The Williams Record (https://williamsrecord.com/category/arts/)
Selma Marchers Approaching Montgomery, Alabama, James H. Karales (American; 1930-2002). Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police this year, and as a response to the ongoing protests against police violence and institutional racism that continue to plague the United States and the world at large, President Maud S. Mandel sent out a statement to the College community, expressing the College’s solidarity with the protests.
This week, the Record profiled Jack Romans ’20 and Ben Mygatt ’20, the final artistic profiles of the year. Below are excerpts from all the arts profiles of members of the class of 2020 from the past two years.
“Exciting, colorful, relaxing.”
These are three words Isabel Bushway ’23 used to describe her crocheting obsession. She first learned to crochet in middle school, but quarantine has given her the opportunity to take her craft to the next level.
The end of each semester typically brings members of the College community to Spencer Studio Art Building to see work produced by students in studio art classes. This semester’s move to remote learning due to the COVID-19 outbreak bars the art show from occurring as usual, but the pandemic has not stopped student-artists from producing a wealth of work and a desire to share it. We put out a call to studio art students asking them to submit some of their work, and received over 60 pieces from a variety of different courses.
The way I see it, there are two kinds of artists: those who use art to reflect their reality, and those who use art to escape it. The former find solace in autobiography, creating works that explicitly mirror their own life experiences, or consuming art to which they can easily relate. The latter enjoy art as evasion, watching movies to live any life but their own, or making pieces that transport them away from their everyday.
It has been more than a month and a half since most students left campus and returned home to finish the semester remotely. If you are anything like us and have found yourself in a bit of an entertainment rut, look no further than Swank, a free movie service offered by the College Libraries that includes hundreds of blockbuster movies you can’t find on Netflix.
“I didn’t want to just listen to the music and be amazed by it. I wanted to create it for myself,” said Emily Ham ’22, a mezzo-soprano who takes voice lessons, attends the opera workshop and performs several times a year at Williams. This year, she was named one of the winners of the annual Berkshire Symphony Student Soloist Competition.
The classroom experience has been hindered, athletics have been canceled, final performances have been nixed, lives have been uprooted and, yet, some continue to sing in spite of their separation from nearly every semblance of campus life.
If there’s one thing that these two months in COVID-19 induced quarantine has taught me, it’s that flexibility is an asset. Suspended between a blurred past and an uncertain future, students are forced to reconfigure their forward-looking mindsets in favor of mentality that takes life day by day.
It has been more than a month and a half since most students left campus and returned home to finish the semester remotely. If you are anything like us and have found yourself in a bit of an entertainment rut, look no further than Swank, a free movie service offered by the College Libraries that includes hundreds of blockbuster movies you can’t find on Netflix.
For many students, life in quarantine has been characterized by mundanity, days that move drearily into one another without remark. Almost two months since the College canceled in-person classes, students are beginning to experience self-isolation as a new normal, habituating to the lifestyle in a way that makes it feel all the more dull as they become numb to emotions outside of their standard quarantine mood.
