On Sept. 15, faculty, students, family and friends filled Keck Classroom to celebrate Erica Rand’s appointment as the Whitehouse Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies.

Whitehouse Professor Erica Rand smiles alongside Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer during an introduction from President Clayton Spencer at her Sept. 15 talk “Hips, Heft, and Fluff: Queer Experiments in Looking and Writing.” (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Rand marked the occasion with a talk, “Hips, Heft, and Fluff: Queer Experiments in Looking and Writing,” followed by a reception in Perry Atrium.

In his introduction, Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer said Rand’s scholarship “explores the limits and possibilities of subversion,” often by elevating everyday phenomena, like Barbie dolls and figure skating, as worthy objects of analysis.

Frank and at times revealing, Rand’s talk explored her approach to writing and analysis as a scholar, feminist and queer- and femme-identified woman. Her terms “heft” and “fluff” refer to gendered, raced and sexuality-related biases in academia about worthy topics, methods and practitioners of cultural work.

During the question-and-answer portion, audience members probed further into Rand’s ideas, at times reflecting on their own relationships to writing and research.

While not offering, by design, any easy answers, Rand’s talk demonstrated the core values of the Whitehouse Chair, which recognizes a dedication to educational and moral excellence and respect for human dignity.

Rand connects with former student Grace Glasson ’14 at the reception in Perry Atrium. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Rand was officially appointed to the chair in 2012, along with five colleagues also receiving endowed professorships.

The Whitehouse Chair was established in 1985 with a gift to the endowment from David ’36 and Constance Whitehouse. Born and raised in Auburn, Maine, Whitehouse earned his M.B.A. from Harvard University after graduating from �ֲ���ý in 1936. He served in leadership positions at the Container Corporation of America throughout his entire career, retiring in 1980 as vice president. The Whitehouses passed away in the spring of 2000 and are survived by four adult children.

Here’s a roundup of �ֲ���ý-relates Olympic news from home and abroad.

Emily Bamford ’15

Australian Olympic skier Emily Bamford ’15 talks with reporters about her preparations for her events. If you thought snow was snow, she notes that the Sochi snow “is really different from what we had in Europe. It’s taking some getting used to.”

At one point she references salt, which is sometimes applied to a course on a warm day though it seems counter-intuitive. The salt thaws the snow, which then refreezes into a harder and more consistent surface.

Her events, the giant slalom and slalom, are scheduled for Feb. 18 and 21, respectively.

Amy Bass ’92

Amy Bass ’92 is a scholar of the Olympics and professor of history at the College of New Rochelle.

A scholar of the Olympics and an Emmy-winning researcher for NBC Sports, Amy Bass ’92 recently penned essays for about the political backdrop of the Sochi Games and for on the apparent devaluation of bronze and silver — at least in terms of Olympic medals.

For all the criticisms of Russian politics and calls for a boycott, critics forget that “the Olympics have never been a freezing of world politics, but, rather, an opportunity to cut through the horror with moments of greatness,” she writes.

Still, “it is naive to think that sport is above politics, that any kind of level playing field exists, or that sport allows the world to put its problems on hold.”

Writing for CNN Opinion, Bass says that even for medal contenders who fall short, it is “enough just to be there.” Yet for others, winning a gold medal is all there is.

Bass, professor of history and director of the Honors Program at the College of New Rochelle, has worked eight Olympics for NBC Sports. She supervised the Research Room for the 2012 Summer Games in London, winning an Emmy along with her team.

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Erica Rand

The college’s Whitehouse Professor, Erica Rand is an avid figure skater, shown here doing a catch-foot spiral. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý professor and cultural critic Erica Rand is an amateur figure skater who wrote Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice, a book that brings her academic expertise about sexuality, race and gender to bear on the curiously gendered world of figure skating.

Writing for the , Rand comments about the selection process that snubbed skater Mirai Nagasu, noting that the three skaters chosen over her “have a key credential that Nagasu lacks: the glorious glow of flowing blond hair that signals, if not always accurately, the highest echelons of whiteness and proper heterosexual femininity.”

Rand, the college’s Whitehouse Professor, has appointments in the Department of Art and Visual Culture and the Program in Women and Gender Studies.

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Peter Carlisle ’91 is the managing director for Olympic and action sports for Octagon. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Peter Carlisle ’91

Sports agent Peter Carlisle ’91 is once again at the Olympic Games.

Carlisle to Portland Press Herald columnist Steve Solloway about the feel of the Games.

The security presence in Sochi, he says, is like Goldbug, the little creature found on each page of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. “Sometimes it’s hard to locate, but it’s always there,” said Carlisle.

Carlisle represents snowboarder Kelly Clark, among other athletes. In this prior to the games, Carlisle comments on the drive his client possesses.

 

 

With a reception on Nov. 16, the �ֲ���ý community extended a warm “well done” to Erica Rand for the publication of her second book, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Duke University Press).

In a gathering sponsored by the office of Multicultural Affairs, students, staff and faculty took the opportunity to congratulate Rand, buy a copy of the book and request a signature. Held at �ֲ���ý’ Multicultural Center and arranged by the MCC staff, who laid on Latin music and a buffet featuring a chocolate fondue fountain, the festivity held out a taste of excitement against a damp and dark late afternoon.

Rand is a professor of art and visual culture at �ֲ���ý and chair of the women and gender studies program. Hailed by one reader as “a wonderfully creative, playful and serious piece of scholarship,” Rand’s new book uses immigration to America, specifically through Ellis Island, as a lens to examine sex, money, material products, power and ideas of nationhood. The snow globe of the title, which Rand purchased in an Ellis Island gift shop, is just one of the kitschy items that used in the book to reveal connections — surprising, funny, provocative — among these themes.

Rand taps her own experiences, too, as departure points for her arguments. “The book deals with some issues important to me,” she said during the reception. “I tried to write it in a personable and accessible style, and used personal anecdotes to raise issues.”

“It’s really important not to separate the people who are consumers of pop culture from the people who write about pop culture,” she explained. “I consume pop culture — I buy Soap Opera Digest.”

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Nov.18:

The �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art presents a symposium on Marsden Hartley, a Lewiston native and a pioneer in modern American art, on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 5-6.

The symposium complements the current exhibition of Hartley’s work at the museum, Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity. The symposium and exhibition are open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-6158.

The symposium begins at 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 5, in the Benjamin Mays Center at �ֲ���ý, 95 Russell St. Donna M. Cassidy, professor of American and New England studies and art history at the University of Southern Maine, will present the keynote speech, “‘Yankee Queer’: Marsden Hartley’s Maine Folk and Regional/Sexual Identities.” A reception will follow in the art museum, in the nearby Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Saturday’s events will take place in the Olin Arts Center, Room 104. They begin at 10 a.m. with presentations by Marcia Brennan, an art historian at Rice University, and Randall Griffey, a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. A 1:30 p.m. panel discussion will include all the speakers along with Liz Sheehan, the �ֲ���ý museum’s assistant curator of academic and exhibition initiatives, and Erica Rand, professor of art and visual culture and chair of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at �ֲ���ý.

Hartley (1877-1943) was an innovative modernist associated with the New York circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe. The symposium is intended to explore how his homosexuality, an often disregarded but important factor in his life, affected his work.

“We want to affirm the place of gender studies in the curriculum and also as an entry to the study of art history,” Sheehan says. “Although the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art was founded around a collection of Hartley art and documentary materials, we haven’t addressed his work in that context. It’s overdue, especially considering that much of the work we have can be described as homoerotic.”

The Hartley collection includes more than 90 drawings, family photographs, jewelry, travel souvenirs and ephemera. Hartley’s works are believed to reflect the many social and historical changes he observed during his lifetime. Though the collection gives great insight into this artist who often felt like an outsider, it also raises many other questions about him, providing a substantial foundation for discussion.

Participants will examine gender issues relating to his work and, more broadly, the application of gender-studies methodology to the study of art history, says Sheehan.

Cassidy is the author of “Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940” (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) and “Marsden Hartley: Region, Race, and Nation,” scheduled for spring 2005 publication by the University Press of New England.

Brennan’s topic is “Marsden Hartley: Mysticism, Masculinity, and the Paradox of Oneness.” She is the author of “Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2001) and a sequel volume, “Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction,” due out this fall.

Griffey is the associate curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and teaches at the University of Missouri there. His writings on Hartley include the 2001 article “Marsden Hartley’s Lincoln Portraits” in the magazine American Art. His symposium topic is “‘Such Beautiful Idealists’: Marsden Hartley’s Brief Foray Inside a ‘Finnish-Yankee Sauna.’ ”

The concluding panel discussion will bring Hartley’s work and issues into the present, while questioning contemporary investigations into sexuality and art. Rand teaches courses on contemporary culture with particular attention to sexuality, race and gender — and, within those areas, to queer and trans sexualities and genders. Her current research will culminate in the book “The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex, Money, Products, Nation,” forthcoming in 2005.

The symposium is part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a major exhibit in 2007 that will explore Hartley along with other gay artists working in Maine around the same time.

The Upper Gallery exhibit at the museum through Dec. 18 is Videodrome II, curated by New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art and the second incarnation at that museum of an exhibition of works exclusively in video. Inspired by director David Cronenberg’s investigation of the integration of television into daily reality in his 1983 cult-classic film Videodrome, the exhibition acknowledges video’s primacy as a medium in contemporary art.

Video has a unique capacity to submerge viewers through such medium-specific characteristics as its reliance upon light to generate atmosphere and the requirement that it be viewed over time.

The 27 artists come from Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and elsewhere. The works of one artist per day will be presented over 29 days, and during two “open call” days visitors can request that a particular work or compilation be screened.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Jerome Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Museum admission is open to the public at no cost. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For more information, call 207-786-6158.

The symposium, which begins in Pettengill Hall at 9 a.m., is designed to share �ֲ���ý scholarship with alumni, students and their parents, along with the faculty at large. The 10 presentations involve research soon to be published, projects still in development, and results of sabbaticals. Questions and discussion after each talk are encouraged. Among the presenters are:

Margaret Imber, assistant professor of classical and medieval studies, who uses the legal defense of a Roman citizen (accused of seducing a widow with magic) to illustrate how provincial Romans constructed their cultural identity;

Loring M. Danforth, professor of anthropology, who makes the game of soccer a frame for examining ways in which the ethnic and cultural narratives of Australian society serve the country’s political and economic interests;

Erica Rand, associate professor of art. Rand, author of the alternative social history Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Duke University Press, 1995), scrutinizes Ellis Island for the traces of immigrants whose sexual and cultural identities fell outside the mainstream.