many ways it was used and when, even down to the differences in how students use the campus in their first year compared to their senior year. “It’s a unique place,” said Dugopolski. “There were a lot of incredible attributes that we wanted to enhance. It needed a detailed and comprehensive look at what is possible.”
The data-driven approach was a way to consider the current strengths and needs of the campus. From a sustainability point of view, said Adrian Niall, Principal from Reed Hilderbrand, it’s always best to start with what one has. “The big principle is ‘are we making the most out of our building?’
Before we think about new buildings, are we getting the most out of our landscape? Are there things that we could do differently? That would make a building function better? How could even older buildings meet contemporary needs? What would allow the landscape to function better and be a more valuable resource for learning for recreation, wellness, the ecology, and the environment?”
THE COMMUNITY
With an understanding of Bennington’s growing emphasis on shared governance, Schlatter and the teams from WXY and Reed Hilderbrand spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the framework design process inclusive. Schlatter convened focus groups and later identified members of a steering committee representing all of Bennington’s constituents, including students, faculty, staff, and the Board of Trustees. They met regularly throughout 2023 to determine the needs and priorities and how they might be addressed.
The team from WXY—including Claire Weisz, the company’s Principal in Charge, and Associate Principal Jacob Dugopolski—was inspired by Bennington’s unique pedagogy, particularly how every Bennington student writes their own academic plan informed by growing knowledge, a community of advisors and collaborators, and a multidisciplinary approach. They worked to incorporate these same ideas to create a framework for Bennington.
They began by collecting every piece of Bennington College data they could find. Schlatter provided housing-use information, classroom-use data, and the College’s substantial catalog of sustainability data. Reed Hilderbrand provided information from their long partnership with the College. “Someone had done a study of the curriculum, so we used that,” said Weisz. “There was the facilities master plan, so we incorporated information from that.”
The team collected information about how many students were studying in each discipline, often more than one; the areas used for those disciplines; and how students moved around campus. They looked at how the campus community
“Andy worked a lot to build a group that was open and that could represent different people,” said Lorena Fernandez Camba ’25 who studies Architecture at Bennington and who both worked on the project as a student worker and served on the steering committee. “We had many conversations about how to build or make transitions. [We came up with] creative ways that prioritize the creation of community and comfort. That’s something that’s unusual to see in any institution.”
“I was impressed by the intensity of the engagement,” said Niall of Reed Hilderbrand. “There was a huge commitment by the working group to be part of each of these meetings. Some of the subjects may not have been their focus, but everyone participated. Everyone was able to share, and I think it made it a much stronger and grounded plan.”
MULTIDISCIPLINARY
The 156-page report looks more like one that would have been produced for a municipality or a neighborhood than for a college. In fact, the methods used to create it more closely reflect those used in urban planning than those typically used by colleges and universities.
It begins with a comprehensive assessment of the existing campus and how it is used. It goes on to address organizational priorities, including movement, living, landscape, sustainability, learning, and recreation, complete with strengths and weaknesses gathered from students, faculty, staff, and others. It ends with a menu of recommendations, both large scale and small, including everything from short-term solutions to those that encompass the long-term vision.
“Rather than a singular linear path, the new campus framework acknowledges that multiple futures are possible and creates a flexible planning tool that can adapt and change in response to changing circumstances,” said Schlatter. “The document provides a look at the possibilities and their relationships to each other without locking us into any one set of decisions.”
One project would reroute vehicle traffic around the perimeter of the campus and leave the main academic thoroughfare more accessible to pedestrians. Another proposed idea would create a stronger sense of arrival with the creation of a welcome center between the Visual and Performing Arts Center (VAPA) and Cricket Hill. The northern end of campus is noted as a desirable location for academic buildings and housing. The report included projects that would help students and others connect with the communities around campus. Projects will be chosen based on the priorities identified in the framework, the strategic plan, and the availability of funds.
“I’ve been here through various master plans,” said Sherefkin. “Bennington’s Adaptive Framework is so completely unique. It’s both finer grained and more comprehensive than most processes. It didn’t look just at structures; it looked at infrastructure, circulation, ecology, sustainability…. I have never seen a process like this before.”
What stood out most to Camba was the consideration that the process paid to the needs of all of the diverse groups who use the campus. “This project was really complicated to make,” said Camba. “But the way we did it felt caring. I hope everyone felt cared for.”
The care Camba noted continues to the very last pages of the report, where WXY included a step-by-step guide to considering and implementing projects in a communityfocused way first developed in the United Kingdom, said Weisz. “Especially in smaller towns and villages in the UK, they have a more developed way of doing shared planning. The things that work in other environments can be applied in university and college settings and allow a greater sense of shared purpose and dialog,” said Weisz.
Schlatter hopes that the Adaptive Framework will be used to guide change at the College for many years to come and herald decades of positive development. “Just as students’ plans relate to tremendous personal growth and improvement, we hope that the Adaptive Framework will move us toward the development of a place that matches our values and improves our connection.” ●
Campus Renewal
Donors can contribute to campus renewal and be a part of exciting changes that support sustainability, movement, living, and learning on campus. Often, a single project, even a small one, can relate to multiple interrelated benefits. Give today.
Be a Bennington Champion
By Laura R. Walker, President
“The largest life lesson I got from attending Bennington was the sense of possibility,” said Brian Rogers ’95, cofounder of The Chocolate Factory Theater, an innovative space built by and for artists, in Long Island City. He can’t imagine making a career as innovative as his “had it not been for the Bennington experience.” (Read more on page 28.) So many of you echo that sentiment. Today, I am writing to ask you to translate those feelings into support for Bennington.
Bennington is needed in this world more than ever. But we need your support as we navigate extraordinary challenges. I invite you to join me in taking action. Use the envelope included with this issue of Bennington Magazine, email institutionaladvancement@bennington.edu, or visit bennington.edu/give to make a gift or pledge in support of Bennington today.
Bennington is at a critical inflection point. Like many small liberal arts colleges—arts-centered ones, in particular— Bennington faces strong headwinds. I want to share our strengths, our challenges, the vital work we are doing to ensure a long and vibrant future, and the ways you can help.
In many ways, Bennington College has never been stronger. Amid threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and marginalization of the arts, students and their families recognize that our unmatched educational model is as relevant as ever. Bennington’s enrollment is at an all-time
high, applications have doubled in the last three years, and our most recent class is the most diverse and academically accomplished in our history.
The Princeton Review ranked Bennington #3 in the nation for college theater, and we rank in the top ten nationwide for innovation and classroom experience. Recent graduates are going to top graduate schools, running for political office, writing novels, and creating works of art, performance, and scientific research. This summer, Bennington Writing Seminars students flocked to campus for their residency as the program celebrated its 30th anniversary. Alumni from every discipline are doing crucial work to improve our world.
We are launching innovative programs to address the needs of the moment. Working from the success we have experienced with Beyond Plastics, this fall we launched a new online class, Saving Democracy Together, for students of all ages from across the country and around the world.
At the same time, we are facing some of the most unfavorable circumstances in our history. More than thirty colleges closed last year, and in recent months, both Goddard College and University of the Arts joined the ranks of small colleges that shut their doors. Factors outside our control—a declining and changing student body, a steady drumbeat of criticism from politicians who question the importance of a highly educated citizenry, and a fumbled
rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, to name a few—have delayed students’ commitments and led to smaller incoming classes nationwide.
With rising inflation, expenses have increased, particularly for scholarships for our talented students. Academic, mental health, and social support are more costly than ever. Moreover, Bennington’s model—with its combination of small classes, individualized student-driven plans, Field Work Term, and graduate-style advising—has always been more expensive than the “fill the lecture hall” style of education offered by many other institutions. And our beautiful expansive campus, one of our most cherished assets, requires significantly more funds for upkeep.
Continuing our nearly 100-year history as a vanguard in higher education requires bold action and innovation. We have a plan. Our 5-year strategic plan and corresponding yearly goals include strengthening the financial sustainability of the College and providing scholarship support for students; energizing Bennington’s distinctive educational approach through support of the faculty, curriculum, and the Bennington Plan; bolstering the student experience from beginning to end; continuing support for community and diversity, equity, and inclusion; expanding programs through new interdisciplinary certificates and degrees; and investing in capital improvements that support the work of
students and faculty, preserve the beauty of the campus, and accommodate new initiatives.
As hard as we are working, we cannot do it without you. We know that Bennington’s alumni are passionate about the education they received here, yet the percentage of alumni who made a gift last year is half of what it is at our peer institutions. We can do better. We must secure vital annual support and grow Bennington’s endowment. We ask you today to become a Bennington champion and to contribute to a stronger and more robust future for Bennington. Please donate. Whether you can give $5 or $5 million, your gift is a vote of support for Bennington. Choose to support Scholarships and Financial Aid, Campus Renewal, Fieldwork Term, or Faculty and Curricular Support. Funds raised are a part of a comprehensive effort to grow support and increase Bennington’s endowment. Use the envelope included with this issue of Bennington Magazine, email institutionaladvancement@bennington.edu , or visit bennington.edu/give, to make a donation. Your support will help see us through the upcoming challenges and continue providing extraordinary educational opportunities into our centennial and for generations of Bennington students to come. Thank you in advance for your consideration and commitment to the students of today and to our collective future.●
Sunlight filters through the curtains onto the desk by the window. Books, papers, and pens suggest a creative mind at work. The writer has just stepped away, leaving their glasses on an open notebook. A gooseneck lamp conveys the long hours, the flowers in the vase a consideration for beauty.
This was the image—a mise-en-scène of the writer’s life—that advertised the Bennington Writing Seminars at its founding in 1994. Inside the promotional brochure, the MFA program was characterized as “a community of kindred spirits and constructive counsel” that would honor “the solitary nature of reading and writing and the collaborative voices of education.”
Its founder, the poet Liam Rector, described it as “the vortex.” The pull is undeniable as the program celebrates its 30th anniversary. “There’s something so seductive about Bennington,” said Taymour Somroo, author of Other Names for Love, who joined the faculty as a fiction teacher in 2022. Driving up the driveway to campus, it is as if the road itself disappears behind you. “You lose all sense of time. The world falls away,” he said. “It’s like nothing else exists.”
On an evening in June, Guillermo Rebollo-Gil MFA ’22 chatted with Eugenie Dallan MFA ’25 outside the Commons. It was midway through the summer residency, and students and faculty mingled on the patio, discussing that week’s readings and lectures as the shadows on the lawn grew longer in the slanted light. Rebollo-Gil, a residency volunteer from Puerto Rico, who studied with Craig Morgan Teicher, Brian Blanchfield, Carmen Giménez, and Jennifer Chang, recently sold the manuscript that came out of his MFA thesis, his first book of poetry in English, and he was considering its title, Hard Aspects. Dallan, a writer who lives in Kingston, New York, nodded in approval.
Rebollo-Gil came to Bennington hoping to get out of a creative rut. After sixteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he felt stuck. Teicher helped him hone in on his new subjects—parenthood and masculinity—and working in English felt like discovering a new part of himself. “There are certain things I can write now in English that I wasn’t touching on in Spanish,” Rebollo-Gil said. “Being welcomed by all these writers gave me a sense of grounding in the language.”
One of the first low-residency creative writing programs in the country, the Seminars celebrated their 30th anniversary this year with events at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Kansas City in February and record interest from prospective students. The number of applicants was up 200 percent during the last round of admissions.
The MFA program, which continues Bennington’s long literary history, grew out of the Bennington Writing Workshops, a month-long summer program established in 1977, whose participants included John Ashbery, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, and John Irving, among others. Rector served as founding director of the Seminars until his death in 2007. Sven Birkerts, the essayist and literary critic who had been a member of the faculty since the program’s inception, took over as director until 2017, when he was succeeded by the program’s current executive director, the poet Mark Wunderlich.
Hugh Ryan, the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, graduated from the Seminars in 2009 and still fondly recalls the “summer camp vibe” as a student. “It felt like you were being inducted into something,” he said. The writer Tom Bissell, who taught one of Ryan’s workshops, brought his first draft of a story published by The New Yorker to illustrate “the flaw and the fix.” Ryan still marvels at Bissell’s readiness to show students such an unfinished piece, a kind of pedagogic vulnerability Ryan has since emulated in his own teaching. “He really modeled how to be with my students,” said Ryan, who came back to Bennington after graduation as an alumni fellow and later to teach nonfiction.
The program’s tagline—Read 100 books. Write one.— highlights its emphasis on deep and engaged reading and the idea that writing is always a conversation with other writing. In their third term, students submit a 15-page critical essay, instead of the lecture they once gave in the graduating term. But the core pedagogic principles of the program remain unchanged from the original description in the promotional brochure: “In keeping with Bennington’s progressive tradition, the Seminars are largely self-structured. Students, in concert with teachers, form their own reading list and course of study, submitting original work—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—for critique at regular intervals throughout the semester. Students also submit ongoing nonfiction responses to the books they are reading.”
Wunderlich noted dramatic shifts in the culture over the past thirty years and how those shifts—along with changing needs and expectations from students—have resulted in some dramatic changes to the program. Many new faculty have been added, and recent years have seen the departure of a number of faculty, some of whom had been with the program since its inception.
“As the conversation about literature in America shifts, we need to change with it,” he said, adding that the administration has worked hard to recruit new faculty to bring a diversity
The image used on the original Bennington Writing Seminars brochure and throughout the program’s first marketing efforts.
Bennington Writing Seminars Founder Liam Rector, January 1994
Top: The fifty-eighth class exiting CAPA, June 2024
Bottom: The first class headed to Orientation in Barn 100, January 1994
of voices and approaches. “We need to continually have an eye toward our own reinvention while holding to the core values of how we go about instructing people.”
At the heart of the program, then as now, are the packets: the epistolary exchanges between the student and their assigned faculty member. Once a month, the student sends a letter comprising creative writing as well as shorter analytical work, and in return, gets extensive written feedback.
Mara Naselli MFA ’13, an editor and nonfiction writer, calls it a perfect model. “The correspondence is fantastic,” she said. “Each one of my instructors were very different. My private project was to write for them, so I was doing different things,” said Naselli, who was taught by Wyatt Mason, Dinah Lenney, Phillip Lopate, and Birkerts. “Going into this intense correspondence, generating a ton of material in a month, and doing the annotations, which I loved, was like sharpening the knife,” she said. “I was constantly practicing; understanding my way around different registers, different forms, different narrative positions; and collecting all these tools.”
Naselli, who won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award and who came back in 2024 to teach a seminar on essay writing, calls her time at Bennington “the best two years of my life.”
The correspondence between teacher and student is a deep and dedicated conversation, and the intensity and care with which students work is read by faculty is unmatched, said Wunderlich. “Imagine getting a letter about your work from one of your favorite writers.”
Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars Megan Culhane Galbraith MFA ’15, recalls the importance of the generous feedback she received as a student and how she found her subject and form with the help of her teachers, who included Peter Trachtenberg, Joan Wickersham, and Benjamin Anastas. A decade later, she still refers to a large notebook containing her reading lists and the letters and notes from faculty. “I realized there was a thread,” she said. “What I try to tell students is…don’t worry. It’ll all come together.”
Every six months, students come to campus for a ten-day residency, an intense period of readings, lectures, workshops and conversations. Students and faculty are housed on campus and dine together in the Commons.
“The campus has a certain energy,” said Etan Kerr-Finell MFA ’23, recalling bonfires at The End of the World and the loveliness of fireflies during nighttime walks across campus. Kerr-Finell, who studied with Giménez, Teicher, Monica Ferrell, and Michael Dumanis, has kept in touch with fellow students from the program through WhatsApp groups and
in-person meetups in the Hudson Valley, events he helps organize. Recently, the Kingston-based poet started a support group that meets bimonthly on Zoom to work on submissions for publications, contests, residencies, and grants. He considers a writer’s life deeply communal and deeply solitary at the same time. “You need to be with other writers. That’s critical,” he said. “Even if the hard work of it is you moving words around on the page.”
The writer Rebecca Makkai, who recently joined the faculty, said the Seminars has one of the best reputations among low-residency programs, and she has been impressed with the dedication of the students and the quality of their work. “I always say to my students: It’s half-time, not halfassed,” she said. “And everyone here seems to really understand that.”
Moriel Rothman Zecher MFA ’21 had already written two novels when he applied to study poetry, a genre he wasn’t familiar with. During his time at Bennington he studied with Teicher, Chang, Giménez, and April Bernard and found the workshops “a very sweet and generous space,” a common appraisal among students. “It’s a space to take reading seriously, to take writing seriously,” said Zecher, who returned to campus this summer as a fiction teacher.
He originally applied to Bennington because he wanted to pursue a low-residency MFA as it is “a truer-to-life model of what the writer’s life looks like. You have to weave it into the life you already live,” he said. “Bennington felt like a good home for me as someone who was already shaping my life around writing.”
Diana Ruzova MFA ’23, who studied nonfiction with Chelsea Hodson, Jenny Boully, Eula Biss, and Trachtenberg, said she was “completely blown away” by the beauty of the campus and the conversations about writing when she arrived for her first residency. “I barely slept,” she said. “I spent the whole time walking around, trying to do everything. I went all in.” Ruzova credits Bennington with teaching her a rigorous approach to reading and writing as well as giving her the confidence to call herself an artist. She also found the “community of kindred spirits and constructive counsel” that Rector had originally envisioned. “The education, the degree, the diploma is one thing. But it’s really about these lifelong friends and the community of friends you build,” she said. “You can’t make art in a silo. You have to build a community together.” ●
EXTENDING UNCERTAINTY
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT ADAMS
By Anne Thompson
Pat Adams was born in 1928 and raised in Stockton, California. She studied painting at the University of California, Berkeley, and took classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts, the College of the Pacific, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She received her first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Korman Gallery—later to be renamed the Zabriskie Gallery— which represented her until 2018.
She taught at Bennington for more than thirty years and also at Yale and the Rhode Island School of Design, among numerous other institutions across the country. Her students describe her as “a life-changing teacher.” Many thank her for transforming their notion of what it means to be an artist.
Adams received notable awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Design, and the College Art Association. In 1995, she was awarded the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Her work has been the subject of more than fifty solo exhibitions.
Anne Thompson, director and curator of the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, sat down with Adams in her home studio in Bennington. Thompson’s and Adams’ conversation revealed Adams’ sense of herself as a painter, her teaching philosophy, and her hopes for humanity.
AT: You taught at Bennington for almost 30 years, and after that, at the Yale School of Art. How would you describe your teaching approach?
PA: I had two goals. First, to give students the language by which they could discuss their work. When I was [a student] at Berkeley, I took a course in literary criticism, and I was astonished at the language they had developed. And when I was teaching,
I could see there was a true lack. So developing a language was important. And my other goal was to increase the sensuous aspect of their experience. Students would say to me, I already know about color, line, texture. They may have identified where it occurred, but they did not have a sense of it. To be an artist, you have to register something more deeply. And so my assignments all aimed to develop an increased sensuous self to put back into their efforts.
Language is important within your own approach to painting, in the specificity of your titles and also some idiosyncratic terms you use to discuss your process. I’m thinking especially of “toward-ness” and the “not as yet.” What do these terms mean to you?
I am not a one-shot painter. Some paintings take a couple of years—and they don’t take a couple of years because I’m not working. I have them around, and I study them. And so they’re “not as yet,” but something is coming. I’m waiting to see what the painting needs. I’m painting, and I’m looking at something. Suddenly, I’ll have a strong sensation. I’ll feel that painting. It tells me it wants a purple that has a little brown and a little pink in it. There’s a capacity to prolong uncertainty, to not know what’s going to happen. To extend that uncertainty is something I’m very serious about.
We’re sitting in a studio you recently set up in your house, where you’ve been making collages and small paintings on photographs. It’s like a satellite to the large studio outside on the grounds of your property. At age 96, how do you approach your studio practice?
I don’t use the word.
Practice? Oh, okay. Why not? What does practice mean? Practice is a series of developed skills, and it’s known. Art is not, at least my art, is not about “to know.” My painting is about quiddities, what-nesses. In fact, I dream about this—figuring out, how can I do this? How can I do that? Do I need a template for this kind of curve? How much of an arc do I want? Do I want to reverse those two arcs? I think we should just celebrate that we have all of these vast, delicious, formal possibilities.
Over the years, since the 1970s into today, some critics have described your work—in a positive way—as hard to categorize. You seem to have simultaneously embraced and rejected the modernist dictates, such as flatness, that dominated the scene when you were coming up in the 1950s and 60s. Looking back, what was your relationship to those evolving art movements, abstract expressionism and minimalism in particular? I love the Sanskrit word Anekāntavāda, which means many-sided-ness. I’ve never felt you had to develop a style that overthrew the previous style, that you should overthrow this and argue against that. I’ve always felt that it was almost like Cinderella—will your work fit into the shoe of the current style? I’m disinterested totally in that point of view. I’m looking for a kind of accuracy. Is this accurate in terms of my understanding of things? I think my whole life is a form of evidence of living and looking and marking and relating the interactions of different little pieces of paper or little blocks of ink. It’s an enormous pleasure trying to apprehend what existence is about.
“...I feel in each person there is a form of utterance waiting to come forward.”
Alexandre Gallery in New York City presented an exhibition of works by Adams this past spring. The show, called Pat Adams: Works from the 1950s and ’60s , featured paintings and works on paper from a pivotal period in Adams’ career. These two decades are marked by the birth of the artist’s distinct visual language of “ur forms”—squares, circles, triangles, and S curves—which are essential to her ongoing quest to seek out the “beginnings of things,” an idea that continues to capture her fascination to this day. Thirty people, including Bennington alumni, faculty, and current students, attended a special event at the gallery in April. Pat Adams is represented by the Alexandre Gallery. For current exhibitions and news of Pat Adams, please go to alexandregallery.com.
Left: Pat Adams, Portrait (detail), 1959, gouache on paper, courtesy of Alexandre Gallery; Above: Pat Adams, Norfolk - August 9, 1957, gouache on paper, courtesy of Alexandre Gallery
Before she died in 2023, your former Bennington student Cora Cohen gave a painting to the College in your honor, and I had the privilege of choosing the painting. Cora encouraged me to pick a big “macho” painting that would take up a lot of space. It was her sense that, as a woman in the art world and academia, you didn’t get the respect you deserved. What are your thoughts on that?
It’s a big question. I had a very solid sense of myself as an artist because I had always painted and had regard from many people. I never felt that I was being diminished. I lectured and showed my work all across the continent. And wherever I went, I was treated very decently, except in one place in Kentucky. And the students rose up and told this man, please let her talk. They wanted to hear what I was going to say. So that worked out very well. But I do feel different men definitely have problems with women, and I don’t know what that is. In a review of my show of the big paintings, one man spoke of how I “imposed” my forms on the canvas. What a curious word. I can only think about him and ask what, really, was he feeling?
You’re referring to your 2023 show of large-scale works at Alexandre Gallery, in New York, where you also had a show earlier this year. You’ve consistently been showing your work, almost every two years, since your first exhibit in 1953, mostly in New York. What has it been like to be an artist exhibiting in the city but not living there?
I love New York. I did not leave California to come to Bennington. But circumstances change. I have a family—two sons, three sensational grandsons. A lot of my experience over my whole life has been that I didn’t have time to hang out.
Being in New York as an artist can involve some hanging out.
It’s true. We had dancing parties at the loft in the fifties, and once I came up here [to Vermont], we did have a couple of dances when [sculptor and Bennington faculty member] David Smith came over and others came over. But I was so busy being a mother, a teacher, a painter. I could not just do what others, who were not so involved in life but more involved in enjoying each other, were doing.
You were incredibly influential as a teacher. For you, what was your biggest contribution to Bennington?
Well, the whole notion of students having a corner. And this came from my own life experience. I did not see a studio until 1952. And I wanted these students, particularly the
upperclassmen, to know what a studio could mean. So I devised studios with movable walls that could form corners, one student would work here, another would work there. And the experience I wanted to provide was that as they walked into the corner, that was their world. That was the collection, the marking, the sketches, postcards, whatever it was. So they began to identify and develop their own vision.
In your lectures and writing, you’ve discussed the endurance of painting in the face of trends that declared it to be dead or irrelevant. What are the stakes for painting today?
Early homo sapiens as a species felt the urge to mark something. They used soot, grease. And I feel in each person there is a form of utterance waiting to come forward. And anytime you shut off the unconscious, anytime you shut down, you are diminishing the future of the species. I’m very concerned about the use of so much artificial intelligence. There’s something called homeostasis equilibrium. How do we achieve
equilibrium if we ignore whole sections of our embodiment or personality? If we don’t have the pleasure and the invention and the freedom that art contains, we’re diminishing the human species.
Do you have any advice for young artists? They need to recognize themselves. They need to begin to see what their work means to them, to try to deepen in every way they can, to have the whole sensory embodiment of art. And not to be involved in too much hearsay. I feel that you can listen to other people and, of course, you read everything you can. But your most important thing is to try to recognize what’s emerging. ●
A Place to Let Art Breathe
During Adams’ time at Bennington, she was integral in ensuring that visual arts students were provided with studio spaces. The studios remain an important part of what students appreciate about studying art at Bennington now.
Jade Baratta ’24’s studio at Bennington included a mannequin that an artist she had worked for had given her, friends’ ceramics, art other people had made, and Time magazines, in addition to painting materials and her own art. She would go there to paint in solitude or to commune with other artists while they worked.
“I find it so important to have an extra space, where I don’t have anything to do except make art,” she said. “A studio makes it so easy for me to get into it and stay motivated. It became such a fruitful place.”
Like Adams, Baratta likes to work on big canvases and several at a time. Baratta appreciated “having a space to let the art breathe and see it all in one spot.” The recent graduate added, “I was grateful for my studio when I had it, but now that I don’t have it, I am really sure that it was awesome.”
Left: Adams’ studio;
Right:
Baratta in her Bennington College studio
Portraits in Coll abo rat ion
By Ashley Brenon Jowett
If you’re interested in the secret of success for Bennington alumni and faculty, look no further than collaboration. Alumni and faculty, especially in the performing arts, are often integral to each other’s work. In fact, a remarkable thirty percent of alumni respondents to a recent survey had collaborated with another Bennington alum in their careers. We spoke with a few collaborative teams to uncover the diverse ways they have worked together and what their collaborations have meant to them.
READY FOR ANYTHING
When filmmaker Jason Eksuzian ’00 of Los Angeles saw the availability of a production grant to make a 5-minute film about cliques and echo chambers, it was an opportunity to bring a long-held daydream to life.
“I had this weird idea of a world that was inhabited by people with houseplants for heads. That’s just been rattling around in [my head], which maybe says more about me than I’d like,” Eksuzian said with a laugh.
The grant was a part of an annual mental health awareness campaign from Voices with Impact, which is funded through Art with Impact with help from the National Endowment for the Arts and others. The film is called Plant People. “It is very much a story about loneliness,” he said. It premiered at the Voices With Impact Film Festival in San Francisco on June 6.
Eksuzian’s most frequent collaborator is his wife and partner Kincaid Walker, who produced the piece and played the lead role. When it came to making the plant heads and creating the sounds for the film, Eksuzian turned to trusted Bennington College collaborators faculty member Sue Rees and musician Alex Vittum ’00 of Seattle.
Eksuzian likes working with Bennington people because he feels he already has a head start. He said, “If I went up to many other collaborators and explained the concept—a story about a woman who works in a grocery store, and the rest of the people who live in that world have houseplants for heads— most people would be like, ‘Um, can you just run that back? What are you talking about?’” Bennington people, Eksuzian said, “are like, ‘Great. How can I help?’”
Eksuzian and Vittum knew each other well as students, when Eksuzian was often in the audience of Vittum’s music performances. Eksuzian reached out to Vittum after discovering one of his recent albums. “When I first started listening to the compositions Alex had, it felt like it was written exactly for this [project],” said Eksuzian. Eksuzian asked for some small adjustments to bring the music in line with the images and sound design for the plants themselves. Vittum said, “The cornerstone of the collaboration is that conversation about trying to come up with a conceptual solution that is elegant, meaningful, authentic… and I feel like that was really what Jason and I were trying to do: get to the real details of sonifying these moments.”
Next were the plant heads. “The plant heads are crucial. If those aren’t convincing or they look weird, the whole thing’s dead,” said Eksuzian. “I was such an admirer of Sue’s work when I was at Bennington and a student of hers. She’s got the brilliant mind to create functional and beautiful things. I knew she could do it.” Rees said, “I’m always curious about collaborating with people because it pushes you out of your comfort zone, and it also leads you in different ways or directions or
“Even though we’re all very different and diverse, there is this Bennington mindset and a way of locking in. We understand each other.”
Jason Eksuzian ’00
Alex Vittum ’00
“I’m always curious about collaborating with people because it pushes you out of your comfort zone, and it also leads you in different ways or directions or parts of what you know.”
Sue Rees
parts of what you know. Plus, sometimes, it’s a really great challenge.”
“Bennington offers such a focused education,” said Eksuzian. “Even though we’re all very different and diverse, there is this Bennington mindset and a way of locking in. We understand each other.”
BRINGING WORK OUT
Dancer and dance faculty member Levi Gonzalez and collaborator Kayvon Pourazar, who is a faculty member at Movement Research and has served as visiting faculty at Bennington, have been working on a project called Further (working title). “I’ve always been curious about fairy tales as a weird transgressive narrative where people transform and step outside of their fixed identity or sense of self.”
Like much of his other work, Further combines Gonzalez’s interests in queerness, place, improvisation, and direct conversation with the audience. “I am very invested in thinking about the audience’s multisensory experience and making them aware that they have a body and that they are using their body to receive the work.”
Gonzalez’s piece relies on collaboration with former Bennington music faculty member Senem Pirler and Bennington alumni, who have been involved in bringing it to audiences. He received a residency, Another Audience at Black Hole Hollow Farm in South Arlington, Vermont, which is owned by Nicole Daunic ’03, who studied dance at Bennington, had taught at Bennington, and will be a guest faculty member in dance with Mina Nishimura in Spring 2025. “The idea of the residency at Black Hole Hollow is to let the natural landscape inform the work that we’re making,” said Gonzalez. “At Black Hole Hollow, we allowed some of the sounds from the outside world to weave into the practice, and we got to an interesting place with the layers of sound and the complexity of the improvisational practice.” He and collaborators presented the piece as a work in progress in June.
The premier of the finished piece at another Benningtonrelated venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, New York, is set for November. The Chocolate Factory was founded by artist Brian Rogers ’95 and Sheila Lewandowski ’97, who remain the artistic director and executive director, respectively, and who presented Gonzalez’s work for the first time in 2014, before he became a Bennington faculty member. “I love working with Levi,” said Rogers. “I think he’s one of the most interesting and relevant experimental dance makers working today.”
The Chocolate Factory is unique, Gonzalez said, because of the level of support they offer artists. “Brian’s an artist, and that makes it particularly great,” said Gonzalez. “They give so
much. Artists get three weeks in a space, a three-camera shoot, insurance, hourly pay for collaborators. None of that is normal.”
“I bring my own wants and wishes and needs as an artist to the conversation around how to support the work of other artists,” said Rogers. “The largest life lesson I got from attending Bennington was the sense of possibility: that one could make a life in the arts and in a quirky and independent way. I’m not sure it would ever have occurred to me to start a nonprofit performing arts organization had it not been for the Bennington experience.”
THE CONNECTION CONTINUES
Conversations between renowned costume designer and Rutgers professor Valerie Marcus Ramshur ’89 and internationally exhibited gender-queer fiber artist and activist Michael Sylvan Robinson ’89 are filled with memories. They met when they were both students in the theater discipline at Bennington. Among their first collaborations was a production of The House of Bernarda Alba that Robinson directed while at Bennington.
Later, in the nineties, when they both lived in New York, Ramshur helped Robinson prepare for drag shows. “Valerie was my number one cheerleader and supporter. We would work together on these nine-foot wigs and theatrical drag outfits together,” they said. “She would send me out the door after having had a great afternoon combining our creative talents.”
In the summer of 2021, Robinson reached out in a panic. They had just 8 weeks to fulfill a commission for famed theater producer Jordan Roth’s Met Gala outfit, and they needed a team of discrete and highly skilled people they could work with in their COVID-era, pre-vaccination studio. Ramshur delivered. Years later, Robinson still collaborates with the people Ramshur sent their way.
“Collaboration can take many forms, and that’s one of the things Bennington instilled in us,” Ramshur observed. She notes the competitive nature of the arts and emphasizes that collaboration is a term often used and just as often misunderstood. “What is required is a community agreement. Clarification is needed about the nature of the collaboration. It’s not about ego but about exploration, communication, and trust.” Ramshur added, “When I look at Sylvan’s work, it speaks to me in a profound way.”
“Friends since our first years at Bennington together, I’ve seen Valerie as a lifelong-learner,” Robinson said. “She redefined her work in the world from dancer to actor, actor to costume designer and professor. With each new chapter, she’s brought a tenacity and willingness to develop her creative practice and incorporate the lessons of the past in new directions.”
“The largest life lesson I got from attending Bennington was the sense of possibility: that one could make a life in the arts and in a quirky and independent way.”
Brian Rogers ’95
Robinson with Luciana Figliulo ’24 at the 2022 Reunion “Dressing the Activist” fashion show
Both Ramshur and Robinson have returned to Bennington in recent years. Ramshur has visited as a guest speaker, while Robinson has come back as a visiting faculty member, hosting Field Work Term students for the past two years. “I was incredibly impressed by the students I worked with last year,” said Robinson. “They shared that everything I loved about my time at Bennington remains true for them and that Bennington has positively influenced their approach to generational challenges.” They continued, “Every year, I am determined to do my part to ensure that Bennington continues to thrive in the future. I know that our generation of alumni sometimes has strong opinions, and we do too. But that has not gotten in the way of us being able to commit to this idea that Bennington is just as important—if not more so—now as it was for us in the past.” ●
“Collaboration can take many forms, and that’s one of the things that Bennington instilled in us in our education.”
Valerie Marcus Ramshur
’89
FINDING WONDER
ATLAS OBSCURA CO-FOUNDER
DYLAN THURAS ’04 ON BENNINGTON, TRAVEL, AND THE UNEXPECTED
By Jeffrey Perkins MFA ’09
Illustrations by Nate Padavick
Photos courtesy of Dylan Thuras
DYLAN THURAS ’04 knew he wanted to attend Bennington when he came from his home in Minneapolis with his parents for a tour of the campus and a naked student paraded down the Commons lawn as the tour walked by. It was a sign that Bennington was a different kind of place where students were truly independent and open to explore the world in their own unique ways.
THE BEGINNING
At Bennington, he thrived. He met his wife Michelle, and though they didn’t date during college, they became best friends. “We loved the size of it, we loved the scale, we loved the sense of community,” said Thuras. “We are still so close with dozens of people from Bennington, even people I didn’t know that well while I was in school there. When I run into anyone who has gone to Bennington at any point in their life— they could be 40 years older than me, or at this point, 15 years younger than me—it’s an instant sense of connection and understanding. One of the great gifts of Bennington is this community follows you through your whole life.”
Dylan learned video and animation from Sue Rees, who he calls “a kind of mad woman,” and sculpture from Jon Isherwood and John Umphlett. His advanced work was on the history, structure, and creation of the narrative form. When he graduated, he went to New York City and used the skills he learned during technical courses at Bennington to start work as a freelance video editor.
“I’m a big believer in this idea of marrying theory and classic humanities work with more highly technical skills.”
He recommends current students find ways to blend the two. As an example, he suggests someone who’s interested in literature learn about data systems capable of analyzing huge amounts of text, so they can pull out interesting connections. “Maybe that’s not what you thought you’d be getting into, but it’s a cool tool. It’s an interesting way of analyzing that work. And then you’ve got a new skill.”
FOUNDING ATLAS
Two years after Thuras graduated from Bennington, blogger Josh Foer put out a call for help to produce an event celebrating Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar and polymath, who published major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Thuras volunteered to help with the event, and the two hit it off.
In 2009, they founded Atlas Obscura. It began as a website that offered suggestions for travelers looking to visit weird and wonderful places around the world. “We felt that
the world was still this huge, bizarre, vast place filled with astounding stuff,” Thuras said. Since its founding, Atlas Obscura has expanded to employ fifty people and to include an app, podcasts, books, trips, and events. They recently threw a big festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the eclipse.
THE PLACES
A quick scan of the website or the New York Times bestseller Atlas Obscura, which Thuras co-wrote with Co-founder Joshua Foer and Ella Morton, inspires a sense of wanderlust. Contributions have been added by staff writers alongside local experts from around the world. They range from the Museum of Counterfeit Goods in Bangkok and the Sacred Crocodile Pond in Ghana to the World’s Largest Chess Board in Manhattan and the Rock of Ages Granite Quarry in Barre, Vermont. Thuras has visited more than thirty countries and nearly 600 places. There are still hundreds of places he wants to visit. One of the sites that has stayed with him is the Q’eswachaka Rope Bridge in Peru, which spans 118 feet and hangs 60 feet above the canyon’s rushing river. The bridge of woven straw is remade by the people of four villages each year. The Quechua women braid thin ropes, which the men of the villages combine into large support cables, much like those that support modern suspension bridges. For Thuras, the bridge meets his criteria for a memorable site. “You’re walking across this crazy swaying bridge over this river,” he said. “And you’re kind of like, is this safe? I don’t know. It was really cool. I love the history. I love the culture of it. It was beautiful. It was adventurous. I went there a long time ago, but I still think about that place a lot. It is this direct tie to the Incan empire, this empire of rope and fiber, where even the census data was kept in fiber, in quipu.”
Another site he quickly recalls is the Buzludzha Monument in Kazanlak,
Bulgaria, which was falling into disrepair after the fall of the Soviet Union. An Atlas Obscura contributor and expert on the building helped get recognition by UNESCO. This is one of the reasons that Thuras does the work he does. “There are these two major things you see over and over again in tourism. Places like Venice get like 60,000 people a day during the high tourist season. That’s more than the total number of residents. On the other hand, incredible places disappear for lack of attention or an economic model.”
He continued, “we’ve been in touch with a lot of the small museums and the art projects that we list, and the ability to divert even a small amount of attention to them relates to money in the form of tourism. To provide that to places that deserve it, but aren’t getting it, feels like valuable work to me.”
CULTIVATING WONDER
At the heart of Atlas Obscura is a philosophy: “wonder is a value we can cultivate.” He says it’s easier to do when you’re dropped in a new country with a different language and customs, but it’s worth doing in your own community. He recommends that people “get lost,” even close to where they live, or challenge themselves to become a tourist in their hometown. When you visit a place, even a familiar one, he challenges, “assign yourself to write a story. Imagine you have to write 2,000 words by Tuesday. What is your story about? Having a mission and having a sense of what you’re seeking is really powerful. It’s powerful, not just in travel, but in life. Try approaching the world with a journalist’s eye or a seeker’s eye or a collector’s eye.”
BACK TO BENNINGTON
Thuras’s experiences of and love for wondrous places all over the world has not diminished his appreciation for Bennington College. For Thuras, Bennington is more than its beauty; it provided an early example of the power of place to shape experience. “I remember wandering across the Commons lawn late at night and the stars are out. There are other people crossing in the dark. Maybe you can hear something happening, a little gathering in one of the other houses. The lights are on…. I have these memories of traversing the campus at night and feeling this sense of magic. You’re just this pocket of people. It feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere. (You’re not really; you’re close to a relatively large population center of Vermont, as far as Vermont goes.) But you feel like you’re on this kind of magical island or mountain top or something. The small-scale geography, the way the houses sit on the Commons…. There’s just something about it that creates this sense of a tiny little kingdom. It is this tiny little world unto itself.”
THE NEXT GENERATION
While Thuras understands what he calls the “careerist” approach to higher education, he’s at odds with it too. Approaching a career, he said, “can’t be the only reason you go to school, because it assumes that you want to lock in.” At Bennington, he said, “You’re not just getting a chance to explore yourself creatively. You’re getting a community that will truly follow you, that will build your life. To be given four years to hang out with interesting people and figure out what you’re interested in is a gift on a scale that you don’t get offered very many times in your life. For me, the case for Bennington is very strong. I have two kids—a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old—so who knows?” ●
ATLAS OBSCURA, BENNINGTON
As a homage to Dylan Thuras ’04’s Atlas Obscura, we’re sharing seven of the website’s wondrous Benningtonarea places. You will barely be able to resist using the map for a spooky road trip this fall.
1 BENNINGTON CEMETERY
Bennington, Vermont
Established in 1762, the Bennington Centre Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries in Vermont. Signs mark the graves of notable people buried there, including poet Robert Frost, and the work of gravestone carvers Carver Zerubbabel Collins and his apprentice Benjamin Dyer. Beware: Ghosts have been spotted nearby.
2 JENNINGS HALL
Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont
Acclaimed author Shirley Jackson is said to have taken inspiration from Bennington College’s Jennings Hall for her classic novel The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959. Jackson was familiar with the house as the wife of faculty member and American literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. As the current home of the Bennington music discipline, one can often hear beautiful music emanating from the studios inside.
3 LINCOLN SQUARE
North Bennington, Vermont
Lincoln Square is home to Powers Market, which has been in near-continuous operation for almost two centuries; the charming Prospect Coffee House; and the John McCullough Library. A more recent addition, Huluppu, is “a magical bookshop.”
Owner Janet Sleigh carries Tarot decks, gems, and books about nature and spirituality.
By Ashley Brenon Jowett
Illustration by Nate
Padavick
4 GUNNAR SCHONBECK EXHIBIT
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
Make mysterious or joyful noises with more than 200 musical instruments that make up the Gunnar Schonbeck exhibit at MASS MoCA. Schonbeck taught at Bennington College 1947–2008. The exhibit, titled No Experience Required, invites visitors to play the many and mostly very large instruments and is a testament to Schonbeck’s idea that one need not be a musician to make music.
5 HARMONIC BRIDGE
North Adams, Massachusetts
Is that a ghostly moan? No. It’s the Harmonic Bridge. Artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger augmented this overpass’s design with tubes and microphones so that it creates a droning C as traffic hums overhead. The tone is so low that the soundwave is sixteen feet long.
6 FREEDLYVILLE QUARRY
Dorset, Vermont
Take the mile-long hike past the old stone foundations of an abandoned mining town to this cavernous marble quarry. There, you can walk deep into the eastern slope of Mount Aeolus. Inside the cave-like quarry, you will find stone columns and a sheltered pond, which makes a great ice skating spot when it freezes in the winter.
7 SALEM ART WORKS
Salem, New York
Anthony Cafritz ’85 founded the Salem Art Works in 2005. The 120-acre sprawling art park is filled with sculptures, studios, workshops, and nature trails. SAW, as it is known, hosts classes, residencies, and the annual Festival of Fire.
More than 100 people attended the Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture in Tishman Auditorium on Bennington College’s campus on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. They joined panelists Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown, the MacArthur Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem ’86, celebrated poet Camille Rankine, and moderator and Bennington faculty member Benjamin Anastas to learn about the life and work of Queer Black poet and essayist Reginald Shepherd ’88, an underrecognized member of the Bennington literary community in the eighties. Below is a piece Lethem wrote for and read at the event.
TRIBUTE TO REGINALD SHEPHERD ’88
By Jonathan Lethem ’86
In the past weeks, as this date approached, I’ve had to accept how this occasion remains disconcerting to me, that of being called here to somehow represent and offer up some fragment of knowledge about Reginald Shepherd in the company of those who’ve studied his work and have a measured and enduring sense of him as among their poetic companions. I mean, of course, Jericho and Camille, but perhaps also those like your Professor Benjamin Anastas and Alexander Chee, who entered into a relation with him as a peer writer in graduate school, or perhaps unknown others who sit among us here quietly, who located Shepherd as a poetic companion of their own, perhaps as their teacher or mentor or colleague,
perhaps only on the page, that relation which can be—as Shepherd often testified—among the most intimate.
I come to you in another relation entirely, as dictated by circumstance. In what has become a series of glamorous humiliations, I’ve spent my life as a walking witness to “Bennington in the eighties.” That’s how I knew Reggie, and in a sense, that’s still how I know him. I find that I need to call him Reggie, and it may also be useful for me to do so, since it not only honors my memories of him but testifies to my limitations as a witness. In his beautiful essay “What’s in a Name?” one of the last things he wrote, Shepherd says, “A few months before my twenty-fifth birthday, I decided I was too old to be called ‘Reggie.’ That was a child’s name.” Well, essentially, Reggie and I knew one another as children. Our friendship ended well before his twenty-fifth birthday; we knew each other when I was eighteen and he was nineteen and then twenty. In that short time we shared an intense friendship, one which ended in a cipher-like form of incompleteness, which was typical, in some ways, of my relation to this place, at that moment—only more so. Reggie and I never spoke again. I read his poems, sometimes, and I looked at his blog, but I lost the chance to intervene in our incomplete story, to risk making an adult friendship with him, when he died.
In the past few months, I’ve tried to make sense of tonight’s invitation by pursuing a concerted study of Reginald Shepherd’s remarkable poetry and prose; by reading his blog from back to front and seeing how it served as a proving ground for his two books of essays; and by reading his book of letters with Alan Contreras. In doing so, I’ve heard his voice both again and for the first time. I’ve absorbed the incredible accomplishment of the poetic and public voice as it is
formulated in his work, how it connects to the precise and formal and sardonic voice of his more conversational interludes in the blog and in the letters, and felt how these voices are rooted in and continuous with the voice of Reggie, the friend I briefly knew. Reggie seemed to me to possess such a total and encompassing and assured writer’s voice at the time, even if every form of knowledge I now possess—and Shepherd’s own testimony in his essays—suggests how much it was embattled and tenuous and under construction, how much it was, in that moment, apprenticed.
This process—of making a synthesis between my private version of eighties Bennington, which exists beyond the caricatures and marketing, and the commanding poet who has called this gathering into being—is bittersweet for me. I’m forced to realize that by never before writing about Reggie, I’ve been trying to keep these memories suspended in a realm of pure experience. Before I could even put these few words down, I spent the morning on Spotify, putting together a playlist of songs I associated with Reggie; I wanted not to be commemorating him, but to be back in the living room of Canfield or Booth, dancing. Reggie himself considers this paradox in his essay: “Why I Write”:
“I have a strong sense of the fragility of the things we shore up against the ruin which is life: the fragility of natural beauty but also of artistic beauty, which is meant to arrest death but embodies death in that very arrest. Goethe’s Faust is damned when he says, ‘Oh moment, stay.’ At last he finds a moment he longs to preserve, but the moment dissipates when it’s halted. The moment is defined by its transience; to fix it is to kill it […] Art is a simulacrum of
life that embodies and operates by means of death. The aesthetic impulse is the enemy of the lived moment: it attempts both to preserve and to transcend that moment, to be as deeply in the moment as possible and also to rise beyond it. ‘Wanting to immortalize the transitory—life— art in fact kills it.’ This is the inescapable aporia of art, that its creation is a form of destruction.”
The public Reginald Shepherd, who accomplished so much, against such odds, and then succumbed to illness and died, has despite my every tactical delaying maneuver, finally arrived to overwrite and supersede Reggie, my friend who was still alive to me in a handful of incommensurable afternoons on the Commons lawn, who danced with me ecstatically to the jukebox at The Cafe, who gave me his copy of Samuel Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which I still own, who stayed up with me in VAPA playing a Psychedelic Furs cassette on repeat while I worked with a glue gun and lumber scraps on an all-nighter sculpture assignment. Because we knew one another under a spell of radically premature artistic and social self-assertiveness, a situation totally embarrassing to recall on the behalf of every person for miles around at the time, and because our friendship ended abruptly and jaggedly, this has been until now among the least plundered treasure of my memory. Thank you for inviting me to come join some stories of Reggie to the life of the poet Reginald Shepherd. I feel blessed to be here with you all. ●
Listen to the Spotify playlist Lethem made for Shepherd.
From left: Jonathan Lethem ’86, Camille Rankine, Jericho Brown, and Benjamin Anastas
44 Years of Experience
7 QUESTIONS WITH MICHELE HURLEY
By Charlie Nadler
Housekeeper Michele Hurley is one of eleven children born and raised in Bennington. She started working at the College in the Fall of 1979, and four of her siblings—Mike, Nick, Jenny, and Tim—have all graced the staff roster at various times from the seventies through today. We sat down with her in Commons to learn more about her remarkable contributions over the last 44 years and counting.
What was your last job before Bennington?
I didn’t have one. This was my first full-time job. As a kid, I delivered newspapers and babysat. Jenny was working at the College and coming up to get her hours. I had just graduated from high school and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I walked up with her and, next thing I know, I walked into the kitchen and one of the chefs said, “Are you looking for a job?”
What were your first days like here at the College?
The Dining Hall was such a great place to work, and being young, I enjoyed being around the people. I couldn’t think of anywhere else I wanted to be. I even came up on hours when I didn’t really have to. During my time in Dining, I worked in the dish room, laundry, salad bar, sandwich bar, and then I was a Server, Cook’s Helper, Cook, and Baker.
What’s a typical day like now?
I’ve been a housekeeper since 1993. I currently clean Kilpat [Kilpatrick], McCullough, and Welling. Each house has its own personality. Welling was so quiet; we used to call it “The Old Folks Home.” McCullough has always been in the middle. And Kilpat has always been the party house.
What’s your favorite thing about Bennington, and why?
The kids. They’re wonderful. Through the years I’ve gotten to know quite a few. I still stay in touch with several of them to this day. It’s great that we can have friendships. I just got a card from one saying how they’re doing. Every once in a while I’ll get an email from a kid who I used to call “Smiley,” who lives in Switzerland where he’s been married for 20 years with two children.
There’s a kid who just graduated. One day I caught him crawling through a Kilpat window. I said, “Don’t do that again! If you need to get in the house just let me know.” He’s one of those kids that will never forget me and vice versa. We became close friends.
It’s cool to get to know the parents well too. One of my house chairs in Welling, at Commencement, her dad came up to me and said, “Thank you so much for taking care of my daughter.”
What’s your funniest memory of working at the College?
There’s a tub in Kilpat that doesn’t have a shower, so most times, people don’t use it. I went to clean the bathroom, and there was water and a big rock in the tub. I thought, why would they need a rock in the tub? So I grabbed the rock and it snapped at me. It was a student’s snapping turtle. She brought it from home after Long Weekend.
Also, when I started in Dining, I had to wear completely white uniforms. My husband—boyfriend at the time—and I were at Price Chopper [now Home Depot] and saw some students. One of them said, “Michele, we almost walked by you because we didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.” My husband said, “Huh?” I had to explain that I was usually in white, and today, I was in color.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
The kids have been very good to me through the years. Kids will call me Mom and tell me they’ll miss me. I remember one asking me a few years ago, “When are you graduating?” I told him I have a few more years!
I can’t think of anywhere else I’d want to be. Even on the tough days, I think about some of these kids. I don’t have kids of my own. When someone asks if I have children, I say I usually have about 108 a year.
Pretend I’m a student and it’s my first day on campus. What advice would you give me?
Don’t stay in your room. Try to make friends. And always know that I’m here. Even if it’s just to say hello. ●
“I can’t think of anywhere else I’d want to be. Even on the tough days, I think about some of these kids.”
Class Notes from San Francisco
1950–1959
Susan Brody ’54 wrote, “I guess what’s new is that I have gotten very old. Nevertheless my husband and I are still living in the house we bought in 1967. We continue to drive, and I shop, cook, and do all the things I have always done, except that I am no longer making pottery. I resigned from the ACCI Gallery almost 3 years ago. I miss the activity and pleasure of creation and often think wistfully of venturing into my studio again. We see our children and grandchildren fairly often, and they bring us great joy.”
1960–1969
Margo Davis, who studied at Bennington in 1962 – 1963, is teaching studio art, French, and English at Fusion Academy in Palo Alto, California.
1970–1979
Judith Serin ’71 has retired after 43 years of teaching writing and literature at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her book of short fiction, Gravity, is available
widely online. She has an upcoming book of short memoirs, Family Stories, from Eyewear Publishing.
The United States Postal Service is issuing five new miscellaneous stamps based on the work of Harold Davis’72. There was a First Day of Issue ceremony at the central post office in Berkeley, California, on July 18, 2024. ▶
Jacqueline Kramer ’76 wrote, “During the Sonoma fires, I evacuated to my daughter’s home in Oakland and, to normalize my situation while my county was on fire, I painted fire. Since then I’ve been using colored inks to paint the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—on large watercolor paper. Wanting to take the craft to a new level and having always been drawn to flowers and other plants, I’ve now taken up botanical illustration. I look forward to the time when the free abstract and the highly skilled craft collide.”
David A. Jaffe ’79 wrote, “I just had a fun performance at the San Francisco Taube Atrium Theatre of my new work for dance, commissioned by Nancy Karp + Dancers. The 45-minute dance sextet served as a retrospective of my work, including works spanning 40
Class Notes is one of the mostloved sections of Bennington Magazine. We are kicking off the section with a collection of notes from San Francisco! Look for other geographic areas in coming issues or recommend yours by emailing classnotes@bennington.edu
years, including Fox Hollow (2016) and String Quartet for Two Instruments (1983). I performed the mandolin/ mandocello part, along with the Friction Quartet.”
1980–1989
Oliver Trager ’82 wrote, “I’ve relocated to Albany, California, in the East Bay to ride point on elder care for my mom and stepmom in assisted living and memory care facilities. I can be found nearly every day sub-teaching at Berkeley High School and/or drawing NYC and baseball scenes, writing, guitar plunking in my little cottage, checking in with friends and making new ones, and exploring this magical region as I prepare for continued performances of my solo show, Dig Infinity! Lord Buckley in Bardo.”
Nigel Poor ’86, wrote “ Ear Hustle , the prison-based podcast I cocreated and co-host with Earlonne Woods recently celebrated its 100th episode with a seven-city live tour. We just came back from the Aspen Ideas Festival, where we moderated two panels about prison reform. Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, we are expanding our work and setting up a second podcast project inside the California Institution for Women in Chino, California, so keep an ear out for more women’s stories coming out in our next season, which drops in September.”
Beauty and the Feast, a landscape design company owned by Miri Malmquist ’89, had two gardens featured in the Bringing Back the Natives garden tour in Albany and El Cerrito, both in California.
1990–1999
Soprano Shawnette Sulker ’95 was featured in an interview in San Francisco Classical Voice on March 5,
2024. The article detailed her heavy schedule of performances, including in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with Mission Chamber Orchestra of San Jose; as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute with Livermore Valley Opera; and for Music at Kohl Mansion with the Poulenc Trio. The interview included her thoughts on how her studies at Bennington College sparked her love of opera, why the Queen of the Night is one of her favorite roles, and how she’s excited to sing with the unusual trio of bassoon, oboe, and piano. ▲
2000–2009
After decades of gently elbowing her way into leadership in the marketing corner of the startup world, Caitlin Clarke ’05 is now a somatic coach. She helps sensitive, ambitious individuals feel at home in their bodies, lives, and careers. Her own life has been chock-ablock with experiences both wonderful and strange: horseback riding through the wilds of Mongolia, spiritual and sober awakenings, and smoking cigars in secret back rooms of Swiss Alpine bars. She lives in Oakland with her cat, Freyja.
Maureen Duffy ’08 moved back to the Bay Area last year when she
got a job offer she couldn’t refuse: partner at a wonderful law firm and chair of her practice group. “I knew I was moving back to the land of challenging housing and crazy high prices, but I wasn’t prepared for the crime. Ouch! The good news is the rich cultural life, deep friendships, and stunning beauty of the natural world remain. I am writing about it all.”
2010–2019
Amira Hankin ’13 works as a design lead specializing in data visualization and cartography products and recently won a Webby (Best Architecture, Art, and Design Website 2021) for her work with the Getty Research Institute. The site visualizes half a million never-before-seen photos from artist Ed Ruscha called “12 Sunsets.” She’s been featured on several podcasts, including Pollinate, a podcast by Stamen Design, where she has talked about her work in UX/ UI design. She currently works as the Head of Design at a Bay Area robotics and seafloor mapping company.
2020–2024
Cameo Wood ’21 graduated from Harvard University Harvard Extension School with a master’s degree in Dramatic Arts in 2024. Her latest film, Stalled, premiered at the Woods Hole Film Festival on July 28, 2024.
Marta Shcharbakova ’23 is a Belarusian artist and educator currently working as a music, art, and “Classroom Without Walls” teacher at the New Village School in Sausalito. ●
Class Notes
1950–1959
Work by Grace Bakst Wapner ’55, Grace Bakst Wapner: Side by Side, was on view at Carter Burden Gallery in New York City April 18–May 15.
1960–1969
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont, presented an exhibit called “Space: an odyssey,” featuring artist Fran Bull ’60’s acrylic paintings inspired by cosmic imagery from the James Webb space telescope from mid-May through June.
Patricia Johanson ’62 spoke with Director and Curator of the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College Anne Thompson about the foundations of her artistic practice and her engagement with land art, including a special focus on Fair Park Lagoon, a sculpture that serves both as a public artwork and an environmental remediation. The conversation was the sixth in the Women of Land Art Symposium, presented September 24, 2023, at Fair Park Dallas.
Peggy Adler ’63 wrote that the audio CD of her book Trilogy: Three True Stories of Scoundrels and Schemers, read by Peter Coyote, was available on Amazon starting April 2, 2024. The audiobook was the gold medal winner in the 2024 Independent Publisher
Book Awards in the category for personal non-fiction audiobooks.
On May 18, Louise Reichlin ’63’s Los Angeles Choreographers & Dancers presented Metro Transformation, a preview of HEART, Gotta Get Up!, The Reimagined Urban and Tribal Dances, and Reboot! Reboot! in Culver City, California.
An interview from and poems by Anne Waldman ’66 will appear in the next issue of the Bennington Review
1970–1979
Choreographer David Appel ’72 premiered The Unfolding Scene (each time we meet) in April as part of the Take Root series at Green Space in Long
Island City, NY. It was a piece created and performed in collaboration with five other dancers, including Ava Heller ’07 Heller appears second from left; Photo by @davidrauchphotos ▲
Gale A. Brewer ’73 was featured as a 2024 Food Policy Changemaker by the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center. She represents the 6th Council District and is the chair of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations. The committee held oversight hearings under her leadership on costs of the migrant crisis, responses to climate emergencies, proliferation of unlicensed cannabis shops, operational challenges in family court, maintaining the municipal workforce, and many others.
Philemona Williamson ’73’s work was on view at June Kelly Gallery in
New York City this spring. She was also named the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development’s Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award winner. She welcomed her first grandchild in July.
Former faculty member Mary Ruefle ’74 won in the creative nonfiction category of the Vermont Book Awards for her volume of prose poems titled The Book, and visiting faculty member Sandra Simonds won the fiction award for her debut novel, Assia. Genevieve Plunkett ’11, faculty member Michael Dumanis, and faculty member Vanessa Lyon were finalists for their 2023 releases.
Susan (Rabbit) Goody ’75 was highlighted in Smithsonian Magazine for her work at Thistle Hill Weavers, which is famous for creating the fabrics used for clothing in period-based films like No Country for Old Men, Master and Commander, and Noah.
Peter Pochna ’78 released the book You Can Earn a Living Trading Stocks: Theory and Practice on Amazon last summer.
1980–1989
Rita Marie Cimni MFA ’80 was among the artists presented at the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Alfa Art Gallery Summer 2024 oil, sculpture, and mixed media exhibition called Color and Texture: Anthologies of Artistry.
Betsy Rathbun-Gunn ’81, “a powerhouse in local early education” according to an article in the Bennington Banner, retired after more
than 40 years at Bennington-area childhood centers.
Eternal Return, paintings by Michele Marcoux ’82, was a month-long solo exhibition on view at the Scottish Arts Club in Edinburgh, Scotland, through May 2024. An artist’s talk was held on April 13, 2024. In May, Marcoux was also awarded a prestigious Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) Residency for Scotland to work on a project on the isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in May 2025. The project is to create new paintings that explore personal and collective memory in the landscape and at a historic croft house. Marcoux at Eternal Return ▲
Bill Bonbrest ’83, a seasoned leader in the hospitality sector with more than four decades of experience, introduced Bonbrest Advisory, a consultancy firm committed to elevating performance standards and enriching guest experiences within the hospitality industry.
Jeff Curto MFA ’83 has made a three-year gift commitment to Bennington College to establish the Jeff Curto MFA ’83 Fund for Faculty and Curricular Support in Photography. This gift will support a full-time visiting faculty member in photography, as well as some costs of enhancing photography teaching, such as field trips, student exhibits, and visiting artists. Jeff cites his
work with former faculty member in photography Neil Rappaport as having influenced the course of his life.
Highland Park Alterstudio, the latest installment in Oscar Riera Ojeda’s Masterpiece Series, examines the Highland Park Residence by Kevin Alter ’85’s Alterstudio Architecture.
Michael Lavorgna ’85 mentioned Bennington in a review of Einstürzende Neubauten’s Rampen (apm: alien pop music) for the Album of the Week section of Twittering Machines, his blog of “hi-fi reviews for people who like to read.”
Thomas T. Chin ’87 gave an interview about his novel Unpredictable Winds, released in 2022, to Reading Nook in September 2023.
Artdaily.com reported that Spanierman Modern in New York City exhibited a solo show of Erin Parish ’88’s most recent landscape-inspired abstract paintings. The title, Ocean Teacher, stems from her fascination with the recent discoveries of the deep seas and the importance of its perpetuation in relation to the existence of life as we know it. Parish has been writing artist profiles and reviews for artburstmiami.com. In addition, she received an artist grant from Miami-Dade and is in group shows at Spanierman Modern in New York City in July and at Andra Norris
Gallery in Burlingame, California, in September. Parish and Monica Church ’87 at Ocean Teacher ▲
1990–1999
Alum and trustee Odili Odita ’90 was featured in The Philadelphia Citizen’s “Art for Change” series in partnership with the Forman Arts Initiative.
Houseman, a New American restaurant owned by spouses Jordana Baldwin ’93 and chef Ned Baldwin ’94, ranked #31 on The New York Times Best Restaurants in NYC list. Brooklynbased seafood restaurant Gage & Tollner, part-owned by Bennington trustee Suzanne Brundage ’08, came in at #48.
Lizette Gradén ’93, now Associate Professor in the Division of Ethnology Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University in
Sweden, published Hip Heritage and Museum Practices in Contemporary Hybrid Markets, co-written with professor Tom O’Dell. Included, Gradén notes, is the American Swedish Institute, where she completed a Field Work Term in 1990. “I was asked to come back and work the summer and have had a relationship with them ever since.”
Matt Connors ’95 published Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts in April 2024, through his imprint Pre-Echo Press.
Nutmeg State Financial Credit Union in Connecticut has appointed Steven Hernández, Esq., ’95 to serve on its Board of Directors and as its 2Gen Committee Chairman.
David Levavi ’96 of Manchester, New Hampshire, graduated from Touro University Worldwide in March 2024 with a Doctor of Health Science degree. His doctoral research focused on the development of habitual alcohol consumption-related chronic nitric oxide-deficient hypertension in middleaged non-Hispanic White men.
Gail Hosking MFA ’97 has published Adieu, a new book of poems, through Main Street Rag Press.
In April, Linda McCauley Freeman MFA ’98 published The Marriage Manual, her second poetry collection from Backroom Window Press.
George Michelsen Foy MFA ’98’s The Last Green Light was published on May 1, 2024, with Guernica Editions. It’s a “lovely, often poetic” riff on the other side of The Great Gatsby tracks.
2000–2009
In January 2024, Desire Lines, a hybrid documentary film directed by Jules Rosskam ’01, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Award in the NEXT category. The film has screened at more than three dozen festivals since then and won an additional four jury awards. It will continue its worldwide festival run throughout the year. Desire Lines is a daring, sexy exploration of the interdependence of gender expression and sexuality. ▲
No Seconds by Heather DeweyHagborg ’03 was on view at University City Science Center in Philadelphia as part of the exhibition A Future Without Guns this past spring.
Anastasia Clarke ’10’s band AC Diamond performed in New York City on July 9.
2010–2019
Sylvan Esso, Amelia Meath ’10’s duo, performed at Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on July 21, at Beech Mountain Resort in North Carolina on August 10, and at Stern Grove Festival in San Francisco on August 21.
Safiya Sinclair ’10 won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for her memoir How to Say Babylon, which was published in 2023.
Annie Decker MFA ’11 selfpublished The Yellow Bathrobe, a collection of short stories, with Troy Book Sellers in 2023.
Tim Z. Hernandez MFA ’11 will publish They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir with The University of Arizona Press in September. The book received a starred review from Kirkus.
Elijah Burrell MFA ’12, a Lincoln University of Missouri English
professor, was featured in a faculty profile on the school’s website in April. In addition, he hosted a reading and signing with the Iowa Writers Workshop’s Margaret Yapp at Pulpit Rock Brewing Co. in May. Burrell read from his newest poetry collection, Skies of Blur.
Greg Obis ’12’s band Stuck played Logan Square Arts Fest in Chicago on June 30.
Fun Facts!, Ethan Woods ’12’s band, played with Wild Yaks at the Anabas Boat Club in Queens, New York, on July 6 and with Looms, Miracle Drug, and Togs at TV Eye in Ridgewood, New York, on July 10. Their debut album will be released later this year.
Caroline Simms Richter Marsiglia ’14 was promoted to literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management.
A book co-authored by Steven Matthew Constantine MFA ’14, A Killer by Design, has been turned into a docuseries. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released on Hulu and Disney+ early in June 2024.
Tori Malcangio MFA ’14’s story “Invasive Species” won the Jeffrey
E. Smith Editors Prize and currently appears in the spring issue of The Missouri Review
Photographs by Julia Barstow ’16 were featured in The Quarry Project Echoes at the Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais, Vermont, through June 2024. The installation included works created by twelve artists in response to the site-specific dance/theater piece, The Quarry Project. The works echo and reflect the performances and the powerful influence of their site, the Wells Lamson Granite Quarry. Barstow was the project photographer from 2017 to 2022. Tyler Rai ’13 danced as a member of the 2019 Quarry Project ensemble. ▲
Amber Caron MFA ’16 has received a 2024 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction for her short story “Didi,” published by Electric Literature
Joely Fitch ’16 has launched a new online literary journal, atmospheric quarterly.
An essay by Emily Gaynor ’16, written while Gaynor was a student at Bennington, was published in the anthology The Weird Sister Collection:
Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture, available from the Feminist Press.
Jake Landau ’16 returned from Sikkim, India, with composer/ percussionist/sound artist and former faculty member Susie Ibarra early this summer. “We were there on a Nat Geo Explorers-funded research and field recording trip.” They recorded water, glacial lakes, birds, and other nature for her project Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, which maps the Ganges River “from source to sink.” Landau is working with Ibarra to release a new Splice.com sample pack focused on bird migration sounds. They look forward to releasing new albums, books, and notation by them and other artists on their new label and publishing company, Habitat Sounds. Landau recording water at Banjhakri Falls Park in Gangtok, Sikkim; Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh ▲
Abby Mahler ’16’s continuing work to stem the spread of COVID was featured on Los Angeles-based KCRW news in a story called “SoCal’s COVID-cautious: Fighting isolation along with the virus.”
The Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University announced that printmaker, installation artist, and educator Farah Mohammad ’16 will be among its fall fellows.
Emily Sanders ’16, editor of Exxon Knew, attended the Society of Environmental Journalists conference at the University of Pennsylvania, which drew 1,000 journalists. Faculty members David Bond and Judith Enck spoke on panels at the event. Sanders writes about how fossil fuel companies knew about the risks of climate change for decades, but actively worked to block progress.
State Rep. Dane Whitman ’16, who represents Bennington-2, announced he would not seek re-election to his House seat in the fall and intends to enter law school.
SKORTS, Emma Welch ’17’s band, headlined at the Sultan Room in Brooklyn, New York, on July 10. They also played a beach show August 3 at Rippers on Rockaway Beach.
Dana Foote ’18 of the band Sir Chloe was interviewed by the Daily
Californian about touring, history, and books for an article published on April 11, 2024. She played at the Day In Day Out Festival 2024 at Fisher Green Pavilion in Seattle on July 13.
Pianist Tony Lu ’18 gave concerts at the Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse in Bennington and Trinity Methodist Church in Port Townsend, Washington, in April.
Choreographer Dani Robbins ’18 and dance students from College of the Atlantic debuted new work in a show titled Sample Platter: New Dance Works in Progress at the Northeast Harbor Library in May.
Foster Powell ’19’s band Verboten performed in Washington state and British Columbia on many dates over the summer. They were with Tiny Fireflies and Space Daze at Chop Suey in Seattle on July 2.
Carling Berkhout ’19—who plays music with Carling & Will, Surplus Daughters with Amy Anders ’21 and Magdalen Wulf, and The Velvet Wave with Sam Clement ’08—is releasing a debut album entitled Omens for her
self-titled project. The album release show was scheduled for September 14 in Manchester Center, Vermont.
Jadu AR launched its debut season on mobile devices. CEO Asad Malik ’19 gave an interview to gaming.net.
2020–2024
Margaret Fortuna Yassky ’20 published an adult Queer romance novel, Rainbow Overalls, under the nom de plume Maggie Fortuna in April 2023 with independent publisher Bold Strokes Books. “The book is set at a purposely unnamed Vermont college and inspired strongly by my love for my time at Bennington,” Yassky wrote.
Suleika Jaouad MFA ’20 was profiled in The Atlantic.
From August 6-17, Liam Shannon ’21 was an artist in residence at the Castleton Festival in Virginia.
Annabel Hoffman ’22, who writes and performs music with Teddy O’Mara ’19, Emma Welch ’17, and Harry Zucker ’23 under the name Aggie Miller, opened the 2024 Sunfest at Bennington College. Hoffman, right, and Welch, left; Photo by Elie Pichanick ’27
Luke Taylor ’22 is releasing new music as a part of Hotel Stark. The album is called two points on a line.
Maddy Wood ’22 had an interview published in Notion. She is studying music composition at the University of Rhode Island while also writing and releasing songs and performing with
her band. Her single, “King of the Ashtray,” was released on June 5.
Gregory Mingo ’23 published an opinion with the Vera Institute titled “Clemency and Prison Education Benefit Everyone.”
Xiao Ma ’23 was hired to be a part of the admissions staff at Sterling College in Vermont.
“Why I Am Not a Gravedigger,” a poetry manuscript by Amy Raasch MFA ’24, is a 2024 Trio Award Finalist. An interview with Raasch about creative dream work was also published in the Los Angeles Times.
Alexandra Brkic ’24 had an opinion piece published in The Caledonian Record called “We must do better for our environment.”
William Greer ’24 ran for and won the Democratic primary nomination for the Bennington-2 seat in Vermont’s House of Representatives. ● Please submit your professional and personal updates to classnotes@bennington.edu.
Faculty & Staff Notes
Ben Anastas’s first novel, An Underachiever’s Diary, was mentioned in The New York Times Books Section recommendations newsletter by Leah Greenblatt. His essay, “Jean Stein’s Rolodex,” appeared in The Yale Review in June.
Faculty member Lopamudra Banerjee co-authored “Contradictions and Crisis in the World of Work/Informality, Precarity, and the Pandemic,” which was published in Development and Change.
Faculty member and Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action
David Bond published an article “Ethnography in the Fight” in Engagement, an online journal published by the Anthropology and Environment Society, on March 4, 2024. In addition, Bond presented on the dangers of incinerating PFAS
waste at Westchester County Zero Waste Task Force and was invited to share his environmental justice work on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands at the annual conference for the Society of Environmental Journalists on April 5, 2024. Bond also gathered with community activists from across the Caribbean in Toronto on May 2-5 to help organize a regional movement to protest the rapid expansion of fossil fuel frontiers in the Caribbean. Bond was invited to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton to participate in a seminar on “Climate Crisis Politics” organized by Wendy Brown and Timothy Mitchell. An edited volume on the theme is forthcoming.
Shawmar Pitts, David Bond, Marisol Cantu, and Madeline Ostrander sit on a panel about climate justice in communities located near oil refineries at the annual conference for the Society of Environmental Journalists in the U.S. Virgin Islands in April; Photo courtesy of Allison Beck ▲
A piece by faculty member Jenny Boully was published in the April issue of Image by the Los Angeles Times. It is called “Want to engage your dreams? Start with mugwort and a full bladder.”
Faculty member Maya Cantu was a keynote speaker for the international StageStruck! 5 conference “Nostalgia and the Hollywood Musical” at the Great American Songbook Foundation in Carmel, Indiana.
Bennington Writing Seminars faculty member Jai Chakrabarti received an O. Henry Prize for Short fiction for “The Import,” published by Ploughshares.
Michael Cohen’s article, “Passover: Universal lessons from the environment,” was published in the Jerusalem Post
Hugh Crowl gave an eclipse education lecture for kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders at the Village School of North Bennington on April 1, 2024.
Work by faculty member Thorsten Dennerline was included in Bound/ Unbound at LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University School of the Arts this spring.
Michael Dumanis read at the Berkshires’ famous The Dream Away Lodge, in Becket, Massachusetts, on May 18. “I Found a Home for Them in Poems: A Conversation with Michael
Dumanis,” curated by Lisa Olstein, appeared in the Tupelo Quarterly in May, and his poem “The Empire of Light” from his book Creature was featured by the poet Major Jackson on the May 20 episode of the poetry podcast The Slowdown
Dumanis and Mark Wunderlich appeared on Greywolf Press’ Graywolf Lab podcast about literary friendship. Mark discussed his long friendship with MFA faculty member Carmen Gimenez, and Dumanis shared his long friendship with Pulitzer Prizewinner Jericho Brown.
Manuel Gonzales’s 2013 story “The Miniature Wife” will be made into a series on Peacock. Elizabeth Banks, of Pitch Perfect and The Hunger Games, and Matthew Macfadyen, of Succession, will star and executive produce.
Provost Maurice Hall discussed commencement speeches as a guest on Vermont Public’s Vermont Edition in May.
Music faculty member Virginia Kelsey performed with her group Roomful of Teeth at Caramoor’s Concert on the Lawn on June 28 and at MASS MoCA on August 24.
Visual Arts faculty member in photography Jonathan Kline retired.
Art history faculty member J. Vanessa Lyon’s visual studies memoir Blackness Thirteen Ways is forthcoming from Pantheon. Lyon appeared with Roxane Gay, of Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, along with authors Lindsay Hunter and Kelly Sundberg, in a Lit!Series event at St. Catherine’s University in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Loft Literary Center on June 8.
Alfredo Medina, Jr., the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and College Diversity Officer at Bennington College, was a guest on WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s Roundtable on May 14. Medina was also the commencement speaker for Rockland Community College, a State University of New York.
In 2024, dance faculty Mina Nishimura has performed at Danspace Project, Sundays on Broadway, and the River to River Festival in New York City and Black Hole Hollow in Arlington, Vermont.
Aysha Peltz was a presenter at the “Women Working with Clay” Symposium at Hollins College in June.
Faculty member Ann Pibal and Matt Connors ’95 were included in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s landmark survey 50 Paintings, which featured works created within the last five years by fifty international artists and how they highlight the artistic trends in practice today.
Stone Valley Arts in Pawlet, Vermont, exhibited Capturing Time: A Neil Rappaport Retrospective, mid-June through mid-August. Rappaport taught at Bennington for 27 years. The show is curated by Chuck Helfer and Krista Rupe.
In October, Lena Retamoso Urbano, Cultural Studies and Language visiting faculty member in Spanish, will be traveling to Paris, France, to participate at the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference for the panel “Approaches to Surrealism in Spanish American Poetry of the Last Half-Century” with her essay “Blanca Varela: trazos de elementos surrealistas sinuosos,” an
exploration on the surrealist elements in Blanca Varela’s poetry. For that same ISSS conference, the artistic panel she organized was accepted as well: “Still Surreal: Glimpses of the Contemporary Omnipotence of Dream State,” and she will be presenting “Surreal Textures: A Journey Towards Light of Debris (2023),” a poetry reading from her most recent book of poetry, Luz de escombros (Light of Debris), along with two other artists.
Faculty member Jennifer Rohn was nominated for an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Lead Performance for her performance in the play How I Learned to Drive at Actors’ Shakespeare Project.
Visual Arts faculty member in Architecture Donald Sherefkin retired.
Elizabeth Sherman, Professor Emerita, discussed the explanation for the diversity of life on earth— evolution, the most important unifying concept in all of biology—on June 13 at the Wayland Free Public Library in Wayland, Massachusetts.
On April 13, participants ran 10Ks, 5Ks, or both in the 43rd April Fools Race in nearby Salem, New York. The race is organized by Dan Snyder in Institutional Advancement and has been won a couple times by faculty member Sarah Harris. Runners and spectators grabbed coffee and pastry at On a Limb, owned by Michelle Nagai ’97, and strolled through the grounds of Salem Art Works, founded by Anthony Cafritz ’85, while they were in town. ●
Obituaries
Barry Bartlett
Barry Bartlett, faculty member emeritus, taught at Bennington for a remarkable 35 years. He passed away on March 14, 2024.
Barry held a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics. His narrative sculptures in ceramic and mixed media explore the realm of socio-psychological conflicts from evolution to warfare to suburban sprawl.
His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including four solo shows since 2008 and a series of group shows throughout the United States. He participated in national and international artist residencies and lectured in Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and England.
Barry was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in visual arts. He has also served on two advisory boards: the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine and for Greenwich House Center for Ceramics in New York.
His Bennington students and colleagues describe him as “a tremendous human being and a powerful fantastic talent;” “a gentle friend and compassionate mentor;” “charming, energetic, passionate about clay;” and “a deeply caring, socially conscious teacher.”
Josh Green ’81, executive director of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts whose time at Bennington only just barely overlapped with Barry’s, said, “[Barry’s] infectious joy for ceramic art and other genres is felt in the way he worked with materials and interpersonal experiences. Collage, a reinvention of elements unnoticed or discarded by others, has been a through line at various stages of his work. Only someone who looked and listened with care, focus, and openness could create and teach as Barry did over decades.”
Harriet Sloane Fels Price
Harriet Sloane Fels Price, wife of former Bennington College President William Carl Fels, was 103 years old when she passed away on March 1, 2024, in Lexington, Massachusetts.
She was born in upstate New York in 1920 and lived in South Orange, New Jersey. In 1945, she married Bill Fels of New York City. He was appointed president of Bennington in 1957 and served in that position until his death in 1964.
The Bennington years were an important period for Hattie. She redecorated the College houses and entertained students, faculty, and trustees. Hattie took courses with Bennington faculty whenever she could.
After Bill’s death, Hattie completed a bachelor’s degree and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she worked briefly for both Harvard and Radcliffe colleges. In 1971 Hattie married Don Price, a Harvard professor, Rhodes Scholar, and the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government. Their marriage led Hattie to a number of new people and experiences, and a full social life in Cambridge, throughout the nation, and abroad.
Through all of this Hattie remained in touch with her many friends and continued to take in classes, concerts, lectures, and to make trips abroad. She raised two children and worked with a number of volunteer groups. Over much of her life, she also pursued art in various forms. Hattie always saw herself as an innovator and leader, especially in forging a new path for women. Her work to better herself and her community are an example for all. Gifts to the College in memory of Bill and Hattie Fels can be made via the Office of Institutional Advancement and will be added to the generous donation bequeathed by Mrs. Price.
Patricia Owen ’72
Josephine Kerr-Lowe ’72, Pamela Skewes-Cox ’72, and Melissa (Missy) Stewart ’72 wish to remember their dear friend and classmate Patricia Owen ’72, who passed away from cancer on April 13, 2024. They met and studied with faculty member Stanley Rosen in the ceramics studio at Bennington College, which was a hub of creativity. It was located in a repurposed chicken coop and tractor garage adjacent to the Early Childhood Center.
It was here, in the midst of discoveries and adventures, that they became lifelong friends and, later, colleagues. Patty studied at Bennington for 4 years and earned a bachelor of arts degree. She later became interested in bookbinding, which evolved into a lifelong passion. She began her bookbinding studies with Kathryn Gerlach in Vermont and, later, with Laura Young in New York. After moving west, she took a leave to attend graduate school in Architecture at UCLA; and, after practicing as a licensed architect, returned to bookbinding. She studied the French style of binding with Eleanor Ramsey of San Francisco.
Patty began exhibiting her bookbinding work in 1987, and, since then, her bindings have been exhibited both in the United States and abroad, including with Les Amis de la Reliure d’Art in France and in Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. Recent shows include for the Designer Bookbinders International in 2014 and 2017, where she was awarded second prize for her “open set” binding.
Patty is survived by her longtime life partner and husband Ron Johnson of Santa Monica, California. Ron also studied at UCLA and earned his architecture degree there. He and Patty continued a practice for many years. Their shared architecture studio and Patty’s separate and specific workshop, in which she hatched her beautiful bindings, were a source of inspiration. We will all miss her.
Marian Zazeela ’60
Avant-garde artist Marian Zazeela ’60 passed away at the age of 83 on March 28, 2024, in New York City. She was known for her calligraphic drawings, light installations, and performance work. She and her husband, minimalist composer La Monte Young, formed the music and performance group Theatre of Eternal Music in the early 1960s. She exhibited paintings at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, designed a stage production of Amiri Baraka’s novel The System of Dante’s Hell, modeled for the photographs in Jack Smith’s The Beautiful Book (1962), appeared in Smith’s 1963 film Flaming Creatures, and starred in a screen test for Andy Warhol in 1964. In 1965, her Ornamental Lightyears Tracery was subsequently presented at the Museum of Modern Art, AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Fondation Maeght, Moderna Museet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Documenta 5, Haus der Kunst, and Dia Art Foundation, among other galleries and museum venues. She was the co-creator of Dream House, a sensory environment that, since 1993, has occupied the third story of a walk-up on Church Street in Lower Manhattan. An exhibition of her drawings, called Dream Lines, was presented from March 1 to May 11, 2024, at Artists Space in New York City. ●
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In Memoriam
Jennifer Lynn Isbill ’81
Charmian M. Knowles ’50
Mary Elizabeth Lang MFA ’07
Elizabeth Dyer Merrill ’50
Ruth Hartley Milidonis ’48
Carolyn Spence Muntz ’51
Steve Paxton, former faculty
Ruth Ann Phimister ’68
Riva Poor ’56
Fergus Reid IV ’86
Sarah Winston Robinson ’47, P ’78
Duncan Syme, former faculty
Eleanor Kester Wakin ’60
Bennington, VT 05201-6003 Saving Democracy Together, a new class created with students to address the pressing need to reconnect America’s founding ideals with today’s political realities, is underway and runs 7:00–8:30 pm Thursdays through October 17. Alumni are especially invited. To learn more and join visit bennington.edu/democracyclass.