Good afternoon. Welcome to the Bloomington Rotary Club's weekly celebration of service. I'm Steve Wicks,
and I'm covering today for President Tracy Yovanovitch, who's traveling. Please silence your electronic
devices. One of our sweetest members, Jim Cryway, wanted me to share that today is National Chocolate Chip Day.
Let's start with the Where in the World. This is the new segment that Tracy has introduced. So today's
focus is on Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. It's a self-governing overseas collectivity of France. Saint-Pierre
and Miquelon is an archipelago of eight islands located 12 to 15 miles south of Newfoundland.
6,000 people live there. Historically, it's been driven by fishing, cod. In Prohibition, it was a hot
spot for smuggling. And now it has a growing tourism industry. So there is a Rotary Club of San Pierre
and Miquelon, relatively new. It was chartered in 1989. The club has 21 members.
It is the only French-speaking club in Rotary District 7815, which comprises of the maritime provinces
of Canada. So Rotary Club members work closely with other local service organizations and also the local
radio station. They've raised money through Bingo to help eradicate polio and establish a free local
library. So Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. OK.
Brown will deliver today's reflection. Thank you, Steve. You know, I used to take the miracle of vision
for granted. And then two weeks ago, I had cataract surgery. And all of a sudden, I got very interested
in vision and how vision works.
And it turns out that that's the most common surgery. There's like four million cataract surgeries every
year. There's probably several people in this room who've had that surgery. If you haven't had it yet
and you live long enough, you're probably gonna have it at some point in your life. But I have a new
appreciation for vision and I started looking back old biology books and thinking, well, what is actually
going on in the eye? How's that work?
And it turns out that light is reflected from the surfaces that your eyes are pointed to. A small sliver
of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light comes at your eyes. And what's coming at your eyes is
the reflected light, not the absorbed light. So you're seeing a representation of something, but you're
not seeing that thing. You're seeing a reflection of it. Reflection, right?
So we see reflected light. We see a small sliver of the world. And the light comes through the sclera,
the corneates, the irises change the pupil allowing different amounts of light in. And it goes through
this liquid and it flips. And it flips upside down and backwards when it hits the retina. So that image
is not upside. It's not right side up. It's upside down. Your brain splits that data.
to both sides of your brain and it crosses, the optic nerve information crosses in your brain. And then
it goes to various parts of your brain, not just the visual cortex, but some of those places in the
brain that worry about whether you're about to be eaten by something. So we can get very excited by
an image that relates to danger, for example. But it turns out that 70% of the receptors in your body
are in your eyes. So vision is obviously very important to us
And when you're actually looking at something, your eyes are not focused in one place. Right now, it
looks like I'm looking in the middle of the room, but my eyes are flitting all over the place trying
to make sure there's nothing coming from the side that's going to eat me. And that flitting around creates
lots of different images. And the time between the flitting is a blank space. And your brain fills that
in. It predicts what you might have seen and fills in the gaps.
And this can result in all sorts of interesting illusions. In one test, they told people to count the
bouncing basketball in a scene. They missed the fact that there was a gorilla walking through the scene.
They missed that gorilla completely because they were so focused on that particular information. So
what we see is more like an art film cobbled together by a biased committee and trying to interpret
sensory data in real time, which is virtually impossible. There's so much data coming through there.
So my vision is suddenly clear and bright. I switched from nearsighted to farsighted. My brain is still
trying to get a handle on that. In a few weeks, I should be used to that. But I had to stop on the way
here to admire a purple pink thistle blossom. I'm not sure I would have done that three weeks ago, but
a new appreciation for
what's in front of me. So what else am I taking for granted? Well, we're pumping blood to every cell
in our body 24 seven. We communicate in a language that we can speak and write and hear, and we can
reflect on our own thoughts. And we can truly see and know and love people that are
that are near us. So those are all amazing things that we sometimes take for granted. As miraculous
as vision is, it's only a shallow reflection of reality, less than skin deep. We need all of our senses
and all of our ability to communicate to truly see each other. We travel together in an infinite hall
of distorted mirrors in our pursuit of reality, truth, and meaning to truly see
We must go beneath the surface. We must crash through those mirrors using all of our senses to truly
see each other. It may not be time for you to get a lensectomy yet, but it is never too early. It's
never too late to see the reality hidden in plain sight in the form of that bundle of miracles sitting
next to you.
Thank you, Bill. Lynn Schwartzberg will introduce today's guests. Thank you. I would love to welcome
our wonderful guests today. First, we have the lovely Ann Bright, a guest of Jim Bright. Please stand
so that we can recognize you. We have a guest of our speaker.
Henley Wolin. We have Bill Yarber, a guest of Hank Walter. And we have Jeremy Pennington, also a guest
of Melanie, our speaker. And then we have one that's a little bit hard to read. It's Nathalie Blaise.
Are you here?
Hello. Thank you all for joining us. Do we have anyone online? Lynn, we do not have any guests online.
Thank you, Joy. And to all of our guests, if you're interested in learning more about Rotary, we would
be happy to share and just speak with someone at your table. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn.
So before we move on, I'd like to add a couple of comments about two of our guests. First of all, Bill
Yarber is the Senior Director of the IU Rural Center for AIDS STD Prevention. Professor Yarber first
proposed the Ryan White statue and has played a big role turning that idea into reality. So we're happy
to have him here today.
And then Natalie Jenner-Blaze was our club executive assistant for seven years. And she continues to
help our club from afar. Unfortunately, she is in Bloomington due to the death of her father. We're
happy to have her back. We just wish the circumstances were better. But Tyler, if you could go ahead
and put up the PowerPoint.
Okay, birthdays and anniversaries. Bill Perkins had a birthday on August 2nd. And then three anniversaries
to observe. Steve Engel, 15 years. Club treasurer Mark Peterson, three years. And young Bill Oates sitting
over here, 38 years. Announcements. So here a few days ago,
Jill, our executive assistant, sent out an email asking people to sign up for volunteer roles for the
fall quarter. So please follow the link and do that. We need greeters. We need people to do reflection.
We need people to introduce guests and so on. And there might still be a couple of spots left for this
quarter. So please sign up to volunteer at our weekly programs. Secondly, Club Service Project, the
Hoosier Hills Food Bank on Friday.
Fun time, we had a crew here, a crew there from 10 to noon, another crew from noon to two. We shoveled
lots of pasta into two pound bags, but we did it in an air conditioned room. So we got a great deal.
But we were there, Duke Energy had a lot of people there. Liz Irwin, club member and Duke Energy
representative spearheaded our efforts as did Michelle Cohen.
one of our community services co-chairs. So thank you for all the work done on Friday. And here are
some pictures. Pictures are from the morning session. But the middle picture, you can see what it looked
like inside the pasta room. And now we have the fun
and fortunate activity of introducing a new member. So Patricia Cox and Lynn Schwartzberg, if you can
both come up front. Stand next to me. And we're going to start with Joy Harder reading Patricia's bio.
All right, can you all hear me? Great. Hello, Patricia. Hello. On behalf of the board and membership
of the Bloomington Rotary Club, it is our great pleasure to welcome you as the newest member of our
club. We look forward to the fellowship that we will share, as well as your participation in the club
projects that make our club
community, country, and world a better place. Though Rotary is not a political organization, Rotarians
are vitally concerned with good citizenship and the election of effective leaders to public office.
While Rotary is not a religious organization, it is built on those highest principles that have served
as a moral compass for people throughout the ages.
Rotary is an organization of businesses, professional and community leaders pledged to uphold the highest
ethical and moral standards. Rotarians believe that worldwide fellowship and peace can be achieved when
people work together and uphold the Rotary motto of service above self. Rotary activities exemplify
the partnership, respect and generosity
that one would expect from people who believe that they have a responsibility to help others. Patricia,
you have been chosen for membership in the Bloomington Club because your fellow members believe you
to be a leader in our community and because you possess the qualities to champion the message and principles
of Rotary. You are a representative of your vocation and talent within our club and community.
You now become an ambassador of Bloomington Rotary, carrying the ideals of service to all within your
sphere of influence. Our community will know and judge Rotary by your character and service. We will
also look to you for inspiration as we strive to become better Rotarians. Now we will pin you with a
distinguishing badge of a Rotarian, your Rotary
pin. Well, I will hand you the pin as opposed to attempting to pin it. Okay. And we, we ask you, Patricia,
that you wear your rotary pin with pride in your many endeavors and as a symbol of our recognition of
your contribution towards a better world through your rotary membership. Fellow Rotarians, please rise
if you are able
And welcome our newest Rotarian, Patricia Cox. And I got things a little bit out of order. So Lynn,
can you give us a bio for Patricia? Oh. Patricia Cox.
is a mortgage loan originator with German American Bank and has several years of experience in real
estate, helping individuals and families achieve their goal of home ownership. She combines her knowledge
of both lending and real estate to guide clients through one of the most important financial decisions
of their lives. Originally from Colombia,
Patricia is bilingual in English and Spanish and enjoys serving a diverse community. She also has background
in psychology, which has given her a passion for understanding people and building meaningful relationships.
Patricia lives in Bedford with her husband Mike, and together they have three children, Mia, Jake, and Mariah.
She enjoys traveling, working out, spending time with her family, and being involved in her children's
activities. She previously served as PTO president at her daughter's elementary school and believes
that giving back and supporting the local community are just as important as professional success. Patricia
is excited to become part of Rotary, where she hopes to build lasting friendships, serve the community,
and contribute her time and skills to meaningful projects. Welcome.
Thank you, Lynn and Patricia. Rotary is an international organization, and it's pretty cool,
least to me, that in our club of 160 members, we now have three originally from Columbia. So Patricia
joins Claudia and Whitney. So congratulations. Welcome. Thank you so much. Well said. You're done.
Thank you. Thank you, guys. OK.
Bill Brown will come up and introduce today's speaker. I am delighted to introduce our amazing guest
speaker, Melanie Cooper Pennington, a sculptor based in Bloomington, Indiana, where she serves as area
head of sculpture and senior lecturer at Indiana University.
Her practice spans intimate figurative studies, large-scale installations, and public sculpture, using
the body as a framework for exploring emotional experience, endurance, vulnerability, and transformation.
Pennington received her MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in 2016. Her work has been exhibited
nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the International Center for the Arts
in Monte Castello de Vibio, sorry,
for you Italians in the crowd, in Italy, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, Artlink Contemporary,
and Eiffel Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include ACRE projects in Chicago, Distortion Gallery in
Beacon, New York, and the Grunwald Gallery of Art. Her work has been supported through residencies and
fellowships at Sculpture Space, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Anderson Ranch Art Center,
and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Pennington has completed public sculpture commissions
and installations for Indiana University, which is pretty close to us here in IMU, the Kinsey Institute,
the Chicago Sculpture International Sculpture in the Parks Program, and the Indianapolis Arts Center,
including major figurative bronze commissions honoring Alfred C. Kinsey and, of course, Ryan White.
Her sculptures are held in the collections of the Kinsey Institute,
the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana University, and the International Center for the Arts in Italy.
Let's give a warm rotary welcome to Melanie. Okay, wow. So how do I sound? Check, check, check.
A little more? Let's speak a little louder. Speak with a little more authority.
Hi, everybody. This is a little bit of an intimidating crowd. But I'm very excited to be here. And I
will let you know you are guinea pigs in a way for a new talk that I'm about to give, because I wanted
to share with you both sides of my practice as a sculptor. So ready? Buckle up. Here we go. And
I recently heard that Charlotte Zitlow had a way of always being ready with a question. So in honor
of Charlotte, I will frame this talk around two questions. The questions are, how do I, as an artist,
give shape to the invisible? And why do I have two different ways of doing so? Oh, how do I click?
This one? Do I go down or left or right? Right?
Do I have to point it over here or over here? Anywhere. Okay. I'm honored to give this talk to you wonderful
group, the Rotary Club. Bill Brown and I first bonded over our mutual love of sculpting the figure about
10 years ago. Did you know he sculpts? Asked to see his Abraham Lincoln. Sorry.
That was back in my early days here as a graduate student at Indiana University. Little did I know then
that I would become a professor here and am now the area head of the sculpture department. And what
I teach most is figure sculpture. It's an area that's fallen out of academic fashion, but I still believe
is one of the most effective ways to teach students how to think three-dimensionally.
This is me when I first discovered I could sculpt at age 19. And then this is my studio when I was a
graduate student at Indiana University in the central stores, if you guys remember that building. I've
titled this talk, Giving Form to the Invisible, because that's how sculpture saved me, quite literally.
And it's the goal behind every piece I make.
It's also how I know when a piece is finished. I was a very, very sensitive young person who didn't
feel safe to share feelings out loud. Clay became a radical tool of communication. It could hold what
my body couldn't. I could mold it into forms that carried the weight I couldn't otherwise put down and
somehow that lightened the load.
Hold on. So, I have two bodies of work. Figurative and abstract. First, my early work was figurative.
I spent my formative years as a sculptor studying anatomy with the cowboy sculptors out west for a week
at a time in Colorado and Arizona. And with anatomy teachers from the New York Academy of Art. I had
small children.
So this was the doable way to get an education in anatomy. I was never satisfied with a piece until
it felt alive, breathing, until it touched something in me while I looked at it. This was natural for
me. I could feel intuitively how posture and body communicate emotion. Those subtle gestures, even as
minor as the masseter muscle in a jaw, with just a little bit of tension,
can communicate things about a person's interior world. I could feel all of that. Probably many of you
can too. Turning that into sculpture takes technical skill, a solid understanding of the biology of
a body in addition to the ability to recreate it. But it also takes something harder to reach, depth
of feeling, an awareness, and dare I say, a willingness
to feel the agony and the ecstasy of being human and to extend that feeling outside of oneself to reach
out and get inside of your subject. Speaking of cowboy sculptors, I got to be one briefly when I did
portraits of my paternal grandparents shortly before they passed, literally like a month before
my grandfather passed.
He and she were both cowboy and cowgirl from rural southern Arizona. They drove cattle, they did horse
breaking, and he was even hired as a yarn teller for ranches. And she was a journalist. So this is called
The Yarn Teller and the Dream Weaver. This was one of my very first portrait pieces. While it was wonderfully
gratifying to make pieces like these, the realistic figurative work,
At the end of the day, it is still only recreating something that is already there. And artists sometimes
want to create new things. So just as we are now turning to my abstract work in this brief talk, I turn
to abstraction in my career. Like many of my heroes who also began with the figure and pushed it further,
here is Constantine Brancusi. Some of you might know he is most famous for this, Bird in Space. You
can see it at the Art Institute in Chicago.
and Isama Noguchi, Japanese American sculptor, love him, famous for this piece of furniture, but also
all of his modernist abstractions. So they started with the figure, they went outside of it. I pushed
myself to do the same. My studio work turned towards abstraction and anthropomorphism in my very first
year of graduate school. I removed faces, hands, and feet.
the things that tell you exactly who and what you're looking at, to focus on the feeling of a piece
instead of its likeness. I leaned into my cowboy roots too, and my love of myth, giving these forms
hooves, bodies built to hold something much more intimate and fierce. Why abstraction?
I find that realism gives all the answers. The fingernails are there, the curl of the hair, the glint
in the eye, but abstraction makes room for questions. I'm interested in the less comfortable side of
being human, physical ecstasy, emotional trauma, the parts that don't resolve neatly. My friend and
mentor, Malcolm Smith, he teaches ceramics here, once told me,
that abstraction slows the read. It slows our understanding of what's happening. It asks for more time,
more investigation. That's exactly why I build hybrid forms and why I keep trying to give shape to the
invisible. This is the largest piece that I ever created.
In both bodies of work, I am always looking to give form to the invisible, and both bodies have enjoyed
some publicity, but naturally it is the public commissions which thus far have gained the most attention.
So despite my interest in the abstract, I continued to teach portrait sculpture for 15 years, believing
it to be both important and foundational for good art making. I am still shocked
by how frequently art that is sometimes famous violates the basics of anatomy purely out of ignorance.
Perhaps you have seen figures that don't look quite right. And it's good that I kept up my skills because
as most of you know, I have recently had the honor of doing two important figures in IU's history.
For me, these were both special and I accepted both deliberately. Referring back to the title question,
how do I give form to the invisible sides of a person?
Or how do you capture the spirit of a person? And to add to that question, who is worthy of
being memorialized? Because I have the privilege of having an income as a professor, I do not rely on
commissions for my bread and butter. And thus, I don't have to do them. This means I can hold onto my
goals as an artist even when the work is representational. And the invisible is what guides those choices
for me. I have to feel aligned with any work I spend so much time on.
And I don't want to burden the landscape with more commemorative bronzes unless I believe in the reasons
to make the sculpture. I pursued the Kinsey Commission because his research made the world question
what it had decided was normal in terms of sexual behavior. He didn't accept society's normal as fact.
He investigated people's actual experience and reported what he found. That reporting sparked a sexual
revolution.
and made room for a broader, more tolerant understanding of human sexuality. The Kinsey scale showed
that people aren't purely one thing or another. There's a gradient. There's abstraction in that.
I love that. For the sculpture, I knew that realism would be the right way to honor both the man and
his alma mater, to place him among the other memorial sculptures on campus. I also wanted to involve
the viewer directly
I placed an interview chair beside the piece and made sure Kinsey's gaze would meet the sitter's eye
to eye. That's the invisible part, the experience of being seen. I speculate, and I've witnessed, that
people's reactions to sitting in that chair echo their own comfort or discomfort with their relationship
to sex. Try it sometime.
Also, the title of this piece, which I put here, is one of the questions from his 330 questionnaire.
When it's warm outside, do you prefer to sleep in the nude? All right. All right. Good job. So there's
been real controversy about this piece. The day after the unveiling, I was harassed across every web-based
platform I'm on for over a year.
to the point that the Bloomington PD had my address on file and my kids had to strip location data from
their devices. It made me confront my choice to memorialize him. Some accused him of being a pedophile
and a predator. I did my own research and came to believe those accusations misread his methods and
are not founded. I believe the Kinsey Institute's work is essential and its researchers are some of
the bravest, kindest people on campus.
My next commission was Ryan White. And by the way, both this piece and Kinsey were made possible by
Dr. Billy Arbor, who's here. Amazing. I competed for the Kinsey commission and was selected.
I worked on it. Bill funded, helped fund that piece.
And then he came to me and said, let's do another one. I think we should do Ryan White. So he is 100%
made that possible. And he wants to do more. Okay. So Ryan brought a different set of challenges. He
was loved by the world and became famous enough that everybody had seen images of him. And most terrifyingly,
unlike Kinsey, Ryan's immediate family
was alive and involved with the sculpture. And they would know immediately if I hadn't gotten him right.
And in his case, that included capturing the invisible. I hesitated before taking this one on. In addition
to the challenges of his fame and family, there were other issues. His age, young kids are hard to sculpt.
The ravages of AIDS and what that had done in terms of his growth in his body.
which was normal but also not normal. And there were a lack of usable photos, which was essential. I
had only one profile photo from either direction. But I could feel something when I read his autobiography.
I could feel his spirit. And when I can feel something, I can sculpt it. I decided to do it, to make
the invisible visible.
For Ryan, that meant giving him physical form on IU's campus and finding a way to carry his message
forward too. I knew I needed to show the sparkle in his eyes, his kindness and his strength. These were
essential and ephemeral qualities I had to capture in his likeness. His unassuming manner, his frank
call for people to be better and to do better towards one another,
which genuinely changed how the world understood HIV and AIDS. I've spent hours over years studying
how to sculpt pupils and irises to carry soulfulness into a portrait. For Ryan, that mattered more than
almost anything else in the piece. Showing his mom this piece is absolutely, cry, one of the highlights
of this experience. She cried for four minutes when she came into my studio.
and it has solidified for me the purpose in making commemorative portrait sculptures. I also built in
an action to this piece. The public loves interacting with art and I didn't want Ryan to fade into the
background of campus. I partnered with IU Dance Marathon on a series of prompt cards
Students now pass notes of encouragement to each other through the sculpture. There's literally a slot
and there's a set of cards with prompts. You can go right now. I encourage all of you to go write a
note and leave it and it will be posted online and you can also take notes of encouragement when you
visit the sculpture. It captures the same thing I circle back to in my work and what I tell my students.
Being human is difficult. Just keep going. Don't give up.
tomorrow will be different than today. Now, you're going to get a sneak peek of my next project, which
might come to life in Bloomington next year. This one will bring both halves of my practice together.
It will be representational in one sense and abstract in another.
The Eternal Vine was selected for the Trades District in Bloomington through the CCC Lilly Grant. It's
going to be the Indiana grapevine shaped into a wandering, circling Ouroboros, cast in bronze, 18 feet
wide and 10 feet tall. This piece holds a few things at once. First, its construction is based on modern
technology
It will require 3D scanning and CNC technologies to create it, fitting for a piece sited in a tech park.
Second, it represents Indiana's natural landscape. I hike a lot. Grapevines are native here, the kind
that they snake through the woods like snakes through the trees on a forest walk. And third, it's local
histories. Actually, if you go back, this is the emblem for the Showers Furniture Company.
from tree to trade was their logo. And they were the largest furniture manufacturer in the 19th century,
and they were the innovators of veneer, just super cool. It's also good entrepreneurship for the tech
park. But lastly, it's a two-sided symbol. It's a symbol of renewal, a snake shedding its skin, and
it's a warning against overconsumption
against ignoring the natural world and the people in it in the name of greed. This was my proposal
originally. Someday I still want to do a fountain. We're not doing a fountain. Instead, it will look
something like this. So I build a small model and then enlarge that through different
renderings with Photoshop and this. I'm supposed to get a contract any day now. We'll see. That's why
I can show it to you. I don't have a contract. Okay. Last, well, almost done here. To come back to my
own personal work. The Vine isn't only something I'm building for a tech park. It shows up in my studio
work too as material and metaphor. This piece is called Use Your Words.
It's built from real vine woven through wrestling figures drawn from ancient Greek wrestling statues.
Think Hercules. It's about the importance of communication and personal relationships and in politics.
The idea that fighting physical or otherwise isn't the answer. And I want to close with one more piece.
This one is called a sleep in the boat. It's one of my favorites. It's four feet.
by nine feet. All of my beasts are about nine feet large. It's a woven willow basket cradling a resting
figure, a mother curled in on herself about to give birth. It's about resting in the middle of creation,
even the act of making a sculpture, a life, anything. We need to pause in order to move forward. A place
It's a place to lay your head down before the next thing begins. With Kinsey, the invisible thing was
his research, the truth of people's actual sexual histories hidden behind. Oh, it's gone. Last slide.
Hidden behind what society had decided was normal. With Ryan, it was his courage and kindness.
in the face of extreme fear and discrimination. With the vine, it's the metaphor itself. Greed, renewal,
warning, all carried inside a form that looks at first like a beautiful piece of nature. In each case,
the invisible thing already existed. You just couldn't see it. My job as an artist is to bring form
to the invisible. Some of what's invisible doesn't have a name yet though. That's where abstraction
lives for me.
Not because I'm avoiding the truth, but because I haven't found the words for it yet. Clay let me hold
that unnamed thing before I could speak it. It still does. This is why I teach both in my classroom
and why I think both matter. Realism teaches you to see clearly and render what's already there. Abstraction
teaches you to sit with what isn't resolved yet, to make room for a question before you have the answer.
That's what sculpture has always been for me, not only a monument to someone else's story, but a way
to hold my own. Thank you. And now you get to ask me questions. And after, bye. Hello there.
sculptures cast here in Bloomington? No, they are not cast here. There are, there's a dearth of foundries
in this part of the country. So I actually cast my work in Arizona, which has given me reason to stay
connected to my Arizona family too. But it makes it complicated. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I think you said you had only one photograph of Ryan White. And could you tell us how old was he at
that time? Well, I had more. I had probably 300 photographs. I had only one from this profile when he
was 13 years old and one from this profile when he was 16 years old. So I was having to adjust his dimensions
and then having to guess
many things about how he looked. And it took three months to get that face right. And it still wasn't
right three weeks before his mom showed up. So I had a mini, my husband knows, I wouldn't come home
until he was breathing. It was hard. It was a lot of work. Yes.
Hi there, my name is Katie and my husband is an abstract painter and so this is where this question
comes from because I remember meeting him and not knowing how do I even approach abstract artwork and
then talking with my parents who are very like what you think of like blue collar and they're like what
is what is going on here you know so I was wondering you know what sort of advice or feedback do you
give to people whether it's students or people you interact with about
you know, how to interact with abstract artwork, whether it's, you know, like me, I wasn't unsure. I
think for some people I've met, including my parents, they feel intimidated by it. Like, what do I even
do with this? So just any guidelines you give the folks to interact with abstraction. I love that. That's
a great question. And what I do is I say, don't try to understand it here. Just how does it make you feel?
How do the colors make you feel? How do the lines make you feel? Where in your body do you feel, like
if you notice like a Franz Kline painting, it's just black, right? But it's got like this kind of violent
energy. So like, what does that do in your body? And then does that tell you something about what the
piece is about? It might. But yeah, it's all about listening to the physical sensations of the body.
One other little thing, so for when I teach figure sculpture, the way I teach students how to get into
the emotion of a piece is we practice, we have a stand and I'll have everyone shout out a feeling, right,
like sadness, and then they have to move their own bodies into that feeling. So that then you have to
sit there yourself, you don't just say it, tell a model to do it, you put your own body
in the position. And then you're like, oh, and then you can stand back and look at it. And you're like,
it's round. Round shapes are softer, sadder. Triangle shapes have energy. They go north. So shapes have
different squares and rectangles are solid. So even just a basic shape can give you a feeling. And if
you notice in paintings or in sculptures, they'll have directional energy. And you can deduce from that what
the feeling of the piece is about. I'd just like to know where around campus we can view your sculptures.
Yeah. Well, just down the hall here in the reading room is Ryan White, right by the fireplace,
place of honor. And then the Kinsey sculpture is behind Lindley Hall. But like on your way to the science
building, it's kind of hidden up there. It also lights up at night.
so you can go see him and visit him at night and sit in the chair and tell him your sexual history.
Hello. I'd be interested to know if there are some projects that take more time or what kind of time
do you allocate maybe for each kind of project and why? Yeah, that's a good question. Ideally, I have
about a year for every project just mentally. I think Kinsey was a two-year process.
Ryan was a one-year process. But again, as I said, I ended up with only three months to sculpt it. It
depends often on the deadlines. But yeah, I need at least six months, generally speaking. And it depends
on the scale of a piece as well. But I love having at least a year. I love just to start projects and
just have them sit in my studio. And then I can come back and you see it differently every day. So the
more time I have, the better it'll
It'll be, and you have to be in the right place mentally for Ryan. I had to not sculpt Ryan when I was
anxious or when I was worried about what people were going to think of the sculpture. I had to literally
really only approach the piece with confidence and otherwise I would mess it up. Well, I'm just going
to jump right in on that question and add a second.
level, do you work on more than one thing at a time? And how do you get your mind into that place of
realism, abstraction? Well, like right now, so I've worked very hard on Ryan all year, and that's really
just wrapping up. And what I've noticed in myself is I need a break from realism.
So I'm starting to, I start, the easiest way for me is I do large scale drawing in my studio.
So I'll do, I put up giant panels of vinyl and pastel, and I just kind of like work it out, or I'll
work with smaller maquettes just to get back into my feelings. But yeah, I'll usually have two or three
things going at one time. But if it's large, I don't have a huge studio, so I can only do so much at a time.
The dream, if anyone has a warehouse or a barn, they wanna, so I could have multiple parts, but yeah,
that's how I work. I have a comment and a question. The comment is, as I parked at the Atwater Garage,
so I have to walk past the Kinsey statue, so I'll have to see if I'm brave enough to sit in the chair
after today's meeting. Yes, you do. You gotta try it. It's different.
The question is, it's been a couple of years, but we had the director of a group in Salisbury that they
have the sculpture garden. And the type of work that they do there, is that anything that can dovetail
with what you're doing, or is it just very different? No, it's very similar. I mean, it's all iron.
Generally speaking, they're iron and aluminum. Actually bringing a class to sculpture trails this fall,
that was Jerry, probably.
And that's wonderful. They make all different types of work, but it's great because it's outdoor. It's
a wonderful public, like for new and professional artists, you go and can cast your work there in iron.
Iron is a different process than bronze. I'm not gonna go into all of that right now, but yeah, I hope
to do a piece with them someday. I don't know what it would be though.
How old were you when a light went out of your head, and you said, I'm going to be a sculptor? And then
my other question is, at what point did you involve Ryan White's mother in Cigna Added? That must have
been kind of anaerobic for you. Well, the story, I love the story of, so when I was young, I was always drawing.
but I was always frustrated. So I was someone who would, wanted to be an artist, thought, hoped, maybe
I was an artist, but was only able to copy things that I, you know, and I would open the book, I would
get like the books on her, how to draw an eye and how to do all this. So I remember actually putting
out to the university at age 16, like, I want to be good at a real certain thing in art, please.
And then I went to college and I ended up taking a class from the, you know, you hear about the good
professors and I tried to get into one of his classes and it was full. So I went to another one of his
classes which happened to be sculpture and he happened to have changed his own practice from abstraction
to realism that year. And so I picked up a piece of clay, it was figurative sculpture and I sculpted
a whole body just like that, age 19,
it was all right there. And it was like, I heard the voice of God, like, this is it, you know, kind
of a thing. And it was like, I just fell immediately in love. I think more people have the gift of working
three-dimensionally than realize it. And I tell this to students as well. So like, if you're good with
Ikea furniture, you should try sculpting. You know, if you can imagine what the back of an object looks
like, you should try sculpting because you,
We don't have as many opportunities to discover this about ourselves. We have drawing, sure, but clay
is very forgiving, very fun, very tactile. So that was sculpture. And then, yeah, I've never been more
anxious maybe ever in my life than to share the Ryan sculpture with Ryan and his sister, Ryan's mom
and his sister. And I have also literally never been more relieved
I mean, really, you should talk to Jeremy. I don't know. He might have a better perspective on it. And
or talk to Bill, because it was a journey of knowing I didn't have it right. And I've done other talks
where I show how not right I had it. I show the process. And it really took a lot of effort. But then
when I did have it, I was hopeful
And then when she walked in and just, she was just like, this is it, this is him, you did it. I'm 100%
overjoyed. It was amazing. And it's wonderful because now I walk in, I mean, I'm still, I haven't even
been here much. So I just walked in today and I'm like, oh, he looks so good. You know, I can't believe
I did it. I'm like, I did it, okay.
All right, next one. At one point I had a boyfriend whose father was an artist. And he told me that
he thought artists were always more liberal because they're faced with nothing and have to create something.
Whereas people like doctors are conservative because you do what's been proven to work and so forth.
I gather you think that's correct.
I'm just doing what I do, having, and this is why this talk was interesting to me, having the two sides
of my art practice, right? I see the responses that people have, and I see who tends to like the realistic
work and why, and I see who tends to like the abstract work and why. And not to throw my mom under the
bus, but she still doesn't understand the abstract,
work because she likes to know exactly what's going on. And there is more conservative thinking with
my mom than with some of my friends who are more comfortable with the abstraction. So I think it is
about practicing Henry Moore. Some of you may know the artist Henry Moore. One of the stories I loved
about him was that he would wander the beach and he would pick up objects or stones or bones that looked
foreign to him.
that he wasn't sure about. And he would hold them in his hand, spend time looking until they got more
comfortable to him as a shape. And he would expand his understanding of that shape just by spending
time with it. And this is my experience with otherness, with people I don't understand as well, with
art I don't understand as well. You have to be willing to slow down
take time, not understand it, be curious, and guess what happens? It gets more comfortable. You have
a broader understanding. It's kind of wild. So yeah, I'm kind of an evangelist about it in some ways.
Okay, I gotta stop, but thank you. That was fun.
Melanie, thank you. So many things to like and take home. I love your evangelism. So impressed by your
personal bravery after the Kinsey statue. It shouldn't have been anything you'd have to deal with. But
love the concept of your giving shape to the invisible. And I especially enjoyed the picture of your
grandparents a month before your grandfather's death. They just both look so full of life. So thank
you very much.
In honor of your talk, a donation will be made this quarter to CJAM. I'd like to thank today's volunteers,
Sarah Loughlin, who was supplanted by Natalie Blaze today, Lynn Schwartzberg, Bill Brown, Joy Harder,
Judy Schroeder is the reporter this month, Michael Shermis, Lynn Schwartzberg again, Joy Harder again,
Bill Brown again,
double duty Hank Walter and Jonas Chang on photography. Our next meeting will be here in the Georgian
room, August 11th. President Tracy will be back. Constantine Dirks will be our special guest discussing
the trying times of the Declaration of Independence. Please join us. And Tyler, if you would please
share the graphic for the four way test and please stand if you're able and join me.
of the things we think, say, or do? First, is it the truth? Second, is it fair to all concern? Third,
will it build goodwill and better friendships? Fourth, will it be beneficial to all concern? And fifth,
is it fun?