CFA Magazine

Like Circles on Water

Alumna Rachel Zsembery told our architecture graduates last May, “Impact comes [when] … organizations are willing to align their operations with their values.” The College of Fine Arts recently agreed on five fundamental values that distill our value to the university and to the world:

• Exploration
• The public good
• Community
• Empathy
• Courage

This collective clarity is expressed in the design of this issue, where images fracture as though seen through a glass kaleidoscope. As our new Head of Art, Meg Bisineer, says below: “Glass does all these things, because you’re not just looking out. At some point, when the light changes, you’re reflected in it.”

In our college, we explore. The STUDIO remains an intersectional site for exploration, such as the pathbreaking project spearheaded by Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh and Chris Donahue. Design junior Michelle Hratko wonders where things come from and finds one answer in a vintage but eternally relevant place: archives. The Center for New Work’s triumphant “Midsummer!”, fresh from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was developed through a process of continuous discovery.

In our college, we pursue the public good and in doing so, strengthen the ties that connect us. New Head of Design Jonathan Chapman’s entire career has circled around one conversation indispensable to the public good: sustainability. He asks, “Why do we throw away things that still work?” And Lenka Clayton’s Collective Biography demonstrates our hunger for community and the necessity of empathy in its communal creation.

In our college, we enact courage by (to quote Meg B.) “staying with the trouble.” As BXA alumna Natasha Patamapongs says, “When there seems to be no path, I dig out a new one.”

And finally, CMU’s stunning collection of George Nakashima furniture makes me think of the poem, “I go among trees,” by the late lamented Wendell Berry.

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

May you be inspired by the commitment, the care and the thoughtfulness of these students, colleagues and alumni. They are determined to be still, to reflect for a moment in this headlong age.

With great admiration,

| Dean Mary Ellen Poole