October
31, 2003
Front-Page
News
Picture This Diane Arbus: Family Albums,
the exhibition now on display at the Mount Holyoke College Art
Museum, is featured in a look back at Arbus's life and art
in the October 23 issue of the Valley Advocate. In "The Freak
in Me," Daniel Oppenheimer details Arbus's early years,
her evolution as an artist, her suicide in 1971, and Susan Sontag's
1973 essay on her work that became the centerpiece of her book
On Photography. "Her non-commercial work, for which she was
awarded Guggenheim fellowships in 1963 and 1966, oriented toward
the unfamous—a couple on a park bench, a young Republican,
identical twin girls—and the marginal: dwarves, drag queens,
circus performers," Oppenheimer wrote. He concluded that
"Arbus continues to fascinate, thirty years later, for a
number of complementary reasons. The photos are amazing to look
at, startling even now, when images of the downtrodden and the
marginal have become the common property of advertisements and
movies. And they are formally innovative, marrying the conventions
of nineteenth-century portrait photography—face-front, amongst
one's things, subject in collaboration with photographer—to
the seamy concerns of the 1960s." Accompanying the article
are several photographs from the MHC show, and a sidebar about
the exhibition. Family Albums has also been featured in the New
York Times and the New Yorker.
Admission Accomplished Melissa Simon '04
is one of five U.S. college students profiled in "How I Got
into College," an article in the September issue of Careers
& Colleges magazine. The segment, titled "The Volunteer,"
reads, "Melissa Simon is the daughter of an international
business consultant, and she spent her childhood tagging along
from one foreign shore to another—she was born in Virginia,
but she has lived everywhere from Boston to Beijing. But wherever
Simon has gone, she has managed to look around, get to know the
community, and pitch in to help. She started a religious school
for expatriate Jewish children in China, cleaned up a community
garden in the Czech Republic, and worked at an orphanage in Israel.
And when she and her family landed back in California for her
last two years of high school, Simon got right to work again,
serving as president of a club that fights hate crimes and homophobia.
When she applied to Mount Holyoke, her commitment to social causes
really made an impression." Simon reflects on her work for
social action and social change, and the weight she believes those
efforts may have carried on her application. "I had experience
working with a lot of different kinds of people, and I think that
really helped when I applied to Mount Holyoke, where diversity
is so important," she said. Simon's admission counselor,
Giulietta Aquino, is also interviewed. "Her experience helped
show me that she would fit in here—she's a go-getter
in terms of meeting people and in terms of community service.
I like to learn about what students are passionate about, and
test scores just can't measure that," Aquino said.
Eleanor Smeal Visits A campus visit by
Eleanor Smeal, head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, was covered
in the October 21 issue of the Republican. Smeal appeared on campus
in support of the "Meet Up. Mobilize. March." tour to
promote the March for Reproductive Choice scheduled for April
25, 2004 in Washington, D.C. According to the article by staff
writer Sandra Constantine, Smeal warned that the change of a single
justice on the Supreme Court could spell the reversal of the watershed
Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. "We are extremely
concerned with what is happening. Somehow the public has to be
woken up," Smeal said. "If you cannot control your own
body, if you cannot make decisions, you cannot attain equality."
The talk, sponsored by the Mount Holyoke Feminist Collective,
drew an audience of about 100 people.
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