Alumni/ae Spotlight on the Arts Film • Video • Theater • Photography • Books • Ceramics • Music • Design • Sculpture • Drawing • Painting • Architecture
Julia Powell ‘97 x 1&2 x At BB&N, Julia Powell ’97 was known as a student-athlete. She excelled in lacrosse and soccer, playing on the varsity teams as a freshman. Then came junior year when she tried out for basketball and, for once, didn’t make varsity. “At the time I was pretty upset but it turned out to be a very lucky thing that happened to me,” she explains. Instead, Powell stepped outside her comfort zone, signing on to participate in the school play. Now an artist quickly gaining notice for her bold, colorful paintings, Powell believes being in the play let her see a whole other side of herself she might not have otherwise discovered. Still, for a long time, her identity was focused around classes and sports, as she continued playing through her first year in college. “My artistic side was always a more private, secret thing,” she says. “I was always doodling and watercoloring.” After graduating from Yale, Powell moved to the West Coast to attend Stanford Law School. For a time after law school, she worked for a large corporate law firm. In 2010, she moved back to Cambridge and refocused on painting with watercolors in the evenings after she finished her days at a smaller, local law firm. It was her brother who pushed her to take her painting to the next level. “For Christmas he gave me an easel and oil paints,” she says. “He told me that real, successful painters do large oil paintings and that I should go for it.” With that added encouragement, Powell started painting four hours a day, while still managing her case load at work. Powell undoubtedly had raw talent, but knew she needed more of a basic education in painting. She hired a teacher from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts who taught her many of the skills she’d missed out on since she had never studied visual arts in school. “I took lessons on things like preparing your canvas, not on things like light, shade, or perspective,” she explains. Next came an unexpected lucky break when her old friend, Hollywood actress Mindy Kaling ’97, came to speak at Harvard. (Kaling and Powell had become close while doing the play junior year.) Kaling stopped by Powell’s house and was impressed by her work. “She said she wanted to buy one of my paintings for the set of her show,” Powell recalls. “It was the first piece I sold to a non-family member and it gave me a lot of confidence.” 10
It also boosted her visibility. Powell’s painting of a yellow barn hangs in the office of Kaling’s character, Dr. Mindy Lahiri, on The Mindy Project. Later, Kaling bought a second painting for her character’s office. When Kaling tweeted about Powell’s paintings, Powell’s website crashed due to the increased traffic. Powell started submitting her work to juried art shows, earning some acceptances. Next came commissioned projects. “Every time someone purchases a painting or reacts positively to my art I get a little more affirmation and I push myself to be a little more serious about my craft,” she says. “I started to feel like this wasn’t a hobby anymore and like I might be a real artist.” She gained representation by a gallery in Boston, Abigail Ogilvy, and Powell has also made prints of some of her paintings. She realizes she’s still new to the world of painting and the business of painting, and is looking forward to slowly “moving up the ladder.” Powell has noticed that male painters seem to dominate the top rungs of that ladder and she would like to see that hierarchy change. Gender equity is something she and Kaling have bonded over as Kaling has faced the same biases in Hollywood. With all her success, Powell is in no rush to quit her day job, finding it a nice complement to the often insular nature of painting. The fact that painting hasn’t always been her entire life also helps her keep a healthy perspective. “I’m always trying to push myself to get better like I did when I was playing competitive sports, but I’m much less hard on myself if I don’t get into a certain gallery or art show,” she says. www.juliaspowell.com David McCann ‘62 x 3&4 x David McCann ’62’s first published poem came out of a class in graduate school where the assignment was to write about a work of art. He chose the Statue of David and wrote what he described as a “slightly naughty and whimsical” poem called David. That poem was accepted by Poetry Magazine and awarded a Pushcart Prize. “I thought, wow, this poetry thing is so easy,” he explains of his nearly immediate success. McCann continued to write poetry throughout his career as a professor of Korean Literature, first at Cornell and later at Harvard. His initial exposure to Korea came after college when he served in the first Peace Corps group to go to the country. There he
Please send submissions to alumni_programs@bbns.org or mail to BB&N Alumni/ae Programs Office
learned the language and also became enchanted with Korean poetry—in particular a form of poetry called sijo. Sijo, a poem of 43-45 syllables with a twist on the theme in the last line, could be considered haiku’s long-lost cousin. “Nearly everyone remembers learning about and writing haiku in elementary school,” says McCann. “I always thought we should have a sijo day just like we have a haiku day.” In 2007, McCann wrote his first sijo at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square. “Charlie’s Kitchen was one of my favorite places and I was there one day and I just grabbed a napkin and wrote out a sijo,” he says. That first sijo led to many more, and in 2010 McCann published a collection of original sijo poems titled Urban Temple. The collection was published in English and also in a dual-language Korean-English edition. In addition to writing his own poetry, McCann has translated many volumes of Korean poetry including Azaleas: Poems by Kim Sowol (Columbia University Press, 2007), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2004), and Unforgettable Things by So Chongju (Si-sa-yong-o-sa Publishers, Seoul, 1986).
“I had always just thought of a language as something one used to speak to other people. Soon I was learning how to get at the structure of a language and analyze that structure.”
x1x
In March, Moon Pie Press will release Same Bird, a four-part collection of McCann’s poems. Included are haiku, sijo, and free verse poetry. McCann describes the poems as mostly “about people and places I’ve known.” x2x
McCann retired in 2014 and meets with a local poetry group called The Every Other Thursday Group to workshop their poems. “The last few years have been about getting back to my own work,” he says.
PICTURED: x 1 x Julia Powell ’97 stands in front of her painting, Winter Thaw. x 2 x Afternoon Barn Shadows, done in pastel on paper x 3 x Davis McCann ’62 x 4 x Same Bird, McCann’s new poetry book
x3x
x4x
McCann traces his love of language back to classes at BB&N, particularly Latin. He fondly remembers taking German in ninth grade with Craig Stonestreet. “The whole process of learning a new language was amazing to me,” he says.
11