“[Art is] going to make students better risk-takers, it’s going to make them think outside the box,
because that’s how you change the world.” Crawl, which has so far been students-only. This year at the TechArts festival, a group of four poets—Blake Leland, JC Reilly, Bob Wood and Karen Head, faculty and staff from the School of Literature, Media and Communication—read from their collaborative book-in-progress, to be published this fall by Poetry Atlanta Press. Head, who has published three books of her own poetry, is excited about Tech’s move toward a more artful campus life. “Art teaches people to take risks. Our students are bright and they are motivated, but they’re not especially risk-takers. They want to know what they have to do to be successful, and they want to do that,” she says. “That’s what I’m hoping that the focus on arts will change in our culture here at Tech— that it will bring out creative thinking. It’s going to make students better risk-takers, it’s going to make them think outside the box, because that’s how you change the world.” Art on Tech’s campus might even do something much simpler, but no less profound. When Head first joined the Institute as faculty a decade ago, she rarely saw students enjoying themselves—not so much as a Frisbee tossed between classes. “They didn’t stop, ever,” she recalls. “I think work is really important, but if you don’t have some downtime—if you don’t take care of the rest of yourself and your soul—you’re going to have a problem. Sometimes it’s just a matter of turning the corner and seeing a piece of sculpture that ∂ Steve Chaddick
stops you. It’s walking [into a building] and somebody’s playing a violin. It makes you pause.” Even for those too busy to pause, the effect lingers. “People take it in,” she says, “even if they don’t realize they’re taking it in.” Head, who attended grad school at the University of Nebraska, where a multi-acre sculpture garden displays more than 30 works by renowned artists, was especially thrilled by the installation of Engineered Art this summer: “I stopped and said, ‘I’ve really missed that! Wow! Yeah, that’s great. Can we keep that?’” Bras, who admits some chagrin at his personal lack of artistic talent, also has been stopped in his tracks by the campus landscape’s new additions. His favorite is Doug Schatz’s “Crown,” a circle of red-orange painted steel spikes that appear to be shooting up out of the the lawn in front of the Campus Recreation Center. “I look at that and I think it was made for that spot,” he says. He’s less a fan of “Squirt,” the large orange curlicue that rests on the lawn between the Stamps Student Center and the Skiles Classroom Building, but he knows his dissent is half the point. “I want three students standing in front of that, looking, and somebody saying, ‘I like it’ and somebody else saying ‘I don’t like it.’ Does it have a meaning? I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.” “What I enjoy,” he says, “are the conversations.”
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