{"id":130857,"date":"2020-02-13T15:05:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T20:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=130857"},"modified":"2025-03-03T14:42:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T19:42:39","slug":"three-days-with-art-and-arts-music-and-musicians-in-olin-arts-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/02\/13\/three-days-with-art-and-arts-music-and-musicians-in-olin-arts-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Multimedia: Three days with art and artists, music and musicians in Olin Arts Center"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the dedication of Olin Arts Center in 1986, the late Carl Benton Straub, then dean of the faculty, said that \u201cnone of us will ever know the countless moments of discovery and self-discovery which will occur in and around this place.\u201d<\/p>\n

We won’t know them all, but here are a few \u2014 images and sounds of artists and their art, musicians and their music, captured over three days in early February by Bates writers Emily McConville and Doug Hubley and photographers Phyllis Graber Jensen and Theophil Syslo.<\/p>\n

The home of the Bates College Museum of Art, Olin Arts Center also houses the Department of Music and the Department of Art and Visual Culture.<\/p>\n

\"Olin<\/a>

Dedicated in 1986, the Olin Arts Center has been a home to art and artists, music and musicians, who “cut through pretense and presumption to fresh, new beginnings.\u201d (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

The building features classrooms and faculty offices; practice rooms for musicians and art studios including a ceramics studio and kiln room; a slide library of digital and film artwork and photographic darkrooms; and the signature 300-seat concert hall.<\/p>\n

In the spaces of Olin, as Straub promised more than three decades ago, Bates artists and art, and musicians and music, will \u201ccut through pretense and presumption to fresh, new beginnings.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that, we begin:<\/p>\n

Wednesday, Feb. 5<\/h1>\n

Experimentation with Intent<\/h3>\n

If Bugs Bunny with his banjo or Bart Simpson with his skateboard seem so free and wild, the art that goes into their cartoon antics is anything but. <\/span><\/p>\n

This is clear from watching Carolina Gonz\u00e1lez Valencia, assistant professor of art and visual culture, show a class in Olin 321 how an animated film is made.<\/span><\/p>\n

8:48 a.m.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Olin<\/a>

Michael Hogue ’20 of Chicago works on a project before joining his classmates for an animation course taught by Carolina Gonz\u00e1lez Valencia, assistant professor of art and visual culture. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The course is \u201cAnimation II: Experimental Methods,\u201d part of the animation track launched by the arts and visual culture department when Gonz\u00e1lez arrived in 2016. The animation lab, a former painting studio that still has a rail around the walls to support canvases, is tucked up under the sloping art center roof. The ceiling lamps are off.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the eyes of six students, Gonz\u00e1lez stands in a pool of light at an animation stand. At the bottom of the stand is a brightly lit baseboard marked with a grid, and at the top there\u2019s a downward-aiming camera that can be moved up and down.<\/span><\/p>\n

9:21 a.m.<\/h6>\n
\"Olin<\/a>

Zhao Li \u201921 of Guangzhou, China, watches the animated short film Recycled\u00a0<\/em>in Carolina Gonz\u00e1lez Valencia’s experimental animation class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez is demonstrating the use of cutouts and layers in a technique called under-camera animation. On the grid, she has created a scenario from a drawing of two open windows and a few cutouts \u2014 a banana, a paper plane, a dancer.<\/span><\/p>\n

You know the drill: Gonz\u00e1lez snaps a few frames of the composition, which go into software called Dragon in an iMac. She moves something slightly and snaps a few more (the standard frame rate for animation is 24 per second). She creates illusions of distance by separating the visual planes with a sheet of glass, or by changing the camera height, or by substituting the paper plane with a smaller version.<\/span><\/p>\n

9:23 a.m.<\/h6>\n
\"Olin<\/a>

Carolina Gonz\u00e1lez Valencia, assistant professor of art and visual culture. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhen there are multiple things that I\u2019m moving at different times, I like to keep a log,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez tells the students, who will soon be creating their own trial animations. In essence, her message is to bring the methods of science to this art form. Restrict the variables, she says. <\/span>\u201cExperiment with intention. Don\u2019t move things in a random way.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She plays back the frames she\u2019s been recording, and a paper plane flies in one window and back out the other.<\/span><\/p>\n

9:47 a.m.<\/h6>\n
\"Olin<\/a>

Gonz\u00e1lez works at the animation stand. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u2018One Really Cool Detail\u2019<\/span><\/h3>\n

As they begin a visit at the Bates Museum of Art, education curator Anthony Shostak gives a class of seventh-graders from Lewiston Middle School two tasks as they take in the exhibition Miracles and and Glory Abound<\/em> by Pittsburgh artist Vanessa German: Come up with at least one question about the art, and find \u201cone really cool detail.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s plenty to choose from. German\u2019s work is immense, expansive, intricate.\u00a0The middle schoolers are quick to point out the details, and their feelings about them. \u201cThat\u2019s scary,\u201d one observes about a pile of plaster baby legs adorning one sculpture. \u201cThere are keys everywhere,\u201d says another.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

10:55 a.m.<\/h6>\n
\"Lewiston<\/a>

Lewiston Middle School student Michael Caron, 13, notices an unexpected part of a sculpture by Vanessa German: himself, reflected in one of the mirrors scattered throughout German\u2019s exhibition at the Bates Museum of Art. (Theophil Syslo\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

This field trip is a kind of \u201cfield work,\u201d says social studies teacher Jennifer Hudner. Later in the semester, the students will pick out a Lewiston landmark to personify. Hudner wants to show her charges that ordinary objects and structures can have great meaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis\u201d \u2014 Hudner gestures toward the whole exhibit \u2014 \u201chas a lot of stories to tell.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Museum education fellow Elizabeth Boyle gathers the students around the exhibit\u2019s centerpiece, a sculpture of a boat and its passengers. <\/span>The sculpture reimagines Emanuel Leutze\u2019s iconic painting <\/span>“Washington Crossing the Delaware<\/span>,” depicting all of the boat\u2019s passengers and the first U.S. president as Black women: <\/span>“LaQuisha Washington Crossing the Day Aware<\/span>.”
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Boyle explains the characters in the sculpture \u2014 including a blue figure personifying water \u2014 and challenges the students to think about the importance of depicting Black women as part of a story from which they are often excluded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Boyle says most tour groups catch recurring motifs like boxing gloves, keys, and mirrors. But German\u2019s sculptures are so detailed, the symbolism so layered, that visitors often notice things before museum staff do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Case in point: One student points out that LaQuisha Washington and the figure next to her look like a couple.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Practicing \u2018Path\u00e9tique\u2019<\/span><\/h3>\n
11:07 a.m.<\/h6>\n

The sounds of piano, a constant on Olin\u2019s second floor, mix with that of a vacuum cleaner running on carpet. Alek Zelbo \u201923 of New York City waits for a moment outside a practice room for his piano lesson to start.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Zelbo started piano about a year and a half ago, during a gap year before college. He took to the instrument so well that he hopes to major in music performance, as well as chemistry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s on his way to reaching that goal \u2014 Bates students can take applied music lessons for credit \u2014 with the help of Chiharu Naruse, an accomplished pianist and piano instructor who studied under renowned Bates pianist Frank Glazer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Vignettes from the Olin Arts Center practice rooms by Theophil Syslo.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n