Earlhamite Fall 2024 - Earlham College Alumni Magazine

THE MAGAZINE OF EARLHAM COLLEGE

Earlhamite Earlhamite

Artist Liliana Guzmàn

Justice Jewelry

Silversmith Will Alderfer ’11 celebrates inclusivity, sustainability and ethics as best practices at the core of his business.

From Stream Beds to Screen Gems

Bruce Carter ’77 began his career hunting rocks and minerals but then found treasures working behind the scenes in Hollywood.

Magic Touch

Part historian, part detective, Olympia Diamond ’06 taps into science, innovation and culture in her work as an art conservator.

Inside the Gamelan Room

Marc Benamou’s gamelan program is a distinctive communitybased component of music-making and scholarship at Earlham.

Museum Guard

When a destructive flood closed a major museum, art historian and community advocate Lauren Lessing ’91 came to the rescue.

Show Me Success

Can coffee beans help change the world? Educator Samantha Lurie Carroll ’08 is leading high school students in an effort to answer yes.

PHOTO COURTESY LILIANA GUZMÀN

Earlhamite

The magazine of Earlham College

EDITOR

Alicia Anstead

CLASS NOTES EDITOR

Cooper Cox

DESIGNER

Emily Aldrich, AldrichDesign.biz

MANAGING EDITOR

Brian Zimmerman

WRITERS

Jen Gose

Kelsey Mackey

VICE PRESIDENT FOR

MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Kristen Lainsbury

Read the latest alumni profiles, submit class notes, check out upcoming events and more at earlham.edu/alumni.

Earlhamite magazine is the oldest college alumni magazine in continuous publication in the United States. Today it is published twice yearly and continues to follow the statement of purpose that has guided it since its 1873 founding: “a regular messenger going out and bearing tidings of prosperity and vicissitudes of Earlham to its friends and supporters, and bringing all associated here into communication with one another.”

Opinions expressed in the magazine are those of its contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the official position of Earlham College.

Send story ideas to earlhamite@earlham.edu

Send class notes, obituaries and address changes to alums@earlham.edu

Please recycle after reading. Paper for the Earlhamite is printed from 10% recycled fiber and is FSC, SFI and PEFC certified.

© 2024 Earlham College.

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Scattered across the Canadian shield lake country of present-day Ontario and Minnesota are pictographs made hundreds of years ago by the original North Americans. Skillfully drawn in red ochre bound with animal fat, these images are often located on cliff faces just above the waterline. They represent such things as outspread hands, people in canoes, moose, wolves, and the mischievous, long-fingered “little people” who live among the rocks in rapids and delight in overturning canoes. Many of the pictographs are situated so that shimmering sunlight reflected from the water animates their figures — in much the same way, surely, that the flickering light of burning torches animated cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago around the world.

Art is not ornamental: It is fundamental. From whatever place and time, art speaks to us of what it means to be humans in this world: We were here! Here are our hands! Here are the creatures and people we admired, revered, depended on, laughed about or feared. Here are the causes of grief and mischief as well as joy. Here is an image or object we made that is significant, beautiful, powerful. Here are words, from ancient sagas, myths, epics and poems to modern stories, novels and lyrics, that make us stop and listen. Here is music that sets us dancing together, or singing together, or brings tears to our eyes.

In my own life, art came first. As a boy, I pestered my parents for violin lessons after hearing recordings of violin concertos. I later attended the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington for an undergraduate degree in violin performance. For many years, the violin has sat

in the corner, its case gathering dust, as I have pursued a career as a biologist and teacher. But the love of music and all other art has not gathered dust; it has, instead, been a steady companion through life’s ups and downs and a source of humane meaning.

On these pages, you will find stories about Earlhamites who are finding and making meaning through the arts. Among them are alums who have brought a socially responsible focus to metalsmithing, produced blockbuster films and TV series, built kinship in the trans and queer communities through photography, and resurrected a leading museum after a devastating flood. Through their work, passion and creativity, these Earlham artists are changing perceptions, uplifting communities and helping us envision — and create — a better world, for good.

Paul Sniegowski President, Earlham College

ARTIST & POLYMATH

above : Sakura-jima, 2017, Sumi ink on cold-press watercolor paper Sumi ink is most popularly used for monochrome calligraphy in Japan.

bottom , left to right : Cloud Encaustic I: Om, 2013, encaustic, ink on wood panel Art styles of Japan have been a major influence on all of Cooper’s work. Harris & Cat, 2012, acrylic on canvas For this “energetic” commissioned work, Cooper engaged a couple’s acupuncture points and meridians. Bodhisattva: Nile, 2008, digital photography Cooper uses a slow flash to create rainbow trails echoing Japanese artistic styles. Photos courtesy Leah Cooper

As an undergraduate, Leah Cooper ’00 intended to move to Japan to work after college. She was a Japanese studies major (with an English minor) and had participated in the Japan Study program at Waseda University in Tokyo. Based at Earlham College, Japan Study is one of the oldest and most comprehensive higher education programs between the U.S. and Japan, linking member colleges of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest to Waseda in Tokyo.

Japan Study, which celebrated its 60th year in 2023, was the reason Cooper, who is a watercolorist, photographer and writer — a self-described “polymath” — chose to study at Earlham.

“I immediately discovered Earlham had established Japan Study in 1963, and that it was one of the oldest and most comprehensive programs in higher education exchange with Japan. It had a strong reputation,” she says. “Earlham is a place where you can learn very deeply about foundational aspects of the culture.”

After graduation, Cooper moved to Boston for the next eight years, where she worked as a DJ photographer (capturing DJs in the excitement of their work). Her approach is highly influenced by her degree in Japanese studies, using a slow flash to create rainbow trails while moving the camera. She calls the photographs the “Bodhisattva” series because they echo Japanese artistic styles and aesthetics.

Cooper moved to Los Angeles in 2009 to pursue photography. She apprenticed with a commercial photographer and worked on sets of independent feature films and shorts with up-and-coming filmmakers, including students at the American Film Institute, UCLA and USC.

Eventually, she started experimenting with painting.

She wanted to apply her Waseda studies with masters of Japanese calligraphy to bring more aspects of Japanese art and culture into her paintings — such as waka (poetry), reiki (healing modality), the heart sutra, acupuncture and meridians.

Then, approximately seven years ago, Cooper became chronically ill and needed to slow down. “I didn’t have much energy,” she says. “All I could really do was work and do one thing a day.” Painting became too difficult, until she moved into sumi ink. Now, she uses watercolor to explore her interest in color theory, but she also loves painting birds, mountains and clouds.

As part of her multifacted approach to the arts, Cooper is also working on a film script. Her partner is a filmmaker who recently filmed a feature in Japan. Now that she is fully recovered health wise, Cooper plans to return to Japan to explore artistically and visit with old friends from Earlham.

Written by Kelsey Mackey

Earlham’s Peace and Global Studies program turns 50

It’s a standard trope: A college student, starry-eyed and idealistic, graduates into the “real world” only to have their dreams crushed by corporate greed, family expectations or a society that just doesn’t make room for their vision of the future.

Like many college students, Earlhamites come to campus as idealists. And 10, 20, 50 years later, many still are. How, then, have Earlhamites learned to shoulder disappointment and keep up the fight for the common good despite setbacks?

The answer may be found in Peace and Global Studies, a long-standing curricular program at the heart of Earlham College’s purpose.

“I put a lot of energy into trying to steel the students’ resolve, so they appreciate even at the bodily level that this is a long struggle, and they might not see the fruits of their labors in their lifetimes,” says director of the program Joanna “Jo” Swanger ’90 “The students who take that to heart appreciate it after graduation, because they see other people give up after a year or two. But PAGS students understand what’s at play and how to continue to come back even when faced with obstacles.”

Founded in 1974 by the late Howard Richards and Caroline Higgins (formerly Richards), PAGS turns 50 this year and stands as one of the pioneering academic peace programs in the U.S. Events to commemorate the anniversary, including panel discussions and a tree planting in memory of Richards, took place on campus September 27 and 28.

structural issues at play, and to do it in a way that doesn’t ignite an even harsher backlash.

When Richards and Higgins were approached to establish a peace studies program at Earlham in 1974, these experiences laid the foundation for how they would structure the curriculum. Originally called Peace and

“PAGS is about getting students to ask better and better questions, and to bring a more sophisticated analysis to an issue,” says director Joanna Swanger.

Richards and Higgins met in California, where they found some success working with Cesar Chavez’s movement for United Farm Workers. Yet they also found that as the union made headway, the growers turned more and more to mechanization, undercutting the union’s power. The two later traveled to Chile to work with popular education efforts. There, they saw the election of the country’s first socialist leader, Salvador Allende, in 1970, as well as the subsequent U.S.-backed military coup that overthrew him.

Their conclusion: Organizing alone is not enough. The only way to achieve lasting change is to address the underlying

Conflict Studies, the program focuses first and foremost on questions of justice and analyzing violence in all its forms including: war, militarism, colonialism, institutionalized racism and gender-based and economic violence.

Over the years, faculty from across the Earlham curriculum have contributed to the program: Tony Bing, John Ray, George Lopez, Welling Hall, Dan Rosenberg, Jonathan Diskin, Carol Hunter, Chris Swafford, Gray Cox, Nigel Young, Pat Washburn, Mervyn Love and Chuck Yates.

More recently, some of the primary faculty contributors to the PAGS program have included Peter Carlo Becerra, Ferit Güven, Ahmed Khanani, Victor Kumar, JoAnn Martin, Ryan Murphy and Womai Song.

Swanger is also a graduate of the program. When she was a student in the 1980s, she noted how the program flexed to encompass and address major world issues and the current campus climate including, at that time, the nuclear arms race, apartheid, U.S.-backed wars in Latin America, the Intifada in Palestine and unrest in Northern Ireland. Student groups, such as the Apartheid Action Coalition and the Committee in Solidarity with Latin America, and Earlham faculty-led programs to Jerusalem and Northern Ireland allowed students to engage with pressing world issues in real ways.

The proof of the program’s success is in its graduates. Andrés Conteris ’84, who received Earlham’s sesquicentennial alumni peace award, credits PAGS for shaping his own path after Earlham. The trajectory of that path includes: receiving a Watson Fellowship, supporting Indigenous movements in Honduras, founding Democracy Now! en Español. Other PAGS alums are Rhodes, Watson and Fulbright fellows, and working in community and social services, education and political organizing around the world.

“It was life-changing to be at Earlham,” Conteris says. “It helped focus a lot of my commitment to this field. I applied to

Earlham because of its peace studies program, because at that time there were very few around the country.”

One thing that was crucial for Conteris was that Howard Richards and Professor George Lopez encouraged him to pursue his passion for human rights in relation to his uncle, who was an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience in Uruguay. They mentored him to do a self-designed internship, for which he went to Washington, D.C. and got 26 U.S. senators to sign a letter for his uncle. “He was freed in 1985, the year after I graduated,” says Conteris, “and he later came to Earlham as a speaker on a tour giving thanks to all who helped apply pressure.”

PAGS doesn’t offer easy solutions to world peace or social justice. What it does offer is a far more lasting and sustainable worldview for its graduates.

“We don’t want to graduate people who all think the same thing,” says Swanger. “It’s not about a fixed set of tools, or a one-size fits-all solution of how to build peace. Instead, PAGS is about getting students to ask better and better questions, and to bring a more sophisticated analysis to an issue, so they can go into any context and know how to form the right kinds of relationships with the people there. Because those are the people who ultimately define what constitutes justice and what could contribute to sustainable peace.” ■

Story by Jen Gose

Photos by Josh Smith

Students in Swanger’s classes learn that lasting change comes through addressing underlying structural issues.

118 million reasons to be thankful

Earlham College raised $118 million as part of For Good: The Campaign of Earlham College. Built on the contributions of more than 11,000 alum donors and friends, the campaign is the largest and most successful fundraising effort in the college’s 177year history.

Immediate past president Anne Houtman launched the public phase of the campaign in October 2022 during her inauguration, with a goal of raising $85 million to support critical initiatives to support student recruitment and retention. The college debuted new academic majors in engineering and accounting and new concentrations in computer science. The college’s

FUNDRAISING HIGHLIGHTS

new varsity softball program reached the playoffs in its inaugural season last spring, and men’s and women’s golf and tennis resumed play after a short pause.

This year, the college is beginning strategic conversations that will result in a long-term plan to renovate or rebuild student housing on College Avenue.

In addition to overwhelming support from Earlham donors, the campaign also was boosted by a $25 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.’s College and Community Collaboration initiative. The grant — and $83 million in matching funds from partners in the community — will support initiatives that are mutually beneficial to the college and its neighbors.

$49.2m $12.8m $56m

to widen the path to an Earlham education by enhancing recruitment initiatives and expanding endowed scholarships.

to enrich the Epic Journey signature student success program by supporting career-discerning experiences such as internships and research experiences and expanding endowed travel funds.

to elevate the student experience by endowing the Clarence Cunningham Student Emergency Fund and transforming the residential experience. Fundraising total also includes the $25 million Lilly Endowment College and Community Collaboration grant.

Recovery Champion Award

Christy Hand ’03 has earned recognition from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast Region for her pioneering research on the elusive eastern black rail bird.

A longtime wildlife biologist, Hand was selected for the 2023 Recovery Champion Award, a recognition for Fish and Wildlife employees who have made outstanding contributions toward the recovery of federally listed endangered and threatened species.

Hand’s research concerning the breeding ecology and molting of eastern black rails has provided new knowledge about the secretive and hard-to-find bird that was listed as threatened in November 2020. The findings from her research have resulted in effective methods of habitat creation, management and restoration for the eastern black rail.

“Any species would be lucky to have Christy Hand as an advocate in its corner,” says Morgan Wolf, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Ecological Services Recovery Planning Team. “She has a unique ability to build consensus and buy-in for the eastern black rail from a variety of stakeholders by exemplifying humility, capability, resilience and kindness.”

Hand heads several scientific groups working to recover the eastern black rail. She co-leads the Eastern Black Rail Autonomous Recording Unit and Bioacoustics Team and the Eastern Black Rail Executive Survey Design Team. She is also the leader of the South Carolina Black Rails Group.

The eastern black rail is a sparrow-sized, gray-black bird with red eyes that is typically found in Louisiana and along the Atlantic coastline in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

The bird’s diet includes beetles, spiders, snails, small crustaceans, grasshoppers and ants. Eastern black rails walk or run through marsh habitat, only come out at night and rarely fly. The primary threats to the bird’s survival are habitat loss and degradation, erosion, environmental contaminants, sea level rise and tidal flooding. Story adapted from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Photos by Christy Hand/South Carolina Department of Natural Resources

WORKING FOR GOOD: CHRISTY HAND ’03

Eastern black rail

Electronic music and spiritual impulse

Last spring, students in Forrest Tobey’s advanced electronic music class invited the campus community to create sound installations using only movements from their hands, arms and mouths. The interactive demonstration was among the highlights of the Epic Expo, an all-campus celebration of scholarship and creativity.

Participants manipulated sound in real time and watched on a computer screen as their gestures created reverb and distortion using an array of electronic instruments, including hand-held controllers, drum pad, microphone and keyboard, which also changed the graphic images on the screen in real time.

“We work with music technology in the classroom more than a lot of people realize,” says Tobey, professor of music and director of Earlham Symphony Orchestra. “My emphasis is on using computer software as a tool for music composition, sound design and live performance. We also have an increasing emphasis on using physical, old-school hardware synthesizers for a more organic and hands-on experience of electronic sound.”

Electronic music has been a fixture of Earlham’s curriculum since Tobey’s arrival on campus in 2003, and is a popular pathway for students to learn about music composition and emerging technologies.

“For many, the exhibit brought out their musical sides,” says Dove RiceSnow ’26. “Social science professors sang with confidence into our system’s

“My interest in this work always has been to have electronic music stand in relationship to human gesture.”

— FORREST TOBEY

microphone, intrigued by the reverb and flanging that made their vocal shimmer and echo back to them. STEM students created beats, snapping, clapping, and using our drum pad as they watched the visual interface turn colors to their rhythms. I overheard a career center staff member explaining to a friend that this is how they make music nowadays.”

Tobey witnessed these experiences firsthand.

“They are learning to organize musical form and getting a better understanding of what constitutes music by experimenting with sound,” Tobey says. “The difference between composing for a string quartet, say, and composing

for electronics is that you’re learning about the physics of sound and how to appreciate sound at a fundamental level. Students learn about processes that are foundational in electronics — filters, oscillators, resonance, amplitude envelopes, ring and frequency modulation, and so on — but applying them to musical creation.”

Tobey discovered a passion for performing electronic music in the 1990s while studying at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a doctorate in musical arts in orchestral conducting and a master’s degree in electronic music performance.

“Peabody was an unusual conservatory in that era because they had an electronic music studio tucked up on the top floor of the main building,” he says. “I grew up in the era of progressive rock bands who popularized the use of synthesizers, and when I saw the opportunity to study computer music alongside orchestral conducting, I took full advantage of it. My doctoral dissertation was about training a computer to follow a conductor’s gestures. And now here I am, conducting

Earlham’s orchestra and teaching electronic music.”

One of the instruments Tobey encountered at Peabody was the Buchla Lightning, a device that uses infrared wands to generate electronic sounds based on movement. He credits it for leading him to one of his big breaks: He was performing on it during a Peabody event that was attended by Michael Bloomberg, a Johns Hopkins alum and philanthropist who would go on to become a three-term mayor of New York City. The chance encounter was a catalyst for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform at Times Square in New York City as part of the Millennium Celebration that ushered in the year 2000.

His experiences with electronic music might have been a spark for what has become a long career at Earlham, too.

“I sometimes joke that I feel lucky to be at Earlham because I’m not sure anybody else would have hired someone who is as crazily eclectic as I am,” Tobey says.

Long before becoming an electronic musician, Tobey was a freelance pianist

and a public-school teacher in the Seattle area. He also taught at the Woodstock School in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains in India while serving as the director of the Delhi Symphony for three years. He plays folk and jazz, and released two recordings this year: one featuring his solo piano improvisations, and another under the band name Off Chants, with his wife Lynnell Lewis, of songs and chants influenced by their time in India.

Tobey draws a particular distinction between the electronic music he teaches in class with other forms of popular computer-generated art forms, including techno.

“I have great respect for the people who perform techno music, but I can’t listen to it for very long,” Tobey says.

“I think it’s because the computer is in charge of the beat. My interest in this work always has been to have electronic music stand in relationship to human gesture, which is another way of saying human emotion. When the music is

connecting to gesture, it connects also to breath and therefore to spirit. There is a great quote by the composer George Crumb. He said, ‘Music is a system of proportions in service to a spiritual impulse.’ That pretty much sums it up for me, and I hope that I can bring that sensibility to my work with the students.’” ■

Story by Brian Zimmerman

Photos by Josh Smith

more online

Listen to Forrest Tobey’s latest album of piano improvisations by scanning the QR code.

Forrest Tobey (below right) and his students develop music in relationship to human gesture and emotion.

PHOTO: WALT BISTLINE

Jordan Wolfe ’20 graduated from Earlham College with the dream to become a full-time working theatre artist. He was divided between acting and sound design, but knew that theatre arts was where he belonged.

Wolfe majored in theatre arts and minored in computer science. After graduation, Wolfe toured with Bright Star Touring Theatre and performed in several shows. His favorite role was with The Spirit of Oz, a company that brings Wizard of Oz characters to events.

He has also worked with Southbank Theatre Company and Nettle Creek Players and acted in several independent short films. He continues to sound design professionally. Most recently he designed BardFest’s Titus Andronicus. He frequently returns to Earlham as a contracted sound designer; his most recent show was The Further Misadventures of Martin Hathaway: Shipwrecked Off Heramathea’s Cove.

Wolfe regularly auditions for opportunities and supplements his work with freelance coding. He is considering moving to Chicago or New York, bigger theatrical pools.

“Acting is not an easy profession,” he says, “and there can be a lot of setbacks, but it’s what I love to do.” Story by Kelsey Mackey.

Trio of Earlham Fulbrights

Three graduates from the Class of 2024 have been selected for prestigious Fulbright scholarships for the 2024-25 academic year.

Meg Lyczak, a peace and global studies major, and Diana Guzman Rivera, a sociology-anthropology major, were awarded Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistantships to Colombia and Mexico, respectively.

Mary Jo Easley, a global management major, received the Fulbright Graduate Studies Award. The scholarship supports Easley’s enrollment in the University of Toronto-Mississauga master’s degree program in sustainability management.

The trio add to Earlham’s proud legacy of producing outstanding global ambassadors that meet the purpose of the Fulbright program, the flagship cultural exchange program from the U.S. government.

Since 1991, 42 Earlhamites have been selected for scholarships from Fulbright’s U.S. Student Program.

GUZMAN

“Team Hyphen” advances Quaker Leadership

As the preeminent Quaker seminary in North America, Earlham School of Religion seemed a natural fit to establish a hub for current Quaker leaders to gather, learn and grow. Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Pathways for Tomorrow program, that vision is becoming a reality.

After receiving the grant in 2021, ESR Dean Gretchen Castle began the search for a leader for the newly established Quaker Leadership Center. She found not one, but two: Della Stanley-Green ’90 and Andy Stanton-Henry ’18, or “team hyphen” as they’re sometimes called, share the role as codirectors. They see their intergenerational collaboration as an example of the types of collaborations needed to move Quaker leadership forward.

“Our experiences differ and complement one another — and in spite of our different backgrounds, we quickly found things we had in common, including two mentors and multiple friends,” says Stanley-Green.

Since coming into their roles in 2022, the QLC co-directors have worked to establish a wide range of programming designed to benefit Quaker leaders, and those leaders could be anyone who takes responsibility in a local meeting, Friends church, yearly meeting or Quaker organization. They also welcome those interested in concepts of Quaker leadership to participate, whether or not they identify as Quaker.

“Our experiences differ and complement one another — and in spite of our different backgrounds, we quickly found things we had in common, including two mentors and multiple friends.”

—DELLA STANLEY-GREEN

“The thing that’s unique about this initiative over the other seminaries that received grants is that the Quaker notion of leadership and ministry is much more expansive,” says Stanley-Green.

From author interviews, workshops, sandbox conversations, visitations and events that have featured speakers such as writer and activist Parker Palmer and novelist and activist Anne Lamott, team hyphen has kept busy. They’ve hosted two

Quaker Leadership Conferences thus far, with the 2024 event drawing more than 70 attendees from 17 yearly and unaffiliated meetings.

Stanton-Henry authors regular blog posts on the QLC website, and the pair just wrapped up a five-session series on Quaker trustee training that was so well-attended and well-received, they’re already planning a continuation.

The QLC hosted a Heart of Peace lecture in September and will host the annual ESR pastors conference in October.

Stanton-Henry and public minister Windy Cooler ’21 will also co-lead a series on public ministry.

Looking ahead, team hyphen hopes to continue to amplify the good things that are already available to Quaker leaders, while also identifying and filling gaps through trainings and events. ■

Story by Jen Gose

more online

Stay in the loop with QLC events by subscribing to the center’s newsletter at esr.earlham.edu/qlc, or by contacting them at qlcoffice@earlham.edu.

Andy Stanton-Henry and Della Stanley-Green are co-directors — “team hyphen” — at the Earlham School of Religion’s Quaker Leadership Center.

EARLHAM SCHOOL OF RELIGION

JUSTICE JEWELRY

Will Alderfer built a jewelry business based on precision, fine design, inclusivity and close interaction with folks along the supply chain.

By Bill Engle

Asthe owner of W.R. Metalarts in Brattleboro, Vermont, Will Alderfer ’11 likes to say his business and his life are based on the principles, training and relationships he has made, many while at Earlham College. The values at the core of the company’s mission — such as sustainable and ethical sourcing of gemstones and metals, and providing jewelry options outside of the wedding industry — separates Alderfer from the principles that are often missing in mass production, traditional products and origin of materials.

“We put people first, celebrating and supporting inclusivity and fair wages and offering an abundance of support for the people we work with,” he said. “I want people to be seen and celebrated.”

As a metalsmith and jeweler, Alderfer works with a small team to create jewelry that celebrates all experiences and all identities. His training is in silversmithing and bronze casting and his emphasis is on direct customer interaction, acknowledgement and celebration of all types of relationships and a strong commitment to those impacted by the sourcing and production process.

“There is a strong environmental piece for me,” Alderfer said. “We source directly from miners and try to build relationships with folks at all levels of the supply chain. We want to support them directly so we have more transparency and positive impact for people, especially those most impacted.”

But the ethics don’t stop there.

strong feeling of community, and I appreciated that.”

His metals professor was Nathan Jones. “We connected right away. He became a lifelong mentor. I learned so much from him,” Aldefer said.

After graduation, Alderfer worked in bronze foundries in Virginia and Boston, concentrating on learning the intricacies of fine art sculpture and public art. “It was truly a great learning experience,” he said.

His work with suppliers and miners confirms his shared beliefs in ethical mining practices and ethical sourcing.

“Going inside a gold mine is amazing,” he said. “We just love connecting with folks, making those direct relationships with miners and stone cutters.”

“We put people first .... I want people to be seen and celebrated.”

“The other thing that is important to me is our queer identity and queer inclusivity,” he said. “I identify as polyamorous and that reflects our values in business. Lots of the jewelry industry caters to only the heteronormative, traditional relationships. We celebrate all relationships and especially those that are more non-traditional and queer. It is so important to have safe spaces for this. We don’t have men’s rings and women’s rings. We just have rings.”

— WILL ALDERFER

Alderfer studied blacksmithing in high school and continued that education at Earlham where he was a double major in metalsmithing and human development and social relations. His training in bronze casting and silversmithing are particularly strong. These endeavors started him on a path of working precisely and thinking deeply. It instilled a concern for the environment, for human rights around the world, for fair trade and social justice issues.

At Earlham, Alderfer found connections and relationships that have sustained him.

“It just felt like home when I went to Earlham,” he said. “I had a

In his production process, Alderfer uses fair-mined gold to have greater social and environmental impact, and to support gold that is mercury free. Gold mining is one of the leading polluters of mercury in the world, leading to tragic and dramatic poisoning of people and contamination of the land.

He has visited the fair-mined gold mines in Colombia where he sources gold for Metalarts as well as other jewelers.

“By going into the mines, meeting the miners, we can meet all the people in the supply chain,” he said. “We can talk to them about how they care for the land and what is important to them, principles like reducing contamination and reforestation.

“By building those direct relationships we know what they use in their process and how we can support them,” he said.

Alderfer continues his commitment to change his industry by serving on the advisory board of Ethical Metalsmiths, an organization of caring buyers, jewelers, designers and suppliers whose goal is to inspire responsible practices through education, connection and action.

Metalarts is also built on customer relations as Alderfer and his team work closely with clients, transforming dreams into pieces of jewelry. He offers a personal, collaborative relationship to define and celebrate his customers through jewelry.

Alderfer started his business in 2016 and his then partner, Rosie Nevins-Alderfer ’11, joined him full time in 2018. He has been inspired, supported and sustained by Earlhamites during the eight-year growth of the business.

“For me it is about relationships, and Earlham has been part of that,” he said.

Nevins-Alderfer helped him set up the business online, which became hugely important during the Covid pandemic. She left

more online

Find out more about Alderfer’s work at wrmetalarts.com.

the company in 2019 to pursue her own career, but the more work Metalarts did the more requests came in.

“We both have different partners now but we still want to co-parent our kiddo in a supportive and loving way. Rosie was an important part of the company; she was hugely instrumental in elevating W.R. Metalarts to be a professional business instead of only a creative studio,” he said.

For Alderfer, the requests have never stopped.

“I told myself I’d get a job when the requests stopped, and eight or nine years later I’m still making rings,” he said.

He hired his first employee in 2020 and now has five, including two Earlham grads.

Vanessa Graham ’09 is the head metal caster for W.R. Metalarts. She has also started her own business, Old Hills Design Company, but enjoys her role at Metalarts.

“I love working for Will because my true love is the making process,” she said. “I love that the art I create is a collaboration with my coworkers and also the customer, and that I get to contribute to an heirloom that will live someone’s life alongside them.

“I also share Will’s ethics for accessibility and sustainability, and am happy to join him in contributing to a greater good in the industry,” she said.

Martin Moon ’13 is the head fabricator and stone setter for Metalarts. While at Earlham, Alderfer was a teaching assistant in Moon’s metals class and accompanied him on a May Term in Turkey.

“I received an incredible education at Earlham,” Moon said. “When Will asked me to join his team I jumped at the chance. Will has been very supportive of me in the many stages of my work. And I’m thrilled that our business is focused on making fine jewelry and doing it in a way that is supportive and inclusive to all people in the chain.”

The business has expanded steadily, doubling in sales in each of its first six years of existence.

The process of production Alderfer follows may be a bit slower and more costly, but he remains true to his belief in unique design and sustainable sourcing. He buys metals for his jewelry designs directly from certified fair-mined gold mines in Colombia and precious stones from small responsible initiatives and transparent operations in the U.S. It is an approach that has sustained him through current challenging times.

“We’ve seen kind of a dip in sales, which I contribute to the political climate right now,” he said. “People are spending less on jewelry at the moment. But we’re still doing a lot of wedding and engagement rings.”

The company has thrived on the ability to adapt and produce.

“Any idea that anyone has we can convert that into jewelry,” Alderfer said. “We remake jewelry. We’ve made things with people’s ashes, with pets’ ashes, with someone’s parents’ or

grandparents’ rings. We repair or remake the design that people are excited about.”

A new line of production is in divorce rings.

“We’ve done a bunch of them,” Alderfer said. “We’ve found that people may want closure and may want to honor that relationship moving forward.”

All along his journey, Alderfer has stayed in touch with Earlham friends who ask him to create wedding and anniversary rings and jewelry for them.

Kristen Georgia ’10 worked for Alderfer for a short time and had Metalarts make the wedding rings for her marriage to Andres Guzman ’10

“It was important that Will and his team make our rings because Earlham is a huge part of my story and Andres’,” Georgia said. “We met at Earlham. I know all the materials that went into the ring, and I was intimately involved in their design and creation.”

Georgia said Metalarts has since made two rings for her and “has made rings for almost every member of my family.”

“I think the reason I refer friends and family to Will is that I’m very appreciative of his process and how inclusive and ethical he is in the work he does,” she said.

Alderfer said he never tires of making connections through his work.

“We are always excited to connect with people,” he said. “If people want to know about this process we are always happy to share more about it and build direct maker-client relationships. That’s why I am never bored and never dread going to work. It is a dream come true.” ■

Photos courtesy W.R. Metalarts

From Stream Beds to Screen Gems

Bruce Carter ’77 navigated a big life pivot from rock and mineral hunting to film and TV producing.

AVID MINERAL COLLECTOR Bruce Carter ’77 has always loved the beauty, mystery and otherworldly strangeness of gems and minerals. The stones’ unique colors, shapes and shine are forged not in the sterile confines of a laboratory but by the earth’s own heat and pressure, which combined with time and a little bit of luck makes something miraculous.

In some ways, Carter’s own life trajectory mirrors the gems he has sought since he was a boy growing up in rural Connecticut — tantalizingly close to the quarries where he looked for treasures such as beryl, tourmaline and garnets. Rather than follow a traditional career path, the geology major’s life has been marked by adventure and serendipity, twists and turns that led him from remote field exploration in places such as the Rocky Mountains and Alaska to the sets and sound stages of Hollywood, where he has worked for nearly 40 years as a film and TV producer.

Although the wilderness of his mineral-seeking youth seems an odd precursor to the sets for productions he has worked on including Benny and Joon, Anaconda, X-Files, Grimm, and Pretty Little Liars, for Carter, his first career smoothly led into his second. His past experiences have given him the tools he needs to be a successful line producer and production manager, roles responsible for managing the day-to-day logistics of a movie or series.

Line producers come with varying approaches and skills, and Carter is one of the best, says David Greenwalt, producer, writer and director for Grimm, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and X-Files.

“The great ones, they solve the problems, and then they don’t tell me about all the problems they solved. They make it work,” he says. “It’s a tough job, and you need to be strong, but it’s also a very diplomatic job. Bruce is absolutely a great creative and line producer, and a man who’s kind of like a chess player. You’ve got to know warfare. You’ve got to know seduction. Bruce has had a life. I like a well-rounded, fully-lived individual. He certainly is that.”

By Abigail Curtis

An early passion

When Carter was a young boy, he was fascinated by the cluster of clear quartz that his older sister kept atop her bureau. It wasn’t rare or expensive, as gemstones go, but there was something about it that fired his imagination and triggered a lifelong interest in minerals. He began collecting interesting specimens wherever he could find them: streambeds, rock piles, even a neighbor’s stone walkway before he learned that was not a wise idea. At 14, he had his first exhibit in the town library.

“My passion is minerals, and I’ve been looking for them my entire life,” he says.

Later, he added a second passion: basketball. His skills on the court helped get him accepted to Earlham with a scholarship to boot, although he still has some doubts about how the admissions office made its decision.

“I have an identical twin brother, and he was a National Merit Scholar,” Carter says. “To this day, I think Earlham thought I was him.”

Despite the brotherly imposter syndrome, Carter brought academic strengths to Indiana with his interest in minerals and gemstones. No matter how he got accepted, it was a good fit, at least as soon as he figured out some essential skills.

“It took me two years before I learned how to study,” he says. Even so, he found college to be a place where he could thrive.

“Earlham saved me,” he says. “If I’d gone to a place that was sterner, or expected a fully-grown academic individual, I’d have been doomed. But Earlham was an environment that was just so pure. In my whole four years there, I’m hard pressed to think of a bad social experience. Everybody was so great.”

Crew members from Tales (1992), with Carter (back row left) and director Richard Donner (center); director Ron Howard (left), Carter and actor Gedde Watanabe in Gung Ho (1986); Carter (back row) with the drone unit from Stumptown (2019).

At work in the field

The summer after graduation, Carter got to work surveying and taking soil and rock samples in eastern Washington state for a uranium exploration company. Other opportunities included mapping energy reserves in New Mexico and logging drill core samples in southern Illinois’ coal country. His shifts were long, the work was hard and soon he decided that he needed to get his master’s degree.

So Carter enrolled in the University of Montana in Missoula and later took a summer job with a railroad company doing geologic mapping, a useful skill for a budding geologist.

Three days after his post-thesis party, Carter was in a floatplane heading to an ice-bound lake in the Talkeetna Mountains in southern Alaska where he was part of a small exploration field crew. It was beautiful, rugged country, and he spent three seasons working there. His final season became memorable when an ancient de Havilland Otter seaplane went down after picking up the crew for the return home.

“The crest of the range approached, but just as salvation seemed at hand, with a series of coughs, the engine died,” Carter said in a 2021 article in Rocks & Minerals magazine. “The pilot struggled fruitlessly to restart it… [we] had crested the ridge, but we dropped like a rock.”

The plane plummeted thousands of feet towards the endless green forest and a torrential glacial river far below. The pilot crashed on the river bank, and he, Carter, and the other passenger ran to escape the smoking plane. They spent two and a half days in the backcountry, surviving on a bag of frozen jumbo shrimp. After that, his passion for wilderness exploration, with its countless hours in little planes and even smaller helicopters, was sated. But his love of minerals continues unabated: Carter still has a collection he’s proud of and serves on the board of directors of the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks & Minerals in Hillsboro, Oregon.

A different kind of break

Carter’s break into a Hollywood career began as an extra in Ron Howard’s 1986 comedy satire Gung Ho. After that final Alaskan field season, he was working as an English teacher in Argentina when he learned that an American film company was looking for extras who looked like Americans. The producers took note of his ability as an organizer and offered him a job as an extras wrangler in Pittsburgh. He said yes, and with that bid adios to South America and his former life as a field geologist.

And as it turned out, his skills crossed over easily from one field to the next.

“Organization, support for a group of people who are moving regularly, air support, food, schedules, all of that was just insanely simple,” he says. “It was a matter of learning new names for the different pieces of equipment, which was actually easier than geology.”

When most people think of Hollywood, they tend to focus on the stars and directors who walk the red carpets and get much of the ink and attention. But Carter’s experience was in the nuts and bolts.

“Counter to everything you read about Hollywood, no other endeavor in the United States is more hierarchical and more demanding of respect for authority. Only the military,” he says. “My Hollywood is the group that makes the show.”

Carter started on the ground floor, perhaps even the basement, working as a second assistant director on a 1986 Roger Corman-produced B-movie Sorority House Massacre. “I was great friends with the killer,” he says. “We hung out a lot.”

His career got a boost when he was accepted to the Directors Guild of America apprentice program in Los

Carter crossing a glacial stream on a minerals exploration expedition in Alaska’s Talkeetna Mountains (1982).

actors Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia.

Angeles, a rigorous, prestigious experience that gave him on-the-job training on shows that ran the gamut — detective series, science fiction and more.

His career took off after that, and he worked on projects including Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride movies, the HBO horror anthology Tales From the Crypt and many more. All the while, the organizational skills and curiosity that he honed as an Earlham student and later as a geologist served him well.

“I was able to work on things that are interesting,” Carter says. “Every show I work on, I have to learn something.”

No business like show business

As he moved up in the production food chain to the positions of production manager and line producer, he learned how to navigate the Hollywood hierarchy and help manage multi-million dollar budgets and 100-plus person crews. He enjoyed the constant problem-solving nature of the work and prided himself on treating the people on the set well. Over the course of a day, he might interact with the network, the studios, the creative team and the crew members that get it all done.

Greenwalt, the writer, worked with Carter for years while shooting the fantasy police procedural Grimm on location in Portland, Oregon. “Bruce had a very important job. It’s a very broad skillset. You’ve got to know what everybody is doing. The hours can be brutal,” he says. “Line producing is where art and commerce meet. Let’s not forget, it’s a big show business. We all want to have success, and we all want to make the very best thing we can.”

The way Carter cares about people on his team sets him

apart from other producers, says Sara Beko, a producer and stunt professional who used to work as his assistant.

“He’s just a great guy to work for, and he’s really good at what he does. He’s really good at problem-solving, and also identifying things that will become problems,” she says. “He’s good at saving the studios money in places where they can, but also really good at being an advocate for the crew, which is super important. Just a great overall allaround guy.”

Having gained mastery over the demands of the movie set, Carter has grappled with challenges of a different sort. In 2021, he was involved in a car accident caused by a hitand-run driver. Over the course of the next year, injuries from the accident worsened, until he finally was unable to walk and also unable to continue working. It has been a dark moment, but he is starting to glimpse the light once more. He’s had both hips replaced, and, as of late spring this year, is finally able to walk again after two years of immobility. “If there’s a bright side, it’s that the past two years have probably been the worst for employment in the history of cinema,” Carter says.

Although he has been on hiatus for the last few years, he hopes to get back into the mix soon.

“Every show is going to be different, with a different set of problems, and every day is different. Sometimes amazingly different,” Carter says. “That’s why I love this business.”

After all, there’s no business like show business. ■ Photos courtesy Bruce Carter

Carter (center, back row) with the creative team on the set of Grimm (2003).

MAGIC TOUCH

London-based art conservator Olympia Diamond is part art historian, part detective and part ethicist in conserving the history and beauty of artworks.

By Abigail Curtis

For art conservator Olympia Diamond ’06, a day’s work might entail carefully removing old, yellow varnish to give new life to a 17th century Baroque altarpiece or pioneering an innovative strategy using seaweed-derived gels to repair a rain-damaged modern artwork.

The expert in paintings, who works as part of a small team of conservators for a private, Londonbased company, also will spend time thinking about how to ethically conserve a specific piece and strive to ensure that any repairs and alterations to an artwork are reversible or retractable. She’ll call on knowledge of sciences such as chemistry and physics but will also take a deep dive into the world of the painting by researching the artist, the medium and the circumstances of its creation.

No matter what, she’ll expect the unexpected — which is the challenge and the fun of her profession.

“It’s basically creative problem-solving every day. That’s what the job is,” Diamond said. “You’ve got to be open to lots of ideas because there’s no one way to do something in conservation.”

Diamond stands before Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s altarpiece Virgin and Child in Glory (1673).

Q&A

THE FOLLOWING IS AN EDITED Q&A WITH DIAMOND.

What is the main goal of art conservation? Is it bringing a piece of art back to its original condition or beauty? Broadly the idea is to bring something back, but in a way that has respect for its aging and what happened to it. A lot of what we do is figure out how to interact with these works ethically and do things that are reversible. I think the important thing is making sure that as much as you can, the artist’s intentions or ideas are the main thing that a viewer can pick up. Let’s say there’s a big scratch across the face of a central figure in a painting, and the paint is flaking off. If I stabilize the paint, the painting is stable and can be viewed. You can then decide if you want to in-paint, or retouch, in the

area of loss and only that area. We’ll use a specific type of paint that is completely removable from the original so when you look at it you read the figure as the first thing, and you’re not distracted by the damage. Then if you’re interested and got really looking, and see marks on the artwork, that’s its history. It’s an object. People forget that artworks, especially paintings, are physical, three-dimensional objects because you look at them on screens and postcards. But they are physical objects.

You were an art history major. Did you always know you wanted to become an art conservator? How did you get into this field? It was kind of random. After I graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn’t an artist, and I knew I

Diamond removing the yellow discoloring on the Murillo altarpiece.

didn’t want to do pure art history. And that stems from my courses at Earlham, because the degree is a mix of studio art and art history. Because you have that mix, you do quickly learn that there’s a disconnect in some of the art historical writing, where there seems to be a lack of understanding of the materials, or how artists work with materials. I just knew I didn’t want to go that route, and luckily got a job as the assistant soccer coach. I was able to be at Earlham, which was really nice, and I lived with some friends who were also kind of figuring life out, as it were. I wrote off to an art historian association and got a physical pamphlet for jobs in a career in the arts. There are so many different careers in the arts. I mean, it’s a huge, billion-dollar global industry. I was flipping through the pamphlet to get ideas, and conservation was there. I thought, oh, that sounds cool. In my head, I just sort of pictured Indiana Jones-type things, and I liked that you could work with the objects.

How does an art conservator look at an object? You look and then you start to piece it together. If I see this mark here, am I seeing it in other layers, too? And then you examine it in all different lighting conditions. We use normal lights. We use strong lights, raking lights to get the texture, so we notice if there are any anomalies that can give you clues. We look with ultraviolet light, which can tell you about the different makeup of materials on the surface. Infrared light can sort of look through the upper layers of paint to show you what’s happening underneath. And sometimes if you need to, you can use X-rays to see things painted underneath. A lot of the job is really looking, and being thorough, and trying to gather the clues to what happened.

What was it like to restore Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s 1673 altarpiece Virgin and Child in Glory, which had been cut up and rolled during the Napoleonic War, and is now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool? That was a really fascinating project. I worked on it for 10 months, and part of what conservation often does besides just physically treating the artwork to restore it is we’ll also research the materials and techniques of the artist. You do as much of these analytical techniques as possible before you do any intervention on the painting so that you could really know to what level you’re taking it down. And with historic paintings, they have probably had many previous treatments or things that happened to them over several hundred years. So you’re not only understanding the artist and the

subject, but you’re also trying to piece together what’s happened and who has interacted with it. It’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes. I did a million tests with different solvent combinations so I can make sure that I’m removing the varnish, and only the varnish. You can’t work like a robot. You have to keep paying attention and keep gathering visual information as you’re working and cleaning.

It must be so satisfying to find ways to solve problems like old varnish, tears to the canvas and other things that happen to paintings. It’s really fun because you start to see the colors come out, and you get to see a lot of the brushwork. That’s when you can really get a sense of the artist’s handling of details. That’s the most exciting. You have quite an intimate relationship with the painting for a period of time. And what’s really nice is getting to know something and seeing it change.

Do you have the same joy working with 20th century and contemporary paintings, as you do now as part of the team from Julia Nagle Conservation LTD? Working with living artists is incredible because you can help them show works in a way that they want to. You can talk to them and ask them questions. When I see marks, you can ask if it’s what they intended or if it’s something that happened later. You can have these conversations and record them so that the information gets passed down and people can make informed decisions about future treatments as well.

Is there a way that you could help people, even those without much of a background in art, to better look at art? You can appreciate art even if you feel you don’t know about the subject matter. Do you like the colors? Is it made of concrete? Has the artist stuck plastic things on it? The material history of it is hugely fascinating. In the early paintings, how did they even get those materials, and how did the painting get from one place to another? Certain pigments used to be almost impossible to get. To prepare the paints, people in the workshop were grinding them for days to get this fine texture. I mean, wow. We just get it out of a tube. But before, that was a major, several-year stage of an apprenticeship, just grinding pigment. I think the material history of the paintings is another way to access things, an easy, visceral way. ■

Photos courtesy National Museums Liverpool

In the gamelan room

A distinguished music program founded by Marc Benamou provides the building blocks for artmaking, scholarship, community and well-being.

BY JAKE STEPANSKY | PHOTOS

JOSH SMITH

BY

arc Benamou is a professor of music at Earlham College, a distinguished teacher and performer of Javanese gamelan, and a fount of knowledge on music and ethnomusicology. His laundry list of accomplishments includes publishing his book Rasa (an acclaimed and foundational gamelan text) and receiving a 2013 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the transcription, cataloging, indexing, editing and translation of lyrics found on 500 commercial cassettes of central Javanese gamelan music.

During a conversation in the summer, Benamou and I spoke about the gamelan, the gamelan community at Earlham and the intense inner calm that comes from performing together. As two decades of Earlham music students know, a conversation with Marc Benamou is the perfect gateway to gamelan.

The road to the gamelan

During our Zoom call, Benamou sat on the floor, surrounded by a vast and varied array of bronze percussion instruments. Benamou is immensely proud of the collection — one of the most robust and complete anywhere outside of Indonesia — and exudes a profound sense of calm among these sacred instruments.

Gamelan, however, refers to more than just a collection of instruments: It is also the music that is performed on them and the people who perform that music in community with one another. Even more specifically, the gamelan is a musical performance ensemble that originates in Java, Indonesia, featuring percussion instruments mostly crafted from bronze and tuned to two specific scales (slendro tuning and pelog tuning) and the singular and trance-like music that is played on those instruments, which often accompanies all-night performances of Indonesian shadow puppetry and dance.

Benamou is a generous and expert caretaker of the gamelan in all its forms — the instruments, his students, and the rich musical and cultural traditions of Java.

But his ethnomusicological journey did not begin with the gamelan.

As an undergraduate music major at Oberlin College in Ohio, Benamou was serious about music. At the time, “music”

in an academic setting meant the Western written tradition, featuring essentially only white male classical composers. Although Benamou’s undergraduate program allowed him to explore the classical music that he loved, it did not provide “an atmosphere where one could feel comfortable if one wasn’t totally at the top of your game — a complete fanatic who spent hours a day practicing and was comfortable playing in high pressure situations,” he said. Benamou had long lived between cultures. His father was French and Jewish – mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic — and his mother was Anglo-German American. He grew up in Michigan, Vermont, Paris, and is bilingual — French and English.

During his junior year, a friend invited him to a gamelan rehearsal and, unsurprisingly given his background and inclination towards expanding the boundaries of his own understanding, something clicked. Finding himself compelled by just about every aspect of the gamelan, Benamou quickly realized that he wanted to understand everything behind the music — beyond the notes and the rhythms — and he was excited to learn that he would be able to do so in a significantly less cutthroat context.

“Learning to play gamelan music for me was a process of unlearning everything I had learned,” Benamou said. “I loved being challenged in that way — having to rethink everything I knew about how music was put together.”

Building the Earlham gamelan

After developing his teaching and performing practice over several decades, Benamou was hired into a tenure-track professorship in the music department at Earlham. From the jump, he knew that bringing a gamelan ensemble to campus would meaningfully enrich the lives of Earlham’s music students — but he also understood the need to move slowly and start small so as not to impinge too heavily on the existing orchestral ecosystem.

Benamou founded a small and informal Javanese choral ensemble called larasmadyå. The repertoire combines choral singing — his area of expertise — with a rhythmic foundation created by frame drums called terbang and a set of tubular bells. The larasmadyå was a hit.

In the summer of 2003, Benamou traveled to Java to purchase (with his own money) a relatively inexpensive slendro gamelan set (made from brass instead of the traditional bronze) and

borrowed a pelog set from Oberlin. For several years, the newborn gamelan ensemble would practice and perform on something borrowed and something of Benamou’s. The gamelan ensemble, too, was a hit.

Two years later, Benamou spent a sabbatical year in Java. Knowing that finding and acquiring a high-quality multi-instrument gamelan takes a great deal of hands-on on-site negotiation — you may need to go to the maker’s house and drink tea, for instance — he wanted to make the most of this rare opportunity. He asked Earlham’s then vice president for finance Dick Smith to earmark $20,000 for the purchase. When the go-ahead came through, Benamou embarked for Java. The making of the one-of-a-kind Earlham gamelan had begun.

or linguistics, but quickly fell in love with the art program and, soon thereafter, with the Javanese gamelan.

It’s important to note that every gamelan in existence is sacred and singular. Each instrument is given a name and is understood to have a spirit.

One foundational example is the gong — arguably the most iconic symbol and feature of Javanese gamelan culture, and one that is often familiar to Westerners, making it an easier entry point to gamelan for the uninitiated. Gong, it turns out, is a Javanese word. The instruments are forged in a ceremonial process that, Benamou said, can be quite spiritually charged and requires high-level skill. Traditionally, a gong maker would fast for a week before beginning the process.

“You’re dealing with really fundamental elements of the world and the cosmos,” said Benamou. “You’re disturbing the earth to extract the metals. You’re using fire to melt them down. You’re using wind to fan the flames, and you’re using the brute force of a hammer that’s coming down and hitting that molten metal in a specific way. And when the gong is finished, you put it into water. You’re getting in touch with some really powerful forces.”

The gamelans at many other Western institutions can only approximate some of the sounds and instrumentations that are foundational to Javanese gamelan practice in Java. In contrast, the Earlham gamelan includes instruments rarely seen outside of Indonesia — a testament to Benamou’s efforts to painstakingly accrue instruments of the widest variety and the highest caliber.

Gamelan

in the snow

“In the winter, I’d walk from my house across campus, and I’d pass this old condemned building, and you could hear the instruments resonating outside of the building,” said ethnomusicologist Oriana Filiaci ’11. “I thought: This is wild. I never thought I’d hear this music in the middle of snow flurries and snowflakes. I was so proud to be Javanese. I was so proud to be Indonesian.”

Filiaci grew up first in Indonesia and later in the U.S. She arrived at Earlham intending to major in international studies

“Having grown up in and being Javanese myself, I felt super at home with the way Marc taught and led the ensemble,” she said. “He was very, very traditional, even more traditional than my current teacher here in Hawai’i. For example, they don’t use notation at Earlham — they learn everything by mind and by heart — and that offers a much more authentic, traditional, and deep way of connecting to the music and each other.”

After Earlham, Filiaci applied to graduate programs to further study gamelan music, and she looks back fondly on her time in the Earlham gamelan program in large part because of how it helped shape her worldview beyond the gamelan.

“Being rooted in traditions, grounded in traditions, in your culture and ancestry, can help you understand how to be a compassionate human being when you’re dealing with things like warfare, climate change, genocide, all of the different injustices that we face,” she said. “Marc is so good at talking about these things in a way that is relevant even to Western college students in Indiana.”

Community

through gamelan

For Neon Guzmán Delgado ’24, the Earlham gamelan was a space for untangling big questions about connection, community and culture.

“Marc’s pedagogy is unique,” they said. “He is so dedicated to teaching you how a Javanese musician would think about gamelan — and that includes all these different philosophical concepts. He doesn’t explain them as philosophical, but they’re concepts that you still have to grapple with.”

“It was central to me rethinking the way I interpret pretty much everything,” said Guzmán Delgado, who chose Earlham because of Benamou and the ethnomusicology program, and double-majored in music and in peace and global studies.

This idea that the gamelan was itself a kind of social organism — a collective that becomes a whole — recurred in my conversations with ensemble members, who shared that studying

with Benamou transformed their understanding of what it meant to be part of a collective.

“The gamelan ensemble is a single organism that can only function when people are attuned to each other,” Benamou said.

Filiaci echoed this: “You show up to a gamelan, to an ensemble, and that particular instrument was crafted, created, forged in tune with the other instruments in that ensemble — the one organism that is that one ensemble.”

Understandably, the gamelan community — at Earlham and internationally — is tightly knit. Sarah Wilks ’15, an ensemble member who stumbled upon the gamelan in a shared storage space while a member of the percussion ensemble at Earlham, sees this tight-knit nature as core to performing the deeply complex music: “If you’ve never been a part of the gamelan and you see them playing, it looks and sounds very confusing, and some parts look almost impossible to learn, but with a lot of patience and practice, it’s doable. It’s exciting to see all of that come together. You develop a small community because you’re possibly the only ones in Indiana doing this activity, struggling together.”

This challenge draws all kinds of folks to the ensemble.

“There were people who had been musicians for years, and people who had never picked up an instrument in their life and could not play Western music to save their lives,” Wilks said. “Marc was always excited to take in non-musician students.”

Malik Barrett, an assistant professor in the math department at Earlham and current member of the gamelan ensemble, was one of those non-musicians.

“The gamelan ensemble is a single organism that can only function when people are attuned to each other.”

— MARC BENAMOU

Marc Benamou

Learn more about Earlham’s gamelan from professor Marc Benamou and his students at the QR code.

“The fact that we have such a great instructor like Marc at an institution like Earlham really calls attention to the unique experience that one could have here, how disparate things are brought together, where someone like me in the math department is sitting down with someone like Marc in the music department,” said Barrett.

Well-being through music

When I asked Benamou to reflect on why he teaches and plays gamelan, he paused.

“I wish I were really confident that I was doing something that I knew was really helping the world,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder about that. I believe what I’m doing is contributing positively to the world, but sometimes I see other things that need to be done in the world and think: Ah! Maybe I should be doing that instead.”

That self-reflection is one quality that makes Benamou such a beloved teacher. Though he has immersed himself in an

extremely specific corner of the musical world — learning every note and story and cultural practice and historical fact and figure — he understands the importance of situating his work in the context of a wider world.

“It’s fair to say that the Earlham music department is somewhat unusual in the degree to which they really try to act according to the principle that all musics are worthy of study,” he said. “We do feel that our students come out of here with a respect for all different kinds of musics in their DNA.”

This openness allows students to better achieve the other desired effect of a life in gamelan: a profound tranquility and inner peace.

“There’s something almost trance-like about it when you’re playing it,” said Wilks. “You do have to pay attention to where the piece is going and what you and the other members are doing, but it’s very calming when it goes right. It’s tranquil.”

“Gamelan music is music that says: ‘All is well with the world,” Benamou said. “When you are in the presence of gamelan music, you are in the presence of well-being.” ■

Museum guard

A devastating flood closed the highly respected Stanley Museum of Art in 2008. Art historian and community advocate Lauren Lessing led the charge to re-open it 14 years later.

By Ray Mark Rinaldi

When Lauren Lessing ’91 took over as director of the Stanley Museum of Art in 2018, she knew it would be the most challenging assignment of her 25-year career.

But the job came with an irresistible opportunity, one that few arts administrators are offered during their working lives: She could oversee the construction of an entire new museum building from the ground up. The Stanley, on the University of Iowa campus, came with a 50-year legacy as one of the most prominent academic art institutions in the country. This was a chance to lead its mission — brick-by-brick — into the future.

Make no mistake, the Stanley was at the lowest point of its storied history when Lessing arrived in Iowa City. The original museum building had been closed for a decade, since June 13, 2008 when the staff got word that a devastating storm was overfilling the banks of the nearby Iowa River and would soon be sending flood waters toward campus. The order was to evacuate.

No one was prepared. Engineers had spent decades directing the flow of the river, confident the region could stay dry during the worst of times. Turns out, they were wrong.

“People thought nature was under control,” Lessing says. “And they built a brutalist, single-story art museum low on the banks of the river, 30 yards from the edge of the water.”

Museum workers responded quickly, making a plan to remove thousands of art works from the museum’s galleries and storage areas. The entire campus community came together for an urgent extraction effort that saved nearly all of the university’s treasures.

That short-term moment of relief turned into years of turmoil as the university struggled with how to reopen the institution. It is a tale that Lessing has told many times as part of her fundraising efforts for a new building.

Other structures on the river side of the campus — Hancher Auditorium, the Visual Arts Building and the Voxman Music Building — were completely destroyed. They have since been replaced with new facilities largely funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which covers losses during natural disasters.

The art museum, built like a concrete bunker to house important objects, was only partially damaged and did not qualify for rescue money. Years of lawsuits filed by the

Stanley Museum patrons in front of Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943).

university against the federal government to win compensation failed, despite the fact that the old building was suddenly worthless. The structure, along with all of its precious contents, were uninsurable due to its location in a place that could forever flood again.

“The college threw its hands up and committed to building a new museum,” Lessing says. Soon after, they offered her the top job.

The new director’s mandate: Take all of that disaster trauma, all of the bureaucratic frustration, all of those dashed dreams and wasted years and transform them into a world-class museum, refreshed and ready for the decades to come.

For Lessing, it was a perfect moment. “I took the job because I always wanted to build something,” she says.

Lessing had spent a lifetime preparing for the days ahead. Her academic credentials were solid. She earned her undergraduate degree in fine art from Earlham College in 1991. She followed that with more studies at Indiana University Bloomington where she earned a master’s degree in library science, a master’s in history of art, then a Ph.D. in history of art.

Her resume included stints working as a historian and librarian at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Just before her current appointment, she spent a decade as a curator at Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, overseeing both academic and public programs.

Lessing and the university’s advancement team worked feverishly to raise the rest, convincing the college that the only way to get over the financial finish line was to start the project early so donors could see what they were asked to support. The school agreed and the building broke ground in 2019.

“That was a leap of faith on their part, and they were reluctant to do it. But it had been, at that point, over a decade that we had been waiting, and donors were thinking it was never going to happen,” Lessing says. “I think people needed to see that commitment from the university in order to give — and it did the job.”

The construction phase brought its own challenges. Another major storm — an inland hurricane known as derecho — hit Iowa City in August of 2020. That caused major delays.

Then there was the work of rounding up and installing the museum’s 40,000 objects that had been sent off-site during the flood. Many were at the Figge Art Museum in nearby Davenport, Iowa, which had held, and temporarily exhibited portions of the collection. The rest had to be gathered from storage facilities scattered across the region — during the coronavirus pandemic.

The new Stanley Museum of Art opened to the public on August 26, 2022, 14 years after the original museum closed.

In many ways, the museum was unchanged, regaining its role as a showplace for the university’s esteemed works. The

“I’ve always thought that museums are libraries. They are just another kind of library.” — LAUREN LESSING

Interestingly Lessing brought along another set of skills that few arts administrators possess: She has experience as a public official, winning elections to municipal government boards in both Prairie Village, Kansas, during her time there, and in Waterville Maine, while she worked at Colby.

And there was a side story motivating her to help put the Iowa museum back on track. As the university’s press materials proudly pointed out at the time of her hiring, Lessing “grew up in southern Indiana, and her parents — a painter and a sculptor — were both students of Ulfert Wilke, the founding director of the Stanley Museum of Art.”

That background came together in service of moving the new, $50 million building forward. She was an art expert, understood how government bureaucracies function and had mastered community outreach.

Among her first tasks was raising money. The university had committed $25 million toward the project and promised to start construction after private benefactors pledged the remainder. To that end, local philanthropists Richard and Mary Jo Stanley had offered the crucial first gift — $10 million that also gave them naming rights to the project.

collection is steeped in 20th century abstraction, touting wares by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Max Beckmann in particular, along with perhaps it most prized possession, Jackson Pollock’s 1943 masterpiece Mural, which was donated to the university by art impresario Peggy Guggenheim in 1951 (and toured globally during the long shutdown). The university also has deep holdings of African art — the University of Iowa was the first school in the world to offer a doctorate degree in African art history.

In other ways, the institution was reborn. The fresh, 63,000-square-foot facility, designed by Kansas City-based BNIM Architects, is a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled box, clad in dark brick and designed to filter in just enough natural sunshine to keep its interior light and airy while remaining a secure place for the delicate contents inside.

Unlike the old museum, which was meant to be a jewel case holding precious objects that visitors admired from a distance, the new Stanley is first-and-foremost an educational tool for the university, intended to be used hands-on in support of the hundreds of classes the school offers each year in art history and instruction. That required making space for classrooms, arranging storage on-site and within easy reach, and cataloging to make

every object accessible to researchers on campus.

“I’ve always thought that museums are libraries,” Lessing says. “They’re just another kind of library.”

Along with their reverence for the museum’s past and a respect for its present function, Lessing and her team considered its future potential. The structure itself is designed to be flexible and wired for whatever high-tech changes come along.

“Who knows the way that climate change will affect museums, the way that artificial intelligence will affect museums, the way that changes in higher education will affect museums?” Lessing says. “We can do a certain amount of planning in anticipation of that.”

She has developed a collection plan to expand the museum’s holdings, which like many museums that got their start during the 20th century, has an overabundance of objects made by artists who are European and male. Lessing wants to change that over time so the museum better serves a body of students that has evolved to be diverse and global. “It’s very important that they be able to see themselves reflected in the collection,” she says.

One of her first acquisitions as director was a threedimensional, stoneware work by Simone Leigh ’90, who has represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. The curator and the artist overlapped during their time at Earlham and were even part of a group show there. Lessing studied graphic design, printmaking, sculpture and other subjects while getting her first degree — before moving over art history in graduate school.

That shift seemed natural to her longtime friends and Earlham alums David Weis ’93 and Canan Akers ’93. They met Lessing shortly after she left Richmond for Bloomington. She was dating their classmate — and Lauren’s future husband — Uri Lessing ’92, who was a year behind her at Earlham. Lauren Lessing visited her alma mater frequently and the two

couples would go on double dates.

Weis recalled an outing the foursome took to the the T.C. Steele Historic Site in nearby by Nashville, Indiana. Lessing already knew about Steele, one of the region’s first Impressionist painters. “Lauren just kind of broke into art historian right there as we were going along on the tour,” says Weis. “She was really into that already.”

Lessing kept her academic ties to Earlham. Early in her professional career, she returned to the college to teach art history courses. Several of her students from that time followed her into the museum world.

Among them was Sarah Hezel ’97. She has worked numerous museums jobs and serves as vice president of design and exhibits at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

Hezel says she had a deep interest in studying art history at Earlham, but the subject was new to her and she held doubts about devoting her studies to it full-time. Lessing made it all feel natural. “It was just great to have this young professor who was teaching a course that I desperately wanted to take, who felt instantly like a kindred spirit,” she says.

Hezel describes Lessing as “wickedly smart and really tapped into current art-history thinking and different approaches to the subject matter.”

There was also an element of fun to the learning. “Because she’s so smart, she’s also funny,” Hezel says.

Lessing credits Earlham for instilling both a deep drive to succeed and a dedication to serving the public in a variety of ways. Growing up, she was eager to attend college, but her artist parents did not have the means to fund her higher education. Earlham gave her a scholarship that made it possible. That opened up opportunities she had not imagined and directed her life choices — personal, professional, civic — in profound ways.

“Throughout my four years at Earlham, there was very much an emphasis on education as an investment in young people, who were expected to go out and change the world,” she says. “I took that very seriously.” ■

All photos courtesy Stanley Museum of Art.

above: Fantasy Coffin — Fish (2017) by Eric Adjetey Anang top, right: Lila Katzen’s sculpture Oracle (1974)

RIOT OF COLOR AND TEXTURE

Photographers Marcel

Pardo Ariza and Liliana Guzmàn have distinct and unique voices in their work. So what do they have in common? The dedication, creativity and community building they learned in college.

By Marin Orlosky

IN A NEW YORK CITY GALLERY hangs an oversized image of a pigtailed young woman crouched in contemplation, a faint pencil-sketch saint’s halo circling her head. Next to her, two blue-faced figures gesticulate dramatically while floating through a star-studded orange void.

In San Francisco, holding watch over a cluster of photos is a portrait of a trans rights activist in a bright red dress and multicolored flower crown standing proudly in front of a wall of googly eyes, as if surrounded by whimsical angel eyes.

These artworks transform the galleries into a riot of color and texture.

The photographs of Marcel Pardo Ariza ’13 and Liliana Guzmàn ’16 don’t simply hang on a wall. They meet the viewer with an intensity that insists upon being fully seen and reckoned with. They immerse the viewer in light, color, and texture — frequently the light, color, and texture of another human being’s skin, captured at a scale that is somehow both intimate and larger than life.

While these two emerging artists do not know each other, their combined impact to elevate and celebrate marginalized identities is starting to be recognized, as they further develop the artistic sensibilities they first discovered during their undergraduate years at Earlham College. Ariza, a Colombian-born trans man, won the 2024 San Francisco Pride Creativity Award for outstanding artistic contribution to LGBTQ communities and is working on a new exhibition, set to open next year, focused on uplifting and celebrating trans migrant experiences from the Global South. In response to the current U.S. rightwing anti-trans political movement, Ariza says they want to amplify “the voices of those who transformed to be themselves.”

Guzmàn, who is also Colombian and was raised in the U.S. — she is the daughter of Earlham professor Rudolfo Guzmàn — won the 2023 Rhonda Wilson Award through the Klompching Gallery in New York City. As part of the award, she received feedback from her mentor Debra Klomp Ching as well as from a panel of 19 decision-makers in photography who reviewed her work at FotoFest 2023. Guzmàn is applying the lessons from this feedback to her expressionist mixed-media series Next To Myself, which has been touring in galleries around the country.

Detail from After Touch (2021), a suite of photographs by Ariza.

Ariza and Guzmàn both draw upon influences from their childhood experiences with Catholic symbolism and ritual, harnessing the traditional iconography of holiness to honor their chosen subjects: self-portraits and depictions of Latinx women for Guzmàn; members of the LGBTQ and trans communities for Ariza. Both artists also intentionally display their works on a grand scale, using gallery spaces in much the same way that churches use large representative art for visual storytelling.

Guzmàn says the larger scale of her prints elevates women’s bodies physically and conceptually: Her photos hang so the viewer is either confronted by them at eye-level or stands slightly below them to experience all of the details of the image. “I wanted to make people really look at these women,” she says.

In 2011, Ariza, who majored in art at Earlham, took a blackand-white photography class with Walt Bistline (who retired in

2023). Students were given an assignment to emulate another artist’s work, and Ariza chose to emulate a queer photographer they admired by photographing a local queer couple. Both the resulting photographs and the process of creating them were transformative. “I really enjoyed creating a level of communal intimacy with the subjects,” they say. “I just love that people were down to create something together. ”

Guzmàn similarly discovered the joy of the creative process as a photographer through her early investigations of the artform at Earlham. She first took an Introduction to Photography course through the college’s program for high school students to explore the college experience. She quickly fell in love with the analog processes of film photography — particularly learning to develop her own film in a darkroom. While she spent her childhood documenting her lived experiences through journaling,

Marcel Pardo Ariza PHOTO

scrapbooking and drawing, in addition to taking photos and videos, she most strongly gravitated towards photography because, unlike drawing or painting, it provides a “sense of the real world…with an almost tactile quality.”

“Of course you can distort things in photography with lighting, digital editing, things like that,” Guzmàn says, “but essentially, the photograph is a historical document. What’s in front of you is in front of the camera.” At Earlham, encountering the manual processes of working with film photography added another dimension to her appreciation of photography’s “realness.”

“All of these things were so physical and so tactile,” she says, “I really loved that part of photography with a film camera.”

Ariza and Guzmàn built upon this spark of creative discovery throughout the rest of their undergraduate years, not only through deeper exploration of the camera as a powerful tool for expression, storytelling and documentation, but also through studying the humanities. They both cite JoAnn

Martin’s courses in the departments of Sociology/ Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality as having profound impacts on broadening their perspectives.

Ariza was particularly struck by discussions Martin facilitated while teaching post-colonial theory. “We were engaging with deep ideas that to this day are still impacting my creative process,” they say.

Guzmàn was struck by the films shown in Martin’s courses, which impressed upon her the way visual imagery was harnessed by historically significant social movements as a powerful tool for expressive storytelling. Ever since that experience, she has continued to find a wealth of visual inspiration in cinema.

Both Ariza and Guzmàn further broadened their perspectives through faculty-led experiences on- and off-campus.

Guzmàn, who majored in French, says Professor Karim Sagna’s study-abroad program, as well as studying language in general, provided her with rich opportunities to interact with a much wider range of people and the artworks of their respective cultures.

“It’s really been this extremely impactful educational base and foundation for who I am as an artist now,” she says, “I’m so thankful that I have that. I just don’t think I could have gotten to make the work that I do without taking all of those different classes, seeing all of those films, reading all of these materials and having discussions with professors and peers.”

While participating in the New York Arts Program, an off-campus opportunity, Ariza bonded with fellow student artist Sucia Urrea over shared experiences, interests and Colombian roots, forging a deeply meaningful friendship that has also led to several creative collaborations over the years.

Ariza says the geography of Earlham’s campus served as a catalyst for both artistic and social

PHOTO BY DEBORAH NESS

Guzmàn’s Reflection (2021)

Liliana Guzmàn

experimentation. In contrast to busy cities such as New York and San Francisco, Earlham’s campus lends itself to taking artistic and social risks, they say. In this less urban setting, taking portraits of classmates fostered meaningful connections with many types of people on campus, even if they had nothing in common except where they were in school together. Earlham was also the first place Ariza felt deep validation for their identity as a trans man. The faculty support was life-changing, and it empowered them to continue pursuing a life of truly authentic expression.

After graduation, both artists’ journeys have led to creative expansion. Guzmàn deepened her knowledge of technical aspects of photography, such as digital processing, by completing a master of fine arts in photography at Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, at Indiana University Bloomington where she was entranced by the digital photography lab. While there, she began layering drawing on top of her photographic prints as a way to represent memories and to express the feeling of her memory of a place, instead of a more neutral physical representation. Drawing on photos allowed her to be “a little more poetic” than photography alone could.

Ariza has broadened their creative palette from photographic portraits to developing larger multidisciplinary art installations. “My practice is very rooted in my passion for architecture,” they say, explaining that their motivation to embrace additional art forms stems from photography’s limited command of space. They consider their multidisciplinary art installations to be “expanded images” that allow a single visual concept to fully transform an entire space.

They also shifted from a solo artistic practice to prioritizing collaboration. “Making art in isolation doesn’t motivate me,” says Ariza.

Creating with others is more energizing and is reminiscent of their growing up in a large, multigenerational family. Such creative collaborations have become a vehicle for building a “found family” type of artistic queer community, working alongside others to first get to know them better, and then use public exhibitions of their installations to collectively raise the visibility of all artists involved in the work. That idea extends to include interactive events and activities at exhibitions — particularly to welcome new audiences to art spaces for the first time. Their ultimate goal is to create “an inclusive space…where everyone feels safe and seen, can create something together and is free to fully experience pain and pleasure.”

While Guzmàn maintains a solo artistic practice, she is similarly community-minded in exhibiting her artwork. She mentions that a primary motivation for pursuing exhibitions of her artwork in many different places is to foster opportunities for her to have conversations with visitors to those galleries, and sometimes also offer artmaking workshops to those visitors.

Both artists’ faces light up whenever they speak about connecting with new audiences for the first time. They are excited to keep finding new ways to build those connections and welcome more people into the art spaces that house their works. “I always want my work to feel like a big party,” says Ariza — and everyone is invited. ■

Guzmàn’s St. Jude Tree (2021)

During a Show Me The World workshop, students learn the e-commerce process for the coffee business.

To educator Samantha Lurie Carroll, a bag of coffee means more than a beverage to enjoy with breakfast. It also means raising a generation of worldtraveling, barrier-breaking high school students.

By Kelsey Mackey | Photos by Tracy Jane Weidel

SHOW ME

SUCCESS

Samantha Lurie Carroll ’08 joined Teach for America after graduation, moved to St. Louis and started making an impact. She was assigned to Vashon High School as a special education teacher and stayed with the district for 11 years. It was during Carroll’s participation in a “school swap” that the idea for Show Me Costa Rica Project, an international travel program, was imagined.

Carroll and her students visited one of the most affluent high schools in St. Louis. During their visit, her students noticed a difference between offerings at this high school versus their own. They were especially intrigued by a flier advertising an international trip.

The students told her that traveling abroad was a dream they had. “And I told them about my first international trip to Senegal, Africa, when I was a student at Earlham College and the impact it made on me,” she said.

Her students advocated for the same opportunity and participated in several fundraising opportunities such as car washes and working concession stands at local sporting events. They raised $25,000 to take the first group of students from Vashon to travel internationally.

Carroll and 10 students traveled to Costa Rica, and the program was born.

From Costa Rica to the world

Show Me Costa Rica flourished in the community and the program expanded to new travel locations and partnered with various school districts.

“This was all grassroots,” Carroll said, “just from hardcore fundraising and community support.”

But Carroll wanted to find stable funds and to expand the experiences offered to her students. To that end, she partnered with Sylvester Chisom and Boahemaa AduOppong as co-founders of Show Me the World project, which provides under-resourced communities access to educational experiences at home and abroad.

Adu-Oppong, who was a doctoral student studying ecology and ecosystems when she met Carroll, expanded STEM teachings to high school students and developed the STEM curriculum for Show Me The World.

Chisom supported Carroll from very early on, as an entrepreneur whose family members attended Vashon. He donated car wash supplies, and helped Lurie establish Show Me The World and their coffee endeavors.

“Together, we co-founded Show Me The World and are working as an educator, scientist and entrepreneur to elevate the mission and vision defined by the community,” Carroll said.

The coffee brand

During one of Show Me Costa Rica’s trips, Carroll gathered bags of coffee as gifts to supporters from the community back home. Chisom was struck with an idea as Carroll loaded her arms with bags of coffee.

“That was really an aha moment for us,” Carroll said. “If people wanted this coffee so bad, what would it look like if we were to sell the coffee as our fundraising arm? This would allow the proceeds to go back into the country through tourism when we travel.”

And the coffee branch of Show Me The World was born.

Show Me The World sells its brand of coffee to fundraise for international trips, but this program is more than an elaborate fundraiser. It also teaches students entrepreneurship skills and lets them flex their artistic muscles.

Students prepare for their Show Me The World international trip all year, with curriculum and workshops to study their destination and to grow the brand. Students sell bags of coffee at the local farmer’s market, pitching their coffee and experiences to shoppers. Students are also involved in designing merchandise that is sold on Show Me The World’s website, funneling their experiences into digital art and clothing design.

Students have been involved from the very beginning in launching the coffee venture and growing the brand.

Show Me The World started the coffee line with Costa Rican coffee sold in a brown kraft paper bag. Now, the brand has expanded to a bag designed by Upstart Food Brands, a company that helps start-ups establish brand

presence, and single-origin beans from Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru.

At the beginning of their partnership, Upstart Food Brands came to Missouri to hear students, parents and teachers share their stories and perspective, face-to-face. They designed the new coffee bag with community voices in mind.

This elevated branding allowed Show Me The World to grow from supporting 10 to 28 students the first year the coffee brand was launched, spreading the impact and breaking more barriers.

Show me the impact

In 2019, Show Me The World was recognized as an official nonprofit organization. In 2024, the program continues to grow and find support for its mission. Next year the program will be supporting its largest group of students with 100 planning to travel internationally, said Carroll.

Show Me The World has supported more than 150 students to achieve their dream of international travel. And having this program offered makes a huge impact on these students’ relationship with school, learning and their future.

Teacher Lauren Bowers joined Show Me Costa Rica as the

co-lead at Vashon High School in 2017. She was intrigued by the program and quickly started noticing that the kids involved with the Show Me program were excellent, dedicated and creative students.

“They were the valedictorians and salutatorians,” she said. “As a teacher, I could tell that these kids were putting in the extra effort.”

Bowers recalled a time that a student in the program stopped coming to school and nobody saw them for weeks. One of the co-leaders of the program called this student every morning to make sure he was at school—to hold him accountable for his own future.

“We saw a huge turnaround in his grades and attendance,” she said. “If this program wasn’t there, that student would have stopped coming to school altogether.”

Show Me The World encourages students to prioritize their schooling, because it is through their education that they have these opportunities. Carroll enjoys every second of watching this shift in priorities happen in real time.

“It’s the best experience and feeling that I could ever have as an educator,” she said. ■

Samantha Lurie Carroll leads a family meeting at University City High School in St. Louis for a new cohort of 20 students who will travel to Costa Rica.

HOMECOMING AND REUNION WEEKEND 2024

OCTOBER 17-20, 2024

There’s still time to register for this year’s Homecoming and Reunion Weekend festivities!

Whether it’s been a few years or a few decades, there’s something special waiting for you.

ACTIVITIES INCLUDE:

• Alumni-Student Connections Social

• Alumni Awards

• Homecoming Bash

• Classroom experiences

• Home athletics games

• Reunions for class years ending in “4” and “9”

• So much more!

Can’t make this year’s event? Join us in future years from Oct. 9-12, 2025 and Oct. 15-18, 2026.

Register today!

Scan the code QR or go to earlham.edu/homecoming!

Congratulations to our 2024 Alumni Award winners and Hall of Fame inductees!

Distinguished Service Award

Margaret Lechner ’72

As a student, Margaret participated in the inaugural August Wilderness excursion. After graduating, she designed the Southwest Field Studies program and joined the Earlham faculty in 1974 to lead the program. She later served as the director of the Wilderness program from 1982 until 2000 and was an associate professor of biology for 25 years. Margaret has continued to play a pivotal role working with Wilderness alumni and faculty leaders leading up to the program’s 50th anniversary in 2021.

Outstanding Young Alumni Award

Team Magic Bus, Classes of 2015-17

Iman Cooper ’15, Leslie Ossete ’16, Sonia Kabra ’16 and Wyclife Omondi ’17 were the grand prize winners of the 2016 Hult Prize, the largest student competition for the social good. Using $1 million in start-up capital earned during the competition, the team piloted a new text messagebased ticketing system called “Magic Bus” that has optimized public transit in Kenya and other countries in Africa. Now called BuuPass, the venture has won accolades in Africa and around the world, including the Bosch Africa Smart Mobility Start-up Award.

Outstanding Alumni Award

Roberta Anderson Ballard ’61 and Phillip Ballard ’61

Roberta Anderson Ballard, Ph.D., and Phillip Ballard, M.D., Ph.D., graduated from Earlham in 1961 and married in 1962. They both specialized in neonatal and perinatal medicine; Phil in basic laboratory research and Roberta in clinical care, administration, and teaching. Together they have published multiple scientific papers and have been honored with two major Pediatric Academic Societies awards: The Maureen Andrews Mentoring Award, and the Mary Ellen Avery Neonatal Research Award.

Earlham College Athletics Hall of Fame

Brandon Miller ’06

Brandon Miller was a four-year member of the Earlham men’s basketball program from 2002-2006 and is currently eighth on the all-time scoring list for Earlham with 1,471 points. He was twice named to the first team All-North Coast Athletics Conference, and was awarded team MVP twice (2005, 2006). In his junior season, Miller led the Quakers in points, rebounds, assists and steals. He repeated in his senior season while also leading the squad in blocks.

Jacob Naegeli ’12

Jacob Naegeli won the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference championship meet, and was named Heartland Collegiate Athletics Conference’s Runner of the Year in 2011. Naegeli also earned HCAC first team honors and NCAA All-Region recognition twice in his career with the Quakers in 2010 and 2011. In track and field, Naegeli was named All-HCAC four times across three different events. Jacob was selected as the Earlham cross country Most Outstanding Runner four consecutive years from 2008-2011.

2011-2014 Men’s Tennis

The Earlham College men’s tennis team won three straight Heartland Collegiate Athletics Conference championships from 2011-2014 with a record of 54-12 across three seasons.

2010-2012 Women’s Soccer

From 2010-2012, the Earlham women’s soccer team won three straight HCAC regular season championships with a combined 37-17-4 record.

Student-athletes abroad

Earlham’s men’s basketball team spent a week in Costa Rica in May as part of the Epic for Athletes program. Funded by Peg and Alan Scantland from the Class of 1974, the program helps student athletes explore sports in a different part of the world while deepening their intercultural communication and learning.

This year, the team practiced in the Costa Rica National Gymnasium and participated in friendly matches against local teams. They also volunteered at a youth-serving organization in the capital city of San Jose, went whitewater rafting and went on a crocodile safari.

“I feel like we’ve always been a close-knit group, but this trip has allowed us to get even closer,” Milan Kennedy ’26 said.

“One of my biggest takeaways is just appreciating the small things,” he said. “I feel like when we went to the shelter for the kids, that was definitely an eye-opener, realizing that we are fortunate — noticing and appreciating what you have now, and just kind of understanding that you are blessed to be in the situation you are in.”

Earlham’s volleyball team also traveled to Costa Rica this summer and the men’s and women’s golf teams traveled to Scotland.

Post-season berth

The women’s tennis program qualified for post-season play in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference for the first time since being reintroduced as an intercollegiate sport on campus in 2022. The Quakers ended their season with five wins and a sixth-place finish in the HCAC standings. Two Quakers, Maddie Cherry and Payton Dugan, were named to the All-HCAC team. In addition, Dugan was named HCAC Newcomer of the Year.

Makaden Bodie (left) and Milan Kennedy practice in the Costa Rica National Gynasium.

Earlham women’s tennis team gathered during a contest against Franklin College in spring 2024.

Bananas with a side of Fries

While Max Fries ’23 ’24 M.Ed. was on winter break during his senior year, the star outfielder on the Quakers baseball team was also honing his craft as a social media influencer with a goal of helping other players improve their skills and stay in shape.

“I started posting on social media to give me something fun to do, as well as hopefully make an impact on other baseball players,” Fries said. “Within the first week, I had a video get over 500,000 views and I thought, ‘maybe I’m onto something here.’”

After a recruiter discovered his TikTok profile and saw potential for more, Fries signed a contract with the Savannah Bananas, the popular touring professional baseball circuit dubbed by ABC News as “The Greatest Show in Sports.” Fries is a member of the newly created Visitors Team, a developmental pipeline for the Bananas and spent the spring and summer traveling to events around the country.

“Being a part of the Savannah Bananas organization has been a dream,” Fries said during a threegame residency at Victory Field in Indianapolis this summer. “This is an organization unlike any other.”

In Banana Ball, players perform choreographed

dances while wearing kilts. Games are capped at two hours. Even foul balls caught by fans count as outs.

“We truly buy into the motto ‘fan’s first’ because nothing is really about you in this. That’s what I love,” Fries said. “It’s a collaborative effort where, yes, we are competing for something, but we want to give the fans the ultimate experience, the ultimate Banana Ball experience. This might be their first time at a game and it’s the greatest show in sports at the end of the day. We want to make sure we bring that to the table.”

Even with his impressive collegiate baseball resume and savvy social media persona — Fries has more than 150,000 followers on TikTok – his journey to the Bananas may have never happened without an unusual idea from his mom.

“My mom is a big fan of the Savannah Bananas and she’s always wanted me to play for them,” Fries said. “She told me, ‘You’re a great player, you’ve got the talent but you need something different. Everyone’s got something on the Bananas that

See the sights and sounds from the Savannah Bananas’ three-game residency in Indianapolis by scanning the QR code.

“We truly buy into the motto ‘fan’s first’ because nothing is really about you in this. That’s what I love.”

— MAX FRIES

they bring to the table that’s not just baseball related.’”

Her idea? Riding a unicycle. “I laughed, and I said, ‘Alright, Mom, I’ll give it a shot,’” said Fries.

Just months after incorporating footage of himself learning to ride a unicycle on his Tiktok, he was offered a contract. It’s the first contract of many he hopes to sign with the organization that has had 200 straight sell-outs and captivated fans across the country.

“My goal is to hopefully be in this organization for a long time,” Fries said. “I think we’re just getting started with Banana Ball and starting to grow. We like to talk about how we’re kind of like babies learning to walk. It’s obviously a great thing right

now and it’s growing but there’s a lot of great opportunities in front of us.”

Head Earlham Baseball Coach Steve Sakosits isn’t surprised by his former player’s success.

“Max’s ceiling is untapped,” Sakosits said. “Whatever it will be in baseball will be because he worked hard to achieve what it is. He will have zero regrets when he hangs up the spikes whenever that will be due to knowing he gave it his all.” ■

Story By Brian Zimmerman

Photos by Kate Young

Max Fries of the Savannah Bananas’ visitors team at a game at Victory Field in Indianapolis, Indiana, earlier this year.

Softball scores with revitalized program

Head coach Stacey Goyette was hired in 2022 to revive Earlham College’s softball program after a 29-year hiatus. The 1993 team, the last to play for the Quakers, saw its season cut short after its roster dipped to just eight student-athletes.

“When I was hired, I didn’t know much about Earlham, its conference or the competition. I had no NCAA Division III experience,” says Goyette, who was a pitching coach at Division I Butler University, a powerhouse from the Big East Conference.

While Earlham had plans to build a new softball stadium, thanks to a major gift from Randy ’73 and Melissa Sadler, Goyette had to recruit student-athletes with only the promise of being a part of something new.

“I was blessed to spend a year traveling the country to recruit softball players who wanted to come to Earlham,” Goyette says. “The new facility really wowed them, but it wasn’t built yet. They couldn’t see it. Everything was going to be new. I told my players that we would spend the year learning together. I didn’t want to base success on wins and losses. I just wanted them to learn from their mistakes and focus on being the best humans they could be on and off the field.”

“Quakees,” a year-end celebration of Earlham Athletics modeled after ESPN’s ESPY Awards. Softball was named the 2023-24 Team of the Year, and Goyette was crowned as the college’s top coach. Cooksey took home two awards, Newcomer of the Year and Moment of the Year, a nod to her record-breaking first trip to the mound.

“We definitely felt welcomed and supportive by everyone in the Earlham community, especially for being new on campus,” Cooksey says. “More and more people showed up to watch our games as the season continued. Many of the players and coaches from other teams on campus reached out to us to wish us luck and to congratulate us when we made the conference tournament.”

The team accomplished that and more in an inaugural season marked by outstanding accomplishments, including a sweep of the University of Olivet before a home crowd.

“Opening the season at home in our new stadium with two wins was huge for our confidence,” says Morgan Cooksey ’27, a pitcher from Williamsport, Indiana, who opened the season with a school-record 16 strikeouts. “We knew we were good as individual players, but none of us knew how we’d play as a team. That moment made us believe and set the tone for the rest of the season.”

Last year’s team — 16 first-year students and one sophomore, seven short of a full roster — won 15 games and qualified for the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference post-season tournament. Two players — Cooksey and shortstop Bo Shelton ’27 — were named to the HCAC All-Conference Team with only one year of experience in intercollegiate sports. They also racked up several honors at the inaugural

“Opening the season at home in our new stadium with two wins was huge for our confidence.”

— MORGAN COOKSEY

As the Quakers prepare for year two, Goyette is going back to basics as she continues to build out her roster. Eight new first-year students and one transfer are joining the program, giving the coach a full roster of 24 players for the first time.

“Just like last year, I’m going to start out by throwing all of the players into a cauldron,” Goyette says. “That way I can compare apples to apples and give everybody a fair evaluation. By the time we start playing the teams in our conference — these are the most important games of the season — I’ll have a better idea of where everyone fits.”

Cheer on softball at Homecoming

Ellie Bewley Stadium, the home of Earlham softball, will be officially dedicated during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend, on Saturday, Oct. 19. Bewley ’69 is a longtime member of the College’s Board of Trustees. Following the dedication, Earlham softball will play two exhibition matches.

Regular season play begins in March 2025.

Sometimes that means putting established players in new and uncomfortable roles. “Stacey did a great job of really pushing us to reach our potential last season,” says Cooksey. “For me, it was about becoming more than just a pitcher and contributing to the lineup as a batter. It helped us see who fits together and where in the lineup. It helped us build an optimal lineup for the season and be prepared if there were injuries.”

The season will also be the debut of the Bud McCollum-Earlham College Baseball Hitting and Pitching Lab, an indoor practice venue for Earlham’s softball and baseball programs. The facility is a result of a major gift from the Sadler family, and additional support from Charlie and Esther Krieger and a multiyear fundraiser by the Earlham Baseball Program.

“Earlham continues to provide a wonderful and nurturing environment for our programs,” Goyette says. “These facilities are among the best in college sports. Our players are just in awe. The best part of this experience is the group of people I get to work with every day. We’re such a diverse group of people that come from many different walks of life. We all believe that we are building something that is bigger than any of us as individuals. To have these people on this journey with me, working toward a common goal, it’s a special feeling.” ■

Story by Brian Zimmerman

Watch the sweep!

Relive softball’s opening sweep of Olivet University in this reel on Instagram by scanning the QR code.

Celebrating the Class of 2024

Graduates from Earlham College, Earlham School of Religion and the Earlham Graduate Programs of Education received degrees during a ceremony on Saturday, May 11, 2024, at the Druley Performance Gymnasium in the Athletics and Wellness Center. Gene Hambrick ’73 (left), Earlham’s senior executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity and executive in residence, gave the Baccalaureate address, Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, the night before.

CLASS NOTES

Send us your news > The deadline to submit entries for the next issue is December 1, 2024. Go to earlham.edu/classnotes to submit yours, or write to alums@earlham.edu. Submissions may be edited for length of other editorial considerations. This issue of Earlhamite magazine includes notes and obituaries received by June 1, 2024.

2011

Oriana Filiaci

Oriana still lives in Hawai’i since graduating from Earlham’s Art and Classics departments. She currently works for Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children and volunteers for other health organizations around the islands. Oriana completed graduate school at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2015, and has been working as a performing artist, ethnomusicologist and scholar for over a decade. She has now expanded her career into integrative medicine by studying allopathic medicine for an MD and traditional la’au lapa’au. Oriana is trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy and is on the Advisory Board of Clarity Project to promote legal, expanded access to psychedelic-assisted therapies. She loves to surf, freedive, garden and traverse the mountains to botanize and gather medicine. Oriana is forever grateful for her community of mentors and friends at Earlham College, in Hawai’i nei, and her family and ancestry in Indonesia and Italy.

2009

Mollie Wegerson

Mollie continues to live and work in Chicago. She has worked at a small Montessori school for nearly 15 years and is currently the elementary drama teacher there. Recently her coworkers successfully voted “yes” to unionize, making her school one of the few private Montessori schools to do so.

2005

Conor Madigan

Conor Madigan is the winner of the 2023 Rick Demarinis Contest judged by MacArthur Fellow Manuel Muñoz. His winning story Finch’s Cow will be published in Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts and included in its 20-year anthology. More of his stories and essays are available at conormadigan.com.

2003

Sean O’Reilley

I missed our 20-year reunion, but we welcomed Atlas Cruise O’Reilley to our family Oct. 5, 2023. Our daughter Sage turned 3 this past March, and we made it back to Indianapolis and took a day trip to Richmond, Indiana, so the kiddos could see the campus. While back in Indiana, I was able to see Adam Fowler ’03, Brian Bennett ’05, Jon Miller ’05, LaRon Henry ’07, Leo Sparks ’04 and Tyler Stewart ’06. My wife Michelle and I are coming up on our sixth year living in Ventura, California, and we absolutely love the West Coast. I hope all Earlhamites near and far are all living their best lives! EC Pride!

2000

Shai Wise

I recently accepted a new role with the Jewish Community Relations Council in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the associate director for programs and alliances. This

is an exciting role creating relationships and building connections across communities and creating programming for communities throughout the Milwaukee area and Wisconsin. Beyond this, my wife and I keep busy with our four kids (15, 15, 10 and 7) as well as our dog.

1994

Tobey Layne

It has been a long road to get here, but in August of 2024, I will be open for business as Lamination Station. I will be wholesaling my pastries to local coffee shops initially, with the aspiration of a brick-and-mortar location in the near future. For those who recall, I spent a fair amount of time baking in the dorms and the co-op. That led me to a career in baking. If you happen to be in the Bellingham, Washington area (or headed up to Vancouver, British Columbia via I-5), give me a shout.

1991

Anna Van Doorn Robertson

On Sep. 5, 2023, we lost my stepdaughter Katy Lynagh to triple negative breast cancer. She was 33. A nurse, a mom, a sister, a wife, a daughter. She fought harder than I ever thought someone could fight to stay with her children, Jonathan 5, and Madison 2. It was not to be. We are shattered.

Sam Tarlin

Sam Tarlin ’91 and Sarah Miller ’92 continue to live in Boston, Massachusetts,

1920s

LOOKING BACK Streetcar service

When the City of Richmond extended streetcar service west of the Whitewater River in 1895, Earlham became a stop. This picture is from the 1920s.

and have recently become empty-nesters. Sam is the General Studies principal at an Orthodox Jewish school, and Sarah is a school counselor in a Spanish-English bilingual school in Cambridge. One of our sons is learning Torah in Yerushalayim, another in Philadelphia, and our daughter is married and working in Baltimore (and the parent of our beautiful 2-year-old granddaughter). Over the past year, we’ve enjoyed connecting with Earlhamites who have joined us in praying for peace and security in Israel.

1988

Erika Steffer

After 12 years as a librarian in business and government and 23 in executive recruitment in the U.S., Canada and internationally, I recently launched a career coaching and planning practice. If I can assist you or someone you know in getting unstuck and finding solutions, I invite you to contact me. Details at stefferandpartners.com.

Rebecca Kuder

Rebecca Kuder’s Dear Inner Critic: a selfdoubt activity book is now available from Literary Kitchen. From the description: “Even if you’ve been living with insecurity all your life, today can be different. Dear Inner Critic offers a flashlight to guide you through the wilds of self-doubt. Between these covers you’ll find fun and creative strategies to quiet your negative self-talk. You’ll write, draw, imagine, demystify — and maybe even befriend — the inner critic. You’ll set boundaries and gain room for creativity and joy. Using ingenuity and self-care, these activities let you play your way toward creative liberation.” Rebecca’s novel The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is available from What Books Press. For information, visit www.rebeccakuder. com.

1985

Karen Tandy Taylor

I’m excited to share that my first poetry book was published in August this year.

Mothers and Other People is a poignant collection delving into themes of death, loss, estrangement, nostalgia and family. From the ache of unspoken words to the weight of unresolved conflicts, the poems in this collection delve into the emotional terrain of estrangement with raw honesty and vulnerability. Mothers and Other People invites readers on a journey of introspection and reflection, encouraging them to confront their own experiences of loss, estrangement, identity and the complexities of family relationships. Here’s a link to the book itself and some additional information: www.finishinglinepress. com/product/mothers-and-other-people-by-karen-taylor

1983

David Fiellin

In January 2023, David Fiellin ’83 was named Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, where he uses the skills he learned in Humanities daily. In 2024, David was also elected to the

CLASS CHAIRS

For class chair contact information, please visit earlham.edu/classchairs

The chairs serve as goodwill ambassadors and are encouraged to help organize class reunions and other alumni gatherings.

American Academy of Physicians, which was founded in 1885 as “an honorific, elected society of America’s leading physician-scientists who exemplify the pinnacle of pioneering and enduring, impactful contributions to improve health.”

1977

Phillip Moore

After being retired for a couple years, I have become the chief financial officer for the City of Flint, Michigan. It is a challenging position that comes with a great staff. The City of Flint is making a comeback.

1975

Esther Wheeler

Hard to believe our 50th reunion is coming up next year. Sean True ’76 and I moved to Cape Cod two years ago. I’ve officially retired, and Sean is getting there. We enjoy our smaller house and neighborhood surrounded by woods and birds, with good access to beaches. After the usual cool raw winter and spring (courtesy of the ocean), summer weather should soon encourage more visitors. We’re always happy to show folks around.

Philip Auerbach

As many of you know, I lived in and around San Francisco for 38 years. During the last six of those, I lived on a marvelous island city called Alameda. Since Alameda is in San Francisco Bay, I got to tell people truthfully that I lived on an island in the Pacific. In April 2021 and

now being delightfully divorced, I moved back to my home town of Philadelphia, which I’ve always loved and where most family members remain. My daughter got married that year and this February 2024, my wonderful granddaughter Lia was born. She and her parents live around 20 minutes from my downtown apartment. Professionally, I am working to rebuild Auerbach International, my translation firm which empowers companies, nonprofits and government agencies to communicate their value in 120 languages. I am also planning to start the nonprofit Uplift Foundation to provide programs, resources and automatic, no-application grants to enable nonprofits to serve their communities more effectively. Monthly, I also run a Zoom-based Interfaith Dialog Group, open to all. Evenings and weekends often involve concerts and plays, speaker events, nature excursions to city and countryside venues, museums, reading, walking, biking and mild hiking, lunches, dinners and talks with friends, travel, conferences and some EC events where it’s always enjoyable to see local alums. So far, no retirement, no new wife, and definitely no boredom. As class co-president, I graciously let Jeff May ’75 do most of the work, and he graciously gives me a lot of the credit. Very kind of him! Please let me know if you come to town. I give wonderful city tours, with or without the local high cuisine of cheesesteaks and soft pretzels.

1974

Jay Harker

Just for the record, I left Earlham in 1973. I kicked around after that pretty much through the ’70s and ’80s working several minimum wage jobs and living mostly in rented rooms. In the early ’90s, I went out on disability and have lived in a subsidized housing apartment since then. I became

schizophrenic in 1972. I am OK, I am doing pretty well, and I am not dead yet!

1970

Michael Selmanoff

As of June 2024, I will have worked as a Scientific Review Officer at the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health for 20 years, and in July, I turned 75. I’ve decided that now is a good time to move on to the next chapter in my life. Working for the advancement of science has always given a great deal of meaning to my life, and at the NIH, I have additionally been able to continue working on behalf of the institution that I value most highly in society, the university. Before working at the NIH, for 27 years I was a professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. There I taught physiology and neuroscience to medical and graduate students, and did NIH-funded basic biomedical research. I’m a neuroscientist and my research area is reproductive neuroendocrinology. My laboratory’s 60-odd publications focused on the hypothalamic GnRH pulse generator neurons, tuberoinfundibular dopamine neurons and GABA neurons that control luteinizing hormone (LH) and prolactin (PRL) secretion from the anterior pituitary gland. In the spring of 2024, I was deeply saddened to read of the death of one of my Earlham roommates, Paul Justman ’70. The last time I was in Los Angeles a few years ago, Paul and I reconnected over lunch and a tour of the Getty Museum. We hadn’t seen each other since our Earlham graduation, but we picked things up as if it were yesterday. His New York Times obituary in July 2023 highlighted his best-known movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Paul directed this documentary about Motown’s house band The Funk Brothers that played on more No. 1 records than

The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley combined. It played around the country after its release in 2002, followed by some touring by The Funk Brothers, getting the recognition overlooked in the ’60s and ’70s. It blasts off the screen like a heat wave, said Newsweek. If you haven’t seen it, it’s marvelous. It’ll put a smile on your face and happy in your feet.

1962

Carol King Friberg

My husband Robert Charles Friberg ’58 passed away at 88 in Tucson, Arizona, on May 1, 2022. I am presently enjoying the desert life with my daughter Julie Friberg and family. I have a family in Phoenix also.

Eleanor Merritt

In a previous issue of Earlhamite, Eleanor Merritt ’62 was falsely published as deceased. By odd circumstance, the obituary for the non-Earlham Eleanor that was published was for a woman born within three days of Earlham’s Eleanor Merritt with nearly identical biographic and geographic information. We’re happy that, in this odd circumstance, Eleanor is still alive amongst the warmth of her friends and classmates.

1961

Garry Thomas

Garry Thomas ’61, Connie Russell Thomas ’62, Roberta Anderson Ballard ’61 and Phil Ballard ’61 were all close friends at Earlham, and have kept up with each over the years, with numerous visits to the Bay Area and Ithaca. They wonder how common it is at Earlham for two erstwhile hallmates and housemates to marry two erstwhile hallmates and housemates. It was Phil who actually announced Garry and Connie’s engagement at the 1961 May Day dance. Garry returned the favor this

year by nominating both Ballards to be recipients of Earlham’s Outstanding Alumni Award, to be awarded at Homecoming weekend.

1960

R. Melvin Keiser

We are doing well amidst our pillstrewn landscape of older age. Now long retired after teaching 36 years in Religious Studies and English at Guilford College, we are active in our Swannanoa Valley Friends Meeting, working for peace and justice in Palestine/Israel, enjoying adult children living near (Megan and Christopher) and grandchildren now in

IN MEMORIAM

Alumni

2007

Nathan James O’Neill

1989

Bradley Starrett

1984

Wendell Brian McMillan

1979

Rick A. Stouder

1977

John David Bell

1976

James Benjamin Pentaudi

Gail Sherry Frazer

William “Bill” Hawxhurst

1974

or about to be in college (Christopher’s Jahniya and Ondessa Kiliru, and Megan’s Sophia and Sam Fairbairn), and still writing books. Beth’s (Elizabeth Bassett Keiser ’60) is Making Peace with Joy and Sorrow about Taha Muhammad Ali, an extraordinary Palestinian poet we met in Nazareth, and our travels among Jews and Palestinians in the so-called Holy Land. My Paths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths explores how far major religious thinkers have included personal experience as the basis of their philosophical reflections. We continue to feel great gratitude for Earlham, its caring transformative Quaker-based education.

John Talbot Nicholson

1969

John May

Roland Henry Woodward

1968

Linda Cripe

David Waller Chamberlin

Robert Michael Hass

1967

Anne Taft

David Lewis Hollander

1966

William “Bill” Adkins

1965

Arthur Ellison

1964

Frank Hammons

1963

Carol Allison Beane Eunice Reynolds Hassell

1961

Judith Carol Williams Burnell

1960

Penington “Pen” Wimbush

Rodney Young

Ronald Wesner

George Forsythe

1959

David Fenn

Steven Glock

1958

Ruth Reynolds

REPORTED BY

ART AND BIOLOGY

MAJOR NATHEN PECK ’24 >

In my work in ceramics, I aim to create points of connection with people and the outdoors. I use imagery and sculpture to inspire a feeling of familiarity which might lead you to smile and remember a moment of memory.

My work provides context for someone to step outdoors and relate to the stories that happen there. For them to be a part of those stories. These pieces come from my experience and my sense of home as they represent the magic that I feel when I am outside. They come from my memories and are brought to you by my hands. They do not live to be read in the way a paper would be, so they are three dimensional to allow you to walk around and step into my fondest memories.