Senior Jim Schelberg's "Partners in Philosophy" Prison Program Featured in Washington Post

Senior James Schelberg’s “Partners in Philosophy” program, a series of summer classes he and several Washington College professors taught to inmates at the Jessup Correctional Institution, was featured prominently in the Washington Post. Education reporter Daniel de Vise attended the final class of the summer, where he witnessed Art History professor Donald McColl teach about ethics issues in art history.

In addition to classes developed and taught by Schelberg, himself, earlier lessons were taught by philosophy professor Kevin Brien, English professor Philip Walsh, and C.V. Starr Center director and history professor Adam Goodheart, all of whom volunteered their time and expertise at the Maryland prison.

Click here to read the Post story, which was posted online September 1 and was front page of the Metro section in the September 3 print edition.

Civil War at the Smithsonian: Starr Center Sponsors Free Road Trip to Washington

CHESTERTOWN, MD— This month, the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of America’s defining drama. To mark this milestone, the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Washington College Department of Art & Art History will sponsor an exciting day of Civil War exploration in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, April 23.

A free bus will depart Chestertown at 11 a.m. and leave Washington at 7:30 p.m. Reservations are required; please contact Jenifer Emleyat 410-810-7161 or jemley2@washcoll.edu. Those interested in meeting the group in Washington should also contact Jenifer Emley to make arrangements.

The program will include a tour of Civil War-era art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum led by Professor Donald McColl and Smithsonian art historian Barbaranne Liakos, a 1998 alumnus of Washington College. Members of the group will have an opportunity to explore a building that hosted Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural ball and sheltered a Union army hospital where Walt Whitman tended injured soldiers.

At 2 p.m. Starr Center director Adam Goodheart will give a public talk on his new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Knopf, 2011), in the museum’s Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. Jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Goodheart’s talk will be followed by a book signing.

Participants will also receive a special guided tour of Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office. During its two years of operation (1865-1867), the Missing Soldiers Office helped families and friends track the fate of the thousands of men missing in action at the end of the Civil War. Located directly across the street from the building that houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, the building housing the Missing Soldiers Office is under restoration, and is not regularly open to the public.

There will even be an opportunity for dinner in the house where Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was plotted—a building that now houses a Chinese restaurant! “When we think of Civil War history, we often think of the Shenandoah Valley, or the battlefield at Gettysburg,” says Goodheart. “But our nation’s capital has its own remarkable Civil War story.”

Space on the bus and tours is limited, so those interested should contact the Starr Center immediately. Goodheart’s lecture is open seating; for more information, visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum events calendar.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Based in the Custom House along the colonial waterfront, the College’s C.V. Starr Center fosters the art of written history and explores our nation’s past—particularly the legacy of its Founding era—in innovative ways, through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Kohl Gallery Hosts Multi-Media Installation by Internationally Acclaimed Artist and Washington College Faculty Member Monika Weiss

CHESTERTOWN—On Friday, February 25 the Kohl Gallery will open a one-person show by internationally acclaimed artist and Washington College faculty member Monika Weiss. “Lamentations (Sustenazo): Recent Works by Monika Weiss,” will run through April 15 at the gallery, which is located in the Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Weiss is a Polish-American artist who works in drawing, projected video, musical composition, performance and sculpture, often combining these elements in her public installations. The new exhibition, which is being shown for the first time in the U.S., is drawn from a larger exhibition of 2010, “Monika Weiss: Sustenazo,” held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Weiss completed the work while on junior sabbatical leave from Washington College, where she serves as assistant professor and coordinator of the studio art program in the Department of Art and Art History. The U.S. Embassy in Warsaw provided a major grant for “Sustenazo,” which also received support from the Central Medical Library, Warsaw, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Historical Museum of Warsaw, Media in Motion, Berlin, and a number of individuals, including a physician. The exhibition later traveled to Berlin.

“Lamentations” is curated by Donald McColl, the Nancy L. Underwood Associate Professor of Art History at Washington College and former Director of Kohl Gallery. The first of several special events planned around the show will be the opening reception, Friday, February 25 at 6 p.m. On Wednesday, March 2, from 4 to 6 p.m., the Kent County Arts Council will host a “Town & Gown” event for the local arts community that will include a talk by the artist, a walk-through of the exhibition and a reception. And on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 30, internationally renowned art historian, critic and curator Dr. Julia P. Herzberg will come to Chestertown for a lecture on Weiss’s work and a conversation with the artist. Each event is free and open to the public; some content may not be suitable for children.

Sustenazo is a Greek word meaning to sigh or to lament inaudibly together. Weiss’s exhibition on this theme was inspired by a specific event that took place at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, when it was a hospital—and actually was installed there, in the cellar, the only portion of the castle to survive. On August 6, 1944, during the onset of the Warsaw Uprising, the German Army forced more than 1,800 patients and medical staff to evacuate the hospital overnight. With that incident as its reference point, Weiss’s art explores visual and musical aspects of the ancient ritual of Lament and its historical connection to feminine expression, especially as contrasted with the notion of the heroic myth within the narrative of war. “An important part of this work is the motif of lament as a form of expression outside language,” she says.

“Lamentatons” speaks to the essence of a hospital as a metaphor for healing, but in the context of the specific horrors of the Nazi evacuation of Ujazdowski Hospital and the general oppression of human rights throughout history. The artist’s original sound composition (Weiss trained for many years at Warsaw’s Conservatory of Music) incorporates the voice of a surviving witness of the hospital’s expulsion along with voices of average Germans reading passages from the second part of Goethe’s classic play “Faust.”

Weiss’s installation also juxtaposes original objects and documents related to the hospital’s exodus—mostly old books and small pieces of medical equipment—with other images, including video. The interplay of all these visual layers in video projection with the mix of voice and music creates a poetic environment in which viewers can form their own assumptions and conclusions. “Much of my art investigates the relationships between memory and history, but I build it from multiple narratives in order to leave the meaning open to interpretation,” says Weiss, who teaches drawing and new genres at Washington College.

London-based art critic Guy Brett has written of Weiss, “Her work is a remarkable, individual counterpoint between technological media (video projection) and the ancient activity of drawing. Sound is also an important element, meticulously composed by the artist. It lifts the silent filmed actions into another emotional register.” The result, he says, “is an alternative experience of space and time, … steady and enduring, establishing and deepening a human presence.”

Curator McColl adds that Washington College is “exceedingly fortunate” to have Monika Weiss on the faculty. “She not only maintains a complex, thoughtful, and highly successful international practice—one based on cutting-edge trends in media and culture, as well as a deep-rooted knowledge of history, literature, language and myth, let alone everything from philosophy to medical theory—but she also holds such deep convictions about teaching and the mentoring of our students,” he says.

Weiss’s past exhibitions include the 2005 “Monika Weiss: Five Rivers,” a comprehensive survey of her work at Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, and a two-person exhibition with the pioneering filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneemann at Remy Toledo Gallery, New York, in 2004. She has also exhibited at such venues as the Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, the Frauenmuseum in Bonn, and the Kunsthaus Dresden in Dresden; examples of her work are also in the permanent collections of places from Vienna’s Albertina Museum to the Drawing Center, New York.

Weiss’s work is featured in the book on contemporary drawing practices Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art, (I.B. Tauris, London). Her papers have been published in books and journals, including Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (Intellectbooks, Bristol, UK) and Being Syncretic (Springer, Vienna/New York). She co-edits the contemporary drawing magazine Tracey, published by England’s Loughborough University.
Weiss is represented by Galerie Samuel Lallouz (Montréal) and Remy Toledo Projects (New York). A member of the Washington College faculty since 2006, she lives in Chestertown and New York City.

"Lamentations" is sponsored in part by the Chestertown Spy. To learn more about the artist and her work, please visit: http://www.monika-weiss.com and http://art.washcoll.edu/faculty_monikaweiss.php.

Kohl Gallery is open Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m., Fridays noon to 6 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays noon to 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays and Tuesdays).

On exhibit in the William Frank Visual Arts Hallway outside the Kohl Gallery through Sunday, Feb. 27 is the photography exhibit, “Photography Exposed,” curated by Brian Palmer, manager of the Multimedia Production Center at Washington College. Each photograph has an accompanying QR Codes, or “Quick Read” matrix barcode, that can be scanned by any iPhone, Android phone or new generation iPod (those with cameras) to gain access to a video or text message from the photographer.

Related Links

• Learn more at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
• Visit Monika Weiss' faculty profile page
• Youtube: The Chestertown Spy profiles Monika Weiss
• Youtube: Interview with Prof. Weiss on "Sustenazo"
• Visit the Kohl Gallery site
• Review: Monika Weiss – "Sustenazo, Lament II"

Chemistry Meets Art during National Chemistry Week

Chestertown, MD, November 6, 2001 — Washington College's Department of Chemistry, as part of its National Chemistry Week celebration, presents "Chemistry Meets Art: The Case of the Early Christian Sculptures at Cleveland," a lecture by Donald McColl, chair of the Department of Art. The talk will be held Thursday, November 8, 2001, at 7:30 p.m., in Goldstein Hall, Room 100, Wingate Lecture Hall. Refreshments will be served at 7 p.m. Please note, this talk has been rescheduled from November 7.

McColl traveled to Turkey in 1988 to conduct archaeological work on the question of the origins and authenticity of several early Christian sculptures from the 3rd century held in the Cleveland Museum's collection. Known as "The Jonah Marbles," this sculptural ensemble astonished the art world when it was introduced to the public in 1965, not only for its superb quality and condition, but also for its very survival. These controversial sculptures conformed to a language of symbols developed by early Christians, but appeared Roman in execution--unlike most Christian art from that era.

In order to authenticate this amazing discovery, McColl convinced the Cleveland Museum to carry out stable signature isotopic marble analyses, a chemical process that showed that the Roman Imperial quarries at Docimium in Ancient Phrygia (now Central Turkey) were the source for the marble from which the sculptures were carved. His talk will reveal how the humanities and sciences can work together to find answers to questions of great cultural significance.

"This cross-disciplinary approach is an important lesson for our students," said McColl. "Scientific knowledge and methods can greatly enhance our understanding of art history."

Sophomore Catharine Clarke Wins Prestigious St. Andrew's Scholarship

Chestertown, MD, May 10, 2001 — Washington College sophomore Catharine Clarke '03 has been awarded a prestigious St. Andrew's Society Scholarship to study in Scotland next year. The St. Andrew's Society Scholarships support the study of Scottish culture, arts, history and heritage. Clarke will study at the University of St. Andrew's in St. Andrews, Scotland.

A Chestertown native, Clarke is a music major with an art minor. The St. Andrew's Society of Philadelphia invites students from only eighteen colleges in the region to apply for the scholarships, with schools such as Swarthmore College, Haverford College, and Pennsylvania State University participating. The selection committee selected Clarke first out of 17 scholarships, giving her the opportunity to attend the Scottish university of her choice. Applicants for the scholarship were judged on academic performance, extracurricular activities, defined course of study and strength of character. The final candidates were determined through written applications and personal interviews.

Clarke will begin her studies abroad in late September. "I am very honored to have received this scholarship and am very excited about the upcoming year in Scotland," she said.

Donald McColl, assistant professor of art history, served as Washington College's liaison and coordinator of the St. Andrew's Scholarship program, and guided Clarke through the application and interview process.

"Washington College is very proud of Catharine, as both a music major and art minor," said Dr. McColl. "She competed against some of the very best students from the Mid-Atlantic region and proved that our students and academic departments truly compete with the best."

Wingate Memorial Lecture Examines Civilization and Madness

Chestertown, April 11—The transformation of the medieval world to Renaissance civilization challenged strongly held opinions about human behavior. Using the history of madness as a lens, noted scholar and author H. C. Erik Midelfort will examine the history of the Renaissance and the civilizing process in his talk "Madness and Civilization in Renaissance Germany." The illustrated lecture takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday April 20 in the Casey Academic Forum at Washington College.

Midelfort's highly praised study, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, forms the basis of his talk. The work has been praised for shedding light on the entire history of its era and on the nature of insanity and culture in general. It received the 1999 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, one of three prestigious national Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards for outstanding nonfiction, as "a contribution to the cultural and intellectual understanding of mankind." Donald McColl, Washington College assistant professor of art history, researched the illustrations for the book.

Midelfort is C. Julian Bishko Professor of history and principal of Brown College at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1970. He has also written "Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany" and other studies of madness and the occult in the Renaissance. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he also received his Ph.D., Midelfort has taught at Stanford, Bern, Stuttgart and Harvard universities.

"Madness and Civilization in Renaissance Germany" is the Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture in History. It is also sponsored by the Washington College Department of Art and the Washington College Phi Beta Kappa Association. It is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 1-800-442-1782.

George Washington and the Currency of Fame

Washington College Hosts Smithsonian’s Numismatic Exhibit

Chestertown, MD — Money does make things happen. From his Revolutionary War headquarters in New York, General George Washington granted his name and the sum of fifty gold guineas to establish a liberal arts institution in Chestertown, Maryland. Today, Washington College is still educating responsible leaders for a changing world. In the 1790 census, this colonial port was the center of population in the new United States of America.

Later, as President Washington shaped the new democracy and advocated the establishment of the U. S. Mint, he is said to have donated his own table silver to be melted down and stamped into coinage. This governmental institution helped break the new nation’s dependency for currency on foreign countries and sparked new creativity and technology in the art of designing, stamping and engraving currency.

While he characteristically rejected the trappings of royalty and disliked the monarchical practice of having rulers appear on the nation’s money, Washington’s image has been represented on a remarkable array of American coins, medals, and paper money.

This fall, Washington College is organizing an exhibition of material on loan from the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which surveys images of George Washington on currency from the time of the United States’ founding to the post-Civil War period. Also featured in the exhibition are an English guinea, fifty of which Washington gave to help found the College in 1782, and the recent issue of the U.S. Mint of a coin commemorating the 200th anniversary of Washington’s death.

The exhibition is on display in the gallery of the Chestertown Bank on High Street in Chestertown from September 2nd through October 29th, during banking hours. Extended hours are offered for visitors to the Chestertown Candlelight Tour on September 18th and the Chestertown Wildfowl Show on October 22nd and 23rd.

The practice of using the image of Washington reflects the enormous admiration 19th-century Americans had for their first president and his broad appeal as an icon for various ideologies, notes Donald A. McColl, the assistant professor of art history at Washington College who is curating the exhibition with the assistance of students from the departments of art and history.

From Indian Peace medals to Civil War "dog tags," Washington has been seen as, among other things, Pater Patriae, new Cincinnatus, friend of commerce, and model of temperance. At the same time, his changing image bears witness to a progression in the quality of American currency from the period of dominance of British and other mints to the time when the United States boasted some of the finest designers, engravers, and die cutters in the world.

"Some of the objects in this exhibit are quite rare," notes McColl, "and the engraved bank notes in particular are quite beautiful. What is especially interesting, though, is that these specimens had a ‘currency’ in the culture, if you will. Each piece tells you about the time in which it was made."

This exhibition is sponsored by Washington College as part of a national observation of the bicentennial of George Washington's death in December 1799. For more information, please call Nancy Nunn at Washington College, at 410-778-7139.