Academic Year 2014-2015
Fall 2014
Mary Weatherford is an increasingly well-known artist represented by some of the top galleries in Los Angeles and New York. She combines paintings on canvas with neon designs and often creates murals for specific locations, demonstrating a remarkable ability to overlap deep, sultry colors in abstract paintings that radiate light, energy and movement. Critics praise the acclaimed artist for her achievements in layering vinyl-based acrylic paint known as Flashe, and for her distinctive use of deliberately draped neon lighting tubes that further electrify her symphonic, colored landscapes. Her work “The Claremont Mural,” painted specifically for the College, is now hanging in the Athenaeum, where she was present and spoke to the audience at the installation dinner.
August Kleinzahler is a prize-winning poet and essayist who has taught at Brown and Stanford as well as at CMC. Critics frequently have remarked on the sharp, chiseled quality of his verse a quality of concreteness influenced, perhaps, by Kleinzahler's own years as a laborer in Alaska before he picked up a teaching credential and his poetry career began to flourish. His poetry has earned the respect of considerable figures in contemporary poetry today and his other distinctions include a Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. During his time on campus, he met with students and faculty and performed a reading/lecture of his work at the Athenaeum in addition to teaching two courses—one on the interactions of European writers, directors, musicians, and artists with Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, and one on advanced creative essay and prose writing.