Last Friday, April 11, third and fourth-year Grinnell students received accolades for their works submitted to the Bachelor of Arts Exhibition. Eleven students received awards in six categories for pieces ranging from sculpture to photography.
Delia Salomon ’14 received the Inez Louise Henely ’14 Best in Show award for her piece, “Tweeting,” which consisted of fourteen sheets of handmade paper featuring watermarks of text taken from the Twitter homepage. Salomon’s piece combined a longtime interest in the aesthetics of typography with newly acquired paper-making skills, which allowed her to work with more freedom than her previous embossing methods had permitted. The concept behind her piece, which juxtaposes traditional and modern methods of communication, is rooted in the laborious and time-consuming process of papermaking she practiced in her senior year.
“The main conceptual thing behind this piece was mostly the clash between new and old. That probably sounds super cliché, but making paper has been around for centuries … I was very interested in comparing a very old, traditional, hand-worked process with Twitter,” Salomon said. “… I just think it’s interesting to look at how forms of communication have changed, and also how appreciation for the instantaneous has changed as well.”
“It was just great for everybody to have a chance to celebrate everybody else’s work,” said Hannah Fiske ’14. “It was great to see how many people came out, even if they weren’t directly connected to the arts.”
Fiske received two awards of her own for her work: the Louis Glenn Zirkle Memorial Prize for Sculpture for her work, “Enshrined,” which featured cast models of braided hair in clay, and an SGA Purchase Prize for her piece “Back and forth etc.,” a monotype print which overlays the routes she has traveled between home and school with images of places she has lived. She sees the second piece as a self-portrait of her time at Grinnell.
Numerous other students also received prizes. The Tammy J. Zywicki ’93 Memorial Prize for Photography was awarded to Patty Murphy-Geiss ’14. Juror’s Merit Henely Awards were awarded to Danielle DeSantes ’15, Na Chainkua Reindorf ’14 and Amy Linder ’14, as well as to Brian Buckley ’14, Dylan Fisher ’14, Mikey Maiorana ’12, Eden Marek ’15, Leah Meyer ’15 and Murphy-Geiss collectively, for a collaborative piece. Division of Student Affairs Purchase Prizes were awarded to Linder and Will Elsas ’14. In addition to the one to Fiske, a SGA Purchase Prize was awarded to Marek.
Correction: The April 11 S&B article “BAX: A Culminating Celebration of Student Art” included a misspelling of 2014 BAX juror Ben Heywood’s name, as well as incorrect biographical information. The article erroneously stated Heywood is an artist and photographer and is based out of London. While Heywood is in fact English, he presently lives in Minneapolis, where he is Executive Director of The Soap Factory, a gallery and alternative art space. The S&B apologizes for these errors.
