COA VISION
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The faculty, students, trustees, staff and alumni of College of the Atlantic envision a world where people value creativity, intellectual achievement and diversity of nature and human cultures. With respect and compassion, individuals construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations.
COVER: Great Duck Island By Virve Hirsmaki ’09 Mixing untreated and dyed wool with found objects, Virve Hirsmaki spent the summer creating a 6-by-8-foot mural illustrating the ecology of Great Duck Island. Says Hirsmaki, “I have a longlived interest in the visual arts; at COA I have broadened my horizons to include the sciences. The constant search for phenomena and names by the scientific community furthers the aesthetic appreciation of life in all its forms, giving me the inspiration to conceptualize the world in greater depth and dimension. Art has shown me how to see these phenomena with the appreciation they deserve. The interdisciplinary nature of COA’s education allows me to combine different, complementary visions for a fuller and more complex view of the world.” Hirsmaki created this mural with the help of a Rothschild Grant given to faculty-student collaborative projects at COA. She worked with Dru Colbert and John Anderson.
BACK COVER: Katrina Zarate ’07 from her senior project, “En-Visioning Art, Theory, and Literature.” For her project, Katrina Zarate created a multimedia installation of distorted imagery within the Ethel H. Blum Gallery that transported the reader into the dark mysteries of dysfunctional vision and brought us through eye damage to new levels of sight and insight.
The transition from summer to autumn at College of the Atlantic is a passage from glory to promise. The flowers in our seaside gardens fade away, but we who work here all summer don’t even notice. For in the place of blossoms come such an array of students— sporting bright, clean faces and scruffy beards, coifed hair and black nail polish—shy and bold and confused and confident, sometimes all at the same time. There’s an eagerness and an intensity that COA’s first year students all share. Having entered a new world, they are ready to make it theirs. They are ready to grapple with this thing we call human ecology; to make sense of it—and ultimately, somehow, to make a life in it. In four short years—sometimes less—these students will be creating work that will be comparable to the work that is in this studentcentered issue of COA. The cover and story are by undergraduates; the art spread features a senior project, several students are featured in the news section. But can you even tell? Whether it is a passion for economic justice fueling an independent study that becomes ground-breaking legislation such as LD 1810, or whether it is a more personal quest for understanding the impact of distorted vision that becomes a gallery-full of poetry, theory, painting and sculpture combined into a mixed media installation, our students take their work seriously. Very seriously. Thirty-five years ago, the glory of the summer of 1972 turned into the promise of the first term of a brand-new college. It seems that the idea of basing a college education on democracy and freedom that seemed so radical back then—that still seems radical—really does work. Students step up to the responsibility. They take charge of their education, they take charge of their educational institution, and truly, they fly.
Donna Gold editor, COA