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Graffiti Comes to Harris Though Harris will be the target of graffiti artists this Saturday, there’s no reason to call the police. The Graffiti Art Showcase is wholly legitimate and sponsored by the Pioneer Diversity Council. “We’re going to have Harris set up like an alley and have four different student graffiti artists doing 15 minutes of live presentation,” said Ki Harris ’14, President of the Pioneer Diversity Council. The Showcase is the Diversity Council’s year-end capstone event. Nick Hinojosa ’14 wanted to make the show themed around graffiti to dispel some of the negative connotations that the art form carries. “[We wanted] graffiti [to be a part of the show] because it’s a big part of the culture back home (Corpus Christi, Texas) and it’s something that Grinnell lacks,” Hinojosa said in an email. “Also, there are a lot of negative connotations about graffiti, it is often affiliated with gangs and tagging and it’s not appreciated as an art.” Various performance artists will accompany the artists as they paint. “We asked each artist to find a performance artist,” Hinojosa said. “There will be a guitarist, ballet dancer, spoken word [artist] and a DJ mix prepared by Will Jackson.” The theme of the event is GC Pride, but “it’s a surprise about how it’s going to turn out exactly,” Harris said. The showcase starts at 2pm this Saturday. “Everyone we’ve mentioned [the show to] is planning on going,” Harris said. “It’s going to be big.” Documentary Photography of Changing Times Draws Crowds Faulconer Gallery is currently housing the “1966 Yearbook Project” exhibition, a powerful compilation of images from Grinnell during the years 1965-1966. The yearbook was created as a social documentary of life on campus during a period of turmoil both on campus and in society at large. The idea for this historical publication to be turned into a gallery exhibit came from Kay Wilson, curator of the gallery, and Milton Severe, Director of Exhibition Design. In 2009, Henry Wilhelm, one of the photographers and compilers of the yearbook, received an email and immediately thought it was a great idea. The yearbook itself held so much history about how the college became the social justice oriented place that it is today. “The first was that we changed the name from Cyclone, because cyclone meant nothing to the outside world. So we established the name “Grinnell College 1966,” which were the two key things: where and when,” Wilhelm said. “We approached it as a documentary on college life and got rid of all the usual conventions. No posed senior pictures, no posed team or club pictures, and the whole subject of sports in this yearbook was a radical departure from what was usual at the time. Students really supported the idea and we sold more presubscribed copies than ever before in history.” Photos in the yearbook ranged from a meet and greet for first years before school started to men on north campus destroying pianos in a competition. The photos are beautiful, but equally, they contain a great deal of commentary on how the college functioned at the time. One aspect of focus was the way women were treated unequally by the college. There are images of people having to leave after being suspended or expelled for being suspected of spending the night with a person of the opposite sex. Students became angry and started fighting back against the sexist regulations, expressed in a photo of women at a meeting holding signs. “We thought of it as a historical book in a time of rapid change,” Wilhelm said. When it came to the actual publishing of the yearbook, Wilhelm and his fellow compilers encountered difficulty. The college was given the original compiling of the yearbook to review before printing and decided that there were multiple liabilities. “In reality, the college just didn’t want the yearbook to be published and it was, in a sense, banned. That was extremely upsetting to a lot of people on campus,” Wilhelm said. “It became very clear that the college wanted to do, but failed to do due to the copyright, was seize the book, probably bring in another editor to ‘sanitize’ it, to remove everything they didn’t like: drug pictures, students being suspended, comments about women, the whole thing.” Wilhelm and his fellow editors had help from an attorney alum and notified the college that they were in possession of stolen property by holding onto the yearbook. Although, even after getting the yearbook back, it was almost impossible to find somewhere willing to publish the book. All of the publishing companies were afraid of being sued by the college, due to the publicity of the conflict between college and yearbook editors. Twenty years later, Wilhelm was reminded of the yearbook and decided that it was time to have it published. “I thought, ‘Well, we should at least tell the college what we’re planning to do.’ If not any other reason, we need the names and addresses of all four classes from the alumni office. Then President George Drake heard through the grapevine that the class of ’66 was planning on publishing the yearbook, so he invited me over to the college to tell him what I’m doing,” Wilhelm said. “In less than five minutes George said, ‘Well this is a history book, we [Grinnell College] should publish it.’ I was astonished.” The yearbook was published in 1986 and the gallery now sports prints that have been digitally re-mastered from the original negatives. Students are encouraged to visit the exhibition and get a glimpse of Grinnell’s powerful history through beautiful photography. There is a station in the middle of the gallery that allows for students to print out any photo from the gallery. Donations are appreciated and the proceeds go to support preservation activities in Burling Library’s Special Collections and Archives and the Faulconer Gallery’s Permanent Art Collection. Student Salon to Open Friday The Annual Student Art Salon showcases works created by Grinnell students in the preceding year. It is organized by the students of the Art SEPC and designed by the staff of Faulconer Gallery, where it will open this Friday at 5 p.m. Art pieces are selected through a jury process and hung by Milton Severe, the Exhibition Designer of Falconer Gallery. The Grinnell College Student Salon will open this Friday with 28 works by 18 students. Photograph by Connie Lee “Traditionally a juror is brought from outside of Grinnell to select from submissions. Last year it was Gilbert Vicario, Curator of the Des Moines Art Center. The year before this was Jefferey Hamada, author of the art blog, http://www.booooooom.com/, ” said Nic Wilson ’12, a member of the Art SEPC. This year, the juror is Kathleen Edwards, Chief Curator of the University of Iowa Art Museum. Edwards will also be holding a Gallery Talk in Faulconer Gallery at 4:15 p.m. this Friday to talk about her strategy and selections for this year’s exhibition. This year was also the first year in which students submitted works electronically. “We got together with the Art SEPC and the Art faculty. Together they wanted to try [electronic submissions],” said Lesley Wright, Director of Faulconer Gallery. With the addition of electronic submissions, Kathleen Edwards had about 110 works to choose from. “Every juror usually comes out of it with a particular idea after looking at everything that particularly speaks to her. And good curators also look to put together an exhibition that has some sort of coherence, ” Wright said. In Kathleen Edward’s statement regarding the Student Art Salon, she says, “I see this curated exhibition of student art work coalescing around concepts related to the structures and functions of the human brain.” Any student is allowed to enter, even if they are not in an art class. It can be any student on campus and any type of artwork is welcome, such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography, or video. There are 28 works by 18 artists this year, so be sure to come support the art community this Friday. The Annual Student Art Salon begins at 5 p.m. Refreshments will be served and the awards will be announced at 5:15 p.m. Post-Industrial Landscapes Across from the Strand Theatre, between Lonnski’s Pub and Dori’s, Dani Radoshevich ’12 has installed her latest artwork in her apartment. The show opened on May 2 at 7:30 p.m. Radoshevich has been working all semester on her exhibition, Post Industrial Landscape, which is comprised of photos and paintings depicting and inspired by industrial buildings. “The project as a whole was inspired by industrial and post- industrial forms in the Midwest, mostly sourced from drawings and photographs I’ve done in St. Louis, some drawings from buildings in Grinnell and some imaginary forms,” Radoshevich said. Radoshevich’s apartment is situated at the end of a long, high ceilinged hallway. Before walking in, I saw that above the door were two windows. They had pictures of factory buildings projected on to them. The projection of photos creates a positive lighting for the factory buildings usually associated with long hours and tedious labor. “I focused on abandoned or defunct industrial buildings and forms, because something about these kinds of environments is so alien, because in general, factories and warehouses and other similar structures geared towards manufacturing feel so big and precarious,” Radoshevich said. “They’re very obviously not meant for the human form/scale.” Along the walls, juxtaposed to the projections, are large painted works of buildings and geometric planes.

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