Coz McNooz Fall 2022

Letter from the Director coz mcnooz fall 2022

Hello from the Director’s Desk!

We are happy to bring you a new issue of the Johnston Alumni Newsletter, in which we share developments in the Center. We’ve got lots going on, so I’ll be brief.

This year, we welcomed a new batch off first year students who are already active in the community. Taking Johnston seminars, creating new collectives, sharing their passions and learning new ones; a lot of this might sound very familiar to you. They have brought new energy and new perspectives to community meeting, porch parties, and classes.

Seminars this Fall focused on art, activism, community organizing, sexuality, biology, Yoga, wellness, graphic novels, European Football and a number of independent studies. In the Spring and May Terms, we’ll offer courses in psychology, literature, media, wilderness education, art, and storytelling. In the May term, a course on Southern California Museums will attract many students, as will our media studies seminar on the Salzburg campus! In the pages below, you’ll hear from one alum who taught this semester; we are so thankful to share with current students the knowledge and experience of our alumnae.

Vintage Johnston returned to form, bringing two hundred guests, raising money to support the Student Project Fund. You’ll hear from one student about how they have used these funds to support their unique educations.

The work of maintaining a place like Johnston in the current climate of higher education is challenging, but worth it every day.

All best, Tim

vintage johnston

SPEECH

BY JOHNSTON ALUM

CRAWFORD BANKS

My name is Crawford Banks, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to speak to you tonight so I can give back to the Johnston Center who gave so much to me.

I grew up in San Antonio, TX and attended an all-boys private military academy for the first ten years of my academic life. I was required to wear a uniform with ranks every day, attend drill practice, and keep my hair off my collar... as you can see, I’m still doing a great job upholding their military standards. Aside from these strict rules, traditional values, and educational rigor, we had chapel every morning. Our headmaster would stand at a podium in front of the student body, explain the background to a certain film, and proceed to click play on a giant projector. We’d watch films that were supposed to act as a daily moral lesson, and most everything I learned about morality, inclusion, spirituality, etcetera during my upbringing came from watching these movies.

Filmmaking may have lived in my subconscious as a dream for a long time, but I didn’t become aware of it until my junior year of high school. At that point I was in public school and really struggling to figure out how to survive in my south Texas town without playing football or doing drugs which I had had prior problems with. I needed a spark of passion. I soon found it in creative writing, which led to me begging my grandfather to buy me a video camera and I began making short films with a small gang of friends who were also uninterested in sports and drugs.

Through a frenzy of what seemed like God inspired events, I wound up at the University of Redlands and was accepted with open arms into the Johnston Pro-

gram, where in my first week I had already started a band and put on a show at the annual Orientation week open mic with hair that was even longer than it is now. I chose the Johnston Center because it had what I had been wanting all along, an educational program that allowed me to take the reins. It was the sort of curriculum that I had never heard of but always fantasized about while in school.

I was going to have the opportunity to solely focus on what I was passionate about and work like hell to achieve it. Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for and the reason we are here... The Johnston Student Project Fund... This fund offered me the opportunity to accomplish the near-impossible, create a feature film from scratch, no budget, no people, no equipment. Let me just start off with the basics on what it takes for one person to get a feature film off the ground... location scouting, casting actors, finding crew members, gathering props and film equipment, transportation services, figuring out how to feed everybody, knowing how to direct those actors and what shots to get, budgeting, scheduling, production designing, wardrobe, makeup, even knowing where you’re going to store all of the equipment and house people at the end of the day. It’s about as complicated as brain surgery, and I’m positive any brain surgeon who tries to undertake making a movie will tell you that. The foundational thing one needs besides determination and motivation to be able to complete all of the objectives that fall under this list of starting up a creative project is money... and sadly, being a college student with only a work study job on campus, that was the one thing I was lacking.

One of my professors recommended that I apply for the Student Project Fund and I did. I wrote up the grant essay and next thing you know, I had 850 dollars to spend. Though 850 dollars is not much in the grand scheme of things, it was a lot more than what most of my donors were offering me, and it was just the correct amount of money in order to pay several of my crew members who were crucial to the project. This money stemmed excitement and a sense of relief in me.

Later in the process of pre-production, it came to my attention that food was going to be one of the most expensive feats when it came to getting the production going. Through advice from another professor of mine, I teamed up with one of my fellow Johnston students, Michael Johnson, who had just completed teaching a restaurant course to other fellow students. He was thrilled when he saw the opportunity

to teach again about catering, and to provide delicious cuisine in bulk. We came to Johnston yet again to request the funds to buy all of the ingredients it would take to feed an average of 15 bodies a day providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Other Johnston students came to aid by becoming part of Michael’s Film Catering course for school credit, and off they would go to Bekins basement to cook vast quantities of meals for our production. We graciously received a thousand dollars for grocery expenses through the fund, and I can’t say there was one slip up throughout the entire process of making the film where feeding everyone was an issue thanks to Johnston’s generosity.

Johnston not only provided me with its support through money, but by fostering connection with its supportive members and their ability to collaborate. What we have here is special, I’ve known it ever since I first walked into Holt and met a circle of zany, friendly, and expressive spirits begging me to attend school with them. Not only did I have students on my catering team, I had them on my set crew. I had professors who looked out for me in every way offering advice and putting me in contact with important people and business owners throughout the community of Redlands. I even had Johnston alumni such as City Councilmember, Denise Davis, go at bat for me when it came to taking our cameras to the streets and not having to worry about local law enforcement. All of my film endeavors have truly been a family affair, but none with such strong bonds as the one the Johnston Program aided in. It wasn’t just a family we built within the cast, crew, and Johnston, but the whole city of Redlands ended up coming together to create something grand.

Because of my combined studies and resources that the Johnston Center offered me throughout my time here, I’ve been able to create more purposeful, profound stories that relate to that young, confused, and sometimes mentally unhealthy boy trying to make meaning of this sometimes rather nonsensical life through such an incredible art form. The Beethoven Method, the title of our film, is now a fully completed 1 hour and 55 minute film that is currently running the festival circuit internationally and is boosting my career further into success, and it wouldn’t have been possible without our program’s donors.

Thank you for having me speak tonight, what I have today is only a result of people like you and countless others who reach out to lend a kind hand to a young person like myself.

alumni seminar - marin summer 2022

“A seminar on old Freud?” you ask, “Isn’t that about eighty years out of date?” Well and good, but here’s some thoughts. Freud—superannuated, obsolete, even despised —is everywhere in our culture; he is both in the wastebasket and in the air simultaneously. The unconscious, repression, subliminal memory, projection, transference, sublimation, the crucial importance of early childhood, childhood sexuality, family-narrative psychology: He’s become part of our common sense.

The pitch: “Dora,” Freud’s sessions with an eighteen-year old woman named Ida Bauer (analysis 1900, published 1905), quickly became infamous for his aggressive interpretation of her “illness,” and for her resistance to it. We plan to have at least five closely interconnected areas: the “Dora” case itself; fictions that stretch its boundaries and unpack its significance (e.g., Heidi Julavitz, The Uses of Enchantment & Arthur Schnitzler, “Fräulein Else”); a “Dora” film; Richard Strauss’s opera "Salome"; current psychologists’ take on the case and its consequences, especially about transference and trauma; critical, especially feminist, writing about the case; and constant consideration of “interpretation” itself. In fact, “Dora” highlights much of what we are grappling with in the #MeToo era, including important Title 9 issues. It helps reveal to us the complexities of our current moment, and perhaps offers some ways through the cultural thicket that we're experiencing. All of these will be in play during our week. Plus a wine-tasting with winemaker and honorary Johnstonian Wes Hagen!

led by bill macdonald & kim Middleton, ‘96

Seminar reflections

"After nine of these alumni gatherings, from University-wide European travel and music-events in the early 1990s to last week's immersion in our theme-and-variation texts and experience, I prize most the renewal of old friendships and making new history together. But I also realize how much I treasure the uniqueness of how each of us thinks, simply thinks, about any of our subjects: the highly individual styles, the voices, of people I have known from a few months to almost fifty years. I can hear each style in my mind's ear, the characteristic ways of beginning, of phrasing, of formulating, of mixing intensity and humor, of disagreeing yet giving space, of welcoming. A blessing—and, once again, Lucky me.”

- Bill Macdonald

"So often, the day-to-day, discursive mishmash of the world dulls my ear and flattens my mind. It makes it easy for me to forget that something else is possible when we come together. I was gobsmacked, on an hourly basis, by the sheer abundance of profound thought, casually tossed around, off the cuff, without a thought to ownership or ego. I'm sure I spent the vast majority of the week nodding and smiling and laughing out of the pure joy of being in your collective presence, and being witness to the event. To be reminded of complex thinking, meaning-making, and the willingness to wrestle with our own and others' humanity, to step outside the blandness and frustrations of the everyday—to be reminded that there IS an outside— is truly a gift.”

- kim middleton

When Bill invited me to be a part of the Dora seminar, I was very nervous about participating. Johnston is important to me in many ways, and I didn't necessarily feel equal to the task of representing "Johnston now," particularly because I worry so much about Johnston's flaws and failures. Predictably, pretty soon after I'd arrived, I realized that, in fact, I was not supposed to be a representative for anything--I was just there to participate like everyone else. Probably the most striking part of the entire experience was how much it just felt like a slightly older, slightly wiser version of the best Johnston seminars I've participated in—a confluence of people from vastly different disciplines, points of view, and experiences coming together to work on figuring something out together and getting into (usually) good-natured, good-faith arguments along the way. I think there's not necessarily a final way to resolve the tension between what I love and what I don't love about being a member of Johnston, but there certainly are a lot of moments when it makes a lot of sense to me why I became a Johnston student in the first place. Negotiating Dora, a book I don't like, with people I came to like a great deal over the course of the week was one of those moments, I think.

- sadie forkner, ‘25

kathreen green lecture TESS TAYLOR

On Tuesday, November 8th, 2022, the students of the Johnston Center enjoyed an informational Kathryn Green Alumni lecture in Holt lobby from alum Tess Taylor, ‘87. Organized by student and intern of Tess Taylor, Ally Kynev, ‘23, Taylor described how she was able to find success in the music industry following her years in Johnston and explained to students what they needed to do in order to ensure success with their Johnston degree in postgrad life.

Taylor, who is the president of the National Association of Record Industry Professionals (NARIP 1998) and the Los Angeles Music Network (LAMN 1988), promotes career advancement, education, and goodwill in the record industry and related music fields. With NARIP, Kynev and Taylor host music pitch sessions, inviting music supervisors, synch agents, and managers to come and listen to clients' music in a more intimate setting with the goal of signing them. When recalling her time in Johnston, Taylor says: “Johnston gave me an early taste for what it would be like shaping my life and destiny.” (Tess Taylor 2022). Using the structure of Johnston to her benefit, Taylor was able to create a degree that would enable her to become one of the nation’s leading authorities on careers in recorded music. Throughout her lecture, Taylor inspired students aspiring to be musicians or work in the industry by giving tips on how to market themselves, taking audience questions, passing out copies from her forthcoming book, and inviting everyone in attendance to one of her music industry brunches. Music industry brunches, hosted by Taylor, are chock full of managers, musicians, and agents to name a few.

In her parting words with the students of Johnston, she reminds them: “when you speak, you lead” (Tess Taylor 2022). As one of the first Kathryn Green alumni lectures to return in person following the pandemic, Taylor’s presence amassed nearly 30 people, making it one of the largest turnouts for an alumni lecture in quite some time. At the end of her lecture, Taylor stayed behind for many hours speaking with students Izzy Jones ‘25, Jack Wells ‘25, Elle Jarecki ‘24, Avery Tyler ‘24, Angela Bozman ‘24, and intern Ally Kynev ’23. Taylor addressed any questions the students had, invested time in learning about their musical interests, and provided support when students asked about how to get their foot in the door for jobs in the music industry. In her time visiting Johnston, Tess Taylor was able to leave students feeling motivated and inspired, ready to pursue their career goals with the confidence that their Johnston degrees will enable them to reach these goals.

-Ally Kynev, ‘23

art & everyday life

jnst course promoting diversity

& inclusion on campus

This semester the Johnston Seminar Art and Everyday Life, taught by alum Danielle Wallis, submitted a grant proposal to the University’s Inclusive Community and Justice Fund (ICJF) for an interactive art event focused on highlighting the experience of people of color (POC) on Redlands’ campus and getting feedback from POC students on their experiences. On November 9th the class hosted an event supported by their grant funding, in the hopes of starting the “uncomfortable conversation” around POC experiences on campus, as well as grab the attention of administrators with the power to make changes. The event included live data collection from walkers-by and the results were everything the class expected, in that many students of color on campus share similar experiences. The class asked questions like: “Have you seen improvement in racial diversity among the student body over time?” and “Is diversity valued in the curriculum of your classes?” Though many agreed diversity was valued in their curriculum, they still didn’t feel heard and supported as much as they would like by the University overall. The class agrees that curricular representation that reflects the cultures and practices of the student body is essential. However, based on the survey results, it’s clear that the University, which states its value of diversity and inclusion openly and often, needs to improve on the ways in which its supporting and acknowledging its students of color and their particular needs and struggles. We hope that our class project helped bring awareness of this need to the administration and that the conversation can move beyond statistics into action. We are continuing to take feedback and the survey is up on campus.

- Melody Miranda, ‘26

KG COURSE: DIGITAL CREATIVITY TAUGHT

BY JEFF WILSON

Imagine, if you will, 14 students working on 14 projects, using 14 different mediums and 14 different programs for 14 weeks.

I am the arbiter of chaos.

Earlier this year, our esteemed director asked if I was interested in leading a Digital Creativity seminar. I jumped at the opportunity to wrangle a herd of autodidacts around the digital realm and the experience has been so fulfilling. My daily class activities consisted of learning, researching, and solving each new hurdle for each student’s passion project.

Our first field trip was to visit Iyan Barrara-Sandri (JC 08) in the new Maker Space where he taught us about the 3-d printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines. Then we negotiated our contracts and set to making stuff. Dharma taught us to model in Fusion 360, Ferg invited folks over to the APH (Ann Peppers Hall) lighting studio to scream in front of her camera, and Zak created game levels using Unreal Engine.

‘25

Our seminar culminated in an art exhibition in the Strand Gallery for the last two weeks of class with an opening reception on Friday, December 2nd. There were videos on digital frames, photography, 3-d puzzle games, sculpture, cyanotypes, fashion, video games, zines, identity campaigns, refreshments, and live music.

I could not have asked for a better cohort of creatives, and I might have learned more than them.

- Jeff Wilson (JC 93)

Mollie Kuffner,

rhys curtis, ‘24

student travel experience

This past summer, through Johnston funding, I was afforded the opportunity to attend a Fashion Design program at Central Saint Martins in London. CSM is a renowned arts institution. I spent a total of three weeks in London. I learned about draping, fashion illustration, how to make technical drawings, how to properly research, and more. I was able to access facilities and information that simply wouldn’t be available at Redlands. I studied under CSM professors and attended seminars hosted by industry professionals. One of my favorite parts of the program was being able to study alongside students from all across the world. It was so interesting to hear about their backgrounds and what led them to the program. The program culminated with a gallery style showing of all the work we had produced in the course, as well as a final project to create fashion illustrations for 6 cohesive looks. Overall, my experience in London and at CSM was extremely unique and only made possible by the Johnston program that we all know and love.

- rhys curtis, ‘24

help us find the next generation of jnst students!

Who Better To Identify Potential Johnston Students Than Alums?

We want to find more students who seek an individualized and integrated college experience, who value community and collaboration as well as academics, and who are passionate about their interests

in short, people like YOU. If you know of high school students who might be interested in aJohnston-style education, please encourage them to visit Johnston.

And, if you know of a high school whose pedagogical model seems similar to Johnston’s, please let our admissions coordinator, Maggie Ruopp (margaret_ruopp@redlands.edu) know about it!

design by kate chase,

on behalf of the johnston center, thank you for your support!