The Heidelberg Project started with one man, Tyree Guyton. Growing up in Detroit during the riots of the late 60s, Guyton was dismayed at the decay and segregation that followed. In 1986, he decided to transform his childhood neighbor, focusing on Heidelberg Street. There were plenty of vacant lots and empty…
For the last month of the semester, a ceramics class is displaying their wares in the library. They are all soup tureens with matching bowls and saucers. Students were inspired to create these objects from readings from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan In Praise of…
Kathleen Montgomery is an artist in residence at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Her sculpture and installations in Body Memory Architecture are sensual and quiet. Many of the wood and found object sculptures suggest heads or torsos. The canvas forms are filled with mud from her own garden. The work…
Ben Hartman was a molder for the Springfield (Ohio) Machine Tool Company. He and his wife, Mary, lived with their three children on the corner of Russell and McCain Avenues. During the Great Depression, Ben lost his job at the tool company. Struggling to keep active, he built a cement…
A theatre professor developed a very creative project for her Acting I class. Students select a character from a play and, through research and inventiveness, develop a full biography of the person. Usually students write the biography; the past few semesters the professor has allowed them to respond through artwork.…
Seward Johnson is a New Jersey native known for his life-like and life-size sculptures. Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey has a retrospective of his work through September. I recently attended the (very crowded) exhibition. Johnson, an heir to his grandfather’s medical company, Johnson & Johnson, started his art…
Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir (Bellevue Literary Press, 2014) This is a collection of short stories centered on Sophie, an amateur naturalist who sees invisible creatures. These aren’t creatures of her imagination, but rather a secondary kingdom of animals that wander among us (including the human-like Keen-Ears). Though the stories…
Michelle Millet’s presentation was our morning exercise. In the afternoon we had presentations on one-shot instruction and I’ll highlight two. Vera Lux presented on multiple literacies in library instruction. She mentioned visual, digital, media, data, and meta literacies and mentioned that they began with a need to address subject-specific (discipline) literacies. All of…
I attend ALAO’s Instruction Interest Group‘s annual workshop the other week. I attended last year and this year was also fantastic. The keynote speak was Michelle Millet, the Immersion Faculty & Director at John Carroll University Library. Michelle mentioned she is on the committee for the ACRL information literacy standards updates. She…
This spring, studio art professor Ron Abram (Tyler School of Art alumn and all-round cool dude) taught a course on portraits. For one project, he brought the class into the library to view the president’s portraits. Our President’s Room (which houses the scores), has a formal painting of each president. Ron…