Urban Agenda Magazine, Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Washington’s HQ Museum Home to the new Discovery History Center

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URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

FALL 2018

LAMBERTVILLE, NJ A Mano Galleries at the Five & Dime 42 N Union St

People’s Store Antiques Center 28 N Union St

Lynn Kurtz 36 N Union St Gordon Hass 71 Bridge St

A Touch of The Past Antiques 32 N Union St

Pirela Atelier 18 N Union St

Gallery Piquel 24 Bridge Street

Midiri Antiques LLC 35 N Union St

Highlands Art Gallery 41 N Union St

Peter Wallace Antiques 3 Lambert Ln

Panoply Books 48 N Union St

America Design (vintage industrial) 5 S Main St

Mix 10 N Union St

Smith 10 Church St

BCDG (Bucks County Dry Goods) 5 Klines Ct Stage in Time 9 Lambert Ln Foxy Red's 24 North Union St Ten One Gallery 22 Bridge Street

F o r For a l ia s tlist o fofp participants a r t i c i p a n t s and a n d activities a c t i v i t i e svisit v i sour i t owebsite: ur website:

CONTENTS

36

12 Ten Questions for Education Reformer Wendy Kopp

BY WENDY GREENBERG

6

Girls Who Code

6

BY TAYLOR SMITH

12

Urban Spirits Thinking Outside the Box Seats: Opera Theatre of Montclair’s Educational Outreach

BY DONALD H. SANBORN III

18

Building a Championship Culture: AD Pat Hobbs and Rutgers Have Big Hopes in the Big Ten

FALL 2018

32

4

48

BY DONALD GILPIN

24

Destination: New Brunswick

BY WILLIAM UHL

32

Urban Books: Novel Approaches To The College Search

BY STUART MITCHNER

34

It’s Cider Time!

BY LAURIE PELLICHERO

36

The Earth Is Calling — Though Not a Memorial, Maya Lin’s Newest Works Pay Homage to Einstein and the Dinky

24

BY ILENE DUBE

42

42

Fashion & Design A Well-Designed Life

On the Cover: Washington’s HQ Museum in Morristown, home to the new Discovery History Center.

Photography by Chris Weisler/MCTB.

URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

FALL 2018

48, 50

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: APPLE PRESS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM; WENDY KOPP/WIKIPEDIA; NEW BRUNSWICK/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM; HERMES HEURE H MEDIUM WATCH/ HAMILTONJEWELERS.COM. MAYA LIN AND DIRECTOR JAMES STEWARD/PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM; RUTGERS BIG 10; COURTESY OF GIRLS WHO CODE;

17

n m

u t Au

& Presentations @ 10 am The Seeing Eye

October 6 at 11 am

Walking Tour in Morristown Saturday, July 15 only

&Discover Presentations @ 10People am A Match Morristown: and Made Places Alexander & Eliza Hamilton: in Morristown Walking Tours in Morristown with author/historian Bonnie-Lynn Nadzeika

The Seeing Eye

October 13 at

Saturdays: July 15 and 22, August 5 and 12

Curator’s Presentation at Morristown National Historical Park

Spotlight on Alexander & Eliza Hamilton-Treasures from the Collection Walking Tour in Morristown Saturday, July 29 only Saturday,Discover July 15 only 11 am Victorian Morristown

register: morristourism.org * ToursKaren are $15.00 per person withTo Victorian lifestyle expert Ann Kurlander 973-631-5151

Alexander & Eliza Hamilton: A Match Made in Morristown ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Walking Tours in Morristown Saturdays: July 15 and 22, August 5 and 12

October 20 at 11 am

Discover NJ Shakespeare Theatre’s The Artist Baker Curator’s Presentation at Morristown National Historical Park Reggie the Ghost Nicky and Paige L’Hommedieu * Jeanne and Joe Goryeb Spotlight on Alexander & Monte Eliza Hamilton-Treasures from the Collection with Bonnie and staff Saturday, July 29 only

To register: morristourism.org * Tours are $15.00 per person October 27 at 10 am Discover the Ford Mansion’s Ghosts 973-631-5151 with Ghost hunter Gordon Thomas Ward ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To register: morristourism.org/tours Or pre-register and pre-pay on Eventbrite.com The * Tours are $15.00 per person, except 10/20 tour is $20.00 Artist Baker 973-631-5151 Nicky and Paige L’Hommedieu * Jeanne and Joe Goryeb MCTB received an operating support grant

the State of New Jersey, MCTB received an operating support grant from from the State of New Jersey, Department of State.

Department of State.

Ten Questions for Education Reformer

Wendy Kopp (And how Princeton played a role in Teach For America and Teach For All)

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TEACH FOR ALL

Wendy Kopp, founder of the successful education access nonprofit organizations Teach For America, and more recently, Teach For All, was inspired by her time at Princeton University — as a 1989 graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She realized she had access to a good public and college education, but not everyone did. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to make a quality education accessible to all.

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF TEACH FOR ALL

Changemakers in sneakers! Teach For America alum T. Morgan Dixon started GirlTrek, a health revolution to empower African American women and girls in the United States to lead healthy lives and become change agents in their communities.

From a programming language group, to a robotics laboratory, to plans for a regional ArtsakhTechExpo, Teach For Armenia fellow Ara Harutyunyan is working hard to bring technology into his classroom.

an ambitious vision of whole communities in every part of the world that are enabling all their children to have the education, support, and opportunity to shape a better future for themselves and all of us. To get on a path to this, we’re focused on producing more extraordinary leaders, by growing our network particularly in low-income countries and supporting network partners to scale with quality. We’re also focused on supporting network partners to orient towards a broader set of outcomes for children, so that the educators we’re developing are growing students as leaders with the competencies, awareness, agency, and dispositions to navigate a turbulent economy and solve increasingly complex problems with empathy and compassion. Finally, we’re focused on enabling these locally-rooted leaders to learn from each other across borders, in order to accelerate progress.

As the spouse of another successful education reformer, raising four children in New York City, what do you make sure is happening in your own children’s education?

One thing we keep realizing — in our work and at home — is that society often underestimates kids. They’re capable of so much more than we realize. I’m not sure we always succeed, of course, but we try to meet our own kids with high expectations and give them the space and autonomy to explore their interests and find their way. I also feel so fortunate to be able to expose my kids to my own work. I just returned from visits to Teach For Ghana and Teach For Nigeria and took my 14-year-old son along. He was simply amazed by the extent of the needs these organizations are addressing, by the brilliance and commitment of their fellows. He told me he’ll never see the world the same way. What a gift to be able to have this exposure at this age!

You recently visited Armenia, which is just one of the 48 countries in the Teach For All network. What hope did the trip give you for the future of education reform?

Teach For Armenia has been attracting some of Armenia’s most promising recent graduates, half of whom themselves grew up in the rural communities where they work. These fellows are so inspiring — they’re throwing themselves into extremely under-resourced, economically depressed, remote contexts and working to put their students on a path to developing their economies and becoming the teachers and educators who will shape a better future! Their deep immersion in their communities and commitment to fostering students’ leadership were so inspiring to see.

Describe a typical work day for Wendy Kopp.

I’m not sure there’s a typical day, but wherever in the world I happen to be I’m typically up early to respond to emails and go for a run. Much of my day is spent in meetings, whether in-person or by video, which are either about getting on a path to realizing our vision or securing the resources we need to keep going! My favorite working days are the ones I get to spend out in the field — visiting the network partners and their teachers, alumni, and community partners and learning from their innovations.

What do you want readers to know about Teach For All, education reform, and access? How can they help? How can the average person get involved?

A quarter of Princeton residents were born outside the United States, so odds are that many of your readers have a personal connection with one of our network organizations. Check out our network partners (https://teachforall.org/network-partners) and learn about the locallyled, globally-informed movements they’re working to build to ensure that young people are equipped to shape a better future for all of us!

Social entrepreneurs don’t receive nearly the support that for-profit entrepreneurs do, so I always encourage people interested in our work to consider supporting them, especially those in low-income countries.

Readers can also follow us on social media (Teach For All is @TeachForAll, and I’m at @WendyKopp) to stay up-to-date on our efforts and find out more about how to get involved.

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When I shared my proposed topic with him, he said, “You can’t propose an advertising campaign for teachers as your senior thesis.”

But he said that if I proposed mandatory national service, he’d be my adviser, because that was his lifelong passion. Having no real option, I said okay. He signed on as my adviser, and four weeks later I turned in “A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher Corps.” I was pretty sure this wouldn’t go over too well, but in fact he loved it!

He thought the thesis was great, but he also thought there was no way I was actually going to be able to start it. He told me I was absolutely delusional.

What is Teach For America’s most important contribution to society at this point?

Leadership is the core of all solutions. Our biggest contribution has been channeling a diverse group of not just a few, but many of our nation’s most educated and capable young people into the arena of expanding opportunity for children in urban and rural communities, and developing their leadership.

More than 50,000 young people have joined Teach For America over these last 30 years, and they haven’t left the work — 85 percent of 50,000 Teach For America alumni are still working full time to address these challenges, whether in education (two-thirds of them) or to take on some of the surrounding issues from sectors like policy and public health. And they’ve assumed real leadership roles in the fight for change — as veteran teachers, school principals, school district leaders and superintendents, social innovators, elected officials, and more.

In part because of the energy, leadership, and entrepreneurship they’re contributing, we’re seeing student outcomes change across whole communities. Take Camden, for example. When Teach For America alumnus Paymon Rouhanifard assumed the superintendency there, as a recent New York Times article noted, “23 of the city’s 26 public schools were on the list of New Jersey’s worst performing, [and] eight are now.”

Beyond Paymon’s extraordinary leadership, Teach For America alumni played significant roles in contributing to this progress. Five of the eight leadership team members in the district were Teach For America alumni, as were the leaders of functions including high school academics, human resources, restorative justice, and trauma-informed care. More than a quarter of all public-school principals in Camden — 10 of 38 — are Teach For America alumni. Paymon and his team embraced a collaborative approach: they engaged students, parents, and community stakeholders and developed partnerships with the mayor’s office and the local police department as well as a host of community organizations and companies. Together, they increased the district graduation rate from 49 percent to 70 percent while cutting the dropout rate from 21 percent to 12 percent and halving the suspension rate. Camden is one of so many examples of meaningful progress we’ve contributed to all across the country.

PHOTO COURTESY OF TEACH FOR ALL

Following your thesis, how did Teach For America actually get off the ground? What were the funding challenges? And what would you tell others about how to make an idea a reality?

The day after I turned in my thesis, I boiled it down into a 30-page prospectus and sent it to 30 business executives — people quoted in articles on the topic of education, and others who led big companies I’d heard of. A few of those executives actually agreed to meet with me. One incredible executive at Mobil agreed to make a seed grant of $26,000, and the chair of the Business Roundtable, which had made a commitment to strengthening public education, gave me free office space in Manhattan.

Still, it was slow going. I would send out 100 letters and just two people would agree to meet with me. But one thing led to another and by the end of the summer after my senior year I had met a lot of people – educators and potential donors. Virtually everyone I met told me this was a great idea but that it wouldn’t work. They didn’t believe the college students would do it. This was the one thing I had reason to have confidence about, having just been a college student.

So my plan became to show people that college students would do this. A few other recent grads had joined me, and we set out to find students at a diverse set of 100 campuses to spread the word through a grassroots campaign (flyers under doors, since there was no email back then!). About 2,500 people applied within four months.

Fred Hechinger at The New York Times wrote a column about this, remarking at this incredible outpouring of idealism from the Me Generation. Supporters came out of the woodwork, inspired to help

enable our generation to channel our energy in this direction. Donors committed the necessary funds, veteran urban and rural teachers clamored for the opportunity to train them, school districts agreed to hire them. So, one year after I graduated from college, I was looking out on an auditorium full of Teach For America’s first 500 corps members.

“Today l got the opportunity to visit the Krisan Refugee Camp in the Western Region of Ghana and was literally blown away by the power of community and diversity. These kids are brilliant and they’ve learned to live with each other though they come from more than 10 different countries on the continent,” said Doe Dotse of Teach For Ghana, on Instagram.

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FALL 2018

What makes a good teacher?

I’ve seen that truly transformative teachers operate like the most extraordinary leaders I know. They build relationships with students and families, work with them to set ambitious visions for the future, and go to all ends to overcome any obstacles in the way to achieving goals that will put them on a path to these visions.

Teach For All is a global network of partner organizations committed to the principles of recruiting, training and developing, and placing participants, and accelerating the leadership of alumni. What was the seed of Teach For All, and where do you see it 10 years from now?

About 12 years ago, I began meeting people all over the world who were interested in developing something like Teach For America in their countries. Ultimately, this led to the launch of Teach For All as a network of independent organizations all committed to galvanizing the rising generation of leaders in their countries to channel their energy towards ensuring all children fulfill their potential. I couldn’t have imagined then that a decade later there would be 48 network partners from Teach For India to Teach For Nigeria to Teach For Lebanon and Ensina Brasil.

Two years ago we stepped back in a network-wide, inclusive process to consider our 25-year vision. We came together around

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TEACH FOR ALL

Changemakers in sneakers! Teach For America alum T. Morgan Dixon started GirlTrek, a health revolution to empower African American women and girls in the United States to lead healthy lives and become change agents in their communities.

From a programming language group, to a robotics laboratory, to plans for a regional ArtsakhTechExpo, Teach For Armenia fellow Ara Harutyunyan is working hard to bring technology into his classroom.

an ambitious vision of whole communities in every part of the world that are enabling all their children to have the education, support, and opportunity to shape a better future for themselves and all of us. To get on a path to this, we’re focused on producing more extraordinary leaders, by growing our network particularly in low-income countries and supporting network partners to scale with quality. We’re also focused on supporting network partners to orient towards a broader set of outcomes for children, so that the educators we’re developing are growing students as leaders with the competencies, awareness, agency, and dispositions to navigate a turbulent economy and solve increasingly complex problems with empathy and compassion. Finally, we’re focused on enabling these locally-rooted leaders to learn from each other across borders, in order to accelerate progress.

As the spouse of another successful education reformer, raising four children in New York City, what do you make sure is happening in your own children’s education?

One thing we keep realizing — in our work and at home — is that society often underestimates kids. They’re capable of so much more than we realize. I’m not sure we always succeed, of course, but we try to meet our own kids with high expectations and give them the space and autonomy to explore their interests and find their way. I also feel so fortunate to be able to expose my kids to my own work. I just returned from visits to Teach For Ghana and Teach For Nigeria and took my 14-year-old son along. He was simply amazed by the extent of the needs these organizations are addressing, by the brilliance and commitment of their fellows. He told me he’ll never see the world the same way. What a gift to be able to have this exposure at this age!

You recently visited Armenia, which is just one of the 48 countries in the Teach For All network. What hope did the trip give you for the future of education reform?

Teach For Armenia has been attracting some of Armenia’s most promising recent graduates, half of whom themselves grew up in the rural communities where they work. These fellows are so inspiring — they’re throwing themselves into extremely under-resourced, economically depressed, remote contexts and working to put their students on a path to developing their economies and becoming the teachers and educators who will shape a better future! Their deep immersion in their communities and commitment to fostering students’ leadership were so inspiring to see.

Describe a typical work day for Wendy Kopp.

I’m not sure there’s a typical day, but wherever in the world I happen to be I’m typically up early to respond to emails and go for a run. Much of my day is spent in meetings, whether in-person or by video, which are either about getting on a path to realizing our vision or securing the resources we need to keep going! My favorite working days are the ones I get to spend out in the field — visiting the network partners and their teachers, alumni, and community partners and learning from their innovations.

What do you want readers to know about Teach For All, education reform, and access? How can they help? How can the average person get involved?

A quarter of Princeton residents were born outside the United States, so odds are that many of your readers have a personal connection with one of our network organizations. Check out our network partners (https://teachforall.org/network-partners) and learn about the locallyled, globally-informed movements they’re working to build to ensure that young people are equipped to shape a better future for all of us!

Social entrepreneurs don’t receive nearly the support that for-profit entrepreneurs do, so I always encourage people interested in our work to consider supporting them, especially those in low-income countries.

Readers can also follow us on social media (Teach For All is @TeachForAll, and I’m at @WendyKopp) to stay up-to-date on our efforts and find out more about how to get involved.

FALL 2018

URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

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<h1>Laying the Groundwork for Future Female Tech Leaders</h1> <h2>By Taylor_Smith Photos courtesy of Girls Who Code</h2>

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URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

{

“Girls Who Code was founded with a single mission: to close the gender gap in technology.”

}

URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

13

<G>

irls Who Code was founded by Reshma Saujani six years ago with the aim of closing the gender gap in computing classes in schools across the nation. Girls Who Code is now 90,000 strong in all 50 states, building the largest pipeline of future female engineers in the United States. Its Clubs Program, Campus Program, and Summer Immersion Program help to create accessible pathways for Girls Who Code alumni to enter into university and workforce computing programs.

The organization also offers continued learning opportunities for Girls Who Code alumni to enhance their professional computer science skills.

Saujani’s original vision for the nonprofit organization has proved to be effective. Girls Who Code alumni are entering higher education and choosing to major in computer science or related fields “at a rate of 15 times the national average,” according to the organization’s website, www.girlswhocode.com. Even more noteworthy, “African American and Latina alumni are choosing to major in computer science or related fields at a rate of 16 times the national average.”

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square and Twitter, says, “diversity and inclusiveness are essential in every industry, and they are critical in tech. Building companies that are as diverse as the people who rely on our products is not only the right thing to do, it is good business.

Girls Who Code helps us to create a stronger community around girls and women that will empower the next generation to be leaders in technology.”

The community created by the Girls Who Code programs aims to build a supportive sisterhood of young students and alumni who are better prepared to meet the demands of computing job opportunities.

Statistics show that while tech jobs are among the fastest growing in the country, girls are falling behind. “While interest in computer science ebbs over time, the biggest drop off happens between the ages of 13-

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17,” as noted on girlswhocode.com.

Leslie Landis, a student from New York City who participated in Girls Who Code, says, “Before Girls Who Code, I never saw myself as a coder or an engineer. Girls Who Code gave me not just valuable coding skills, but a valuable opportunity to see myself in a whole new way. Now, I see myself as someone who can take on a big industry regardless of the gender gap. I am a more able, confident, and ambitious girl with big dreams and I want to share that with everyone around the world.”

The Clubs Program is organized by grade.

Groupings are usually girls in grades three to five and six through 12. According to Girls Who Code website, the Three-Five Clubs can be run entirely unplugged, with optional online aspects.

The curriculum has girls read and discuss a nonfiction book, Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World. They then work together to complete thematically-related challenges.

Princeton Public Library has teamed up with the Princeton High School division of Girls Who Code, hosting bi-monthly meetings in their second floor Technology Center. The group is open to elementary through high school students from all area Princeton schools with an emphasis on early conceptual programming and inclusivity. Meeting dates, times, and scheduling are posted at princetonlibrary.org.

Arta Szatharmy, a Girls Who Code educator, believes that the program is particularly impactful for middle school-aged girls.

Szatharmy facilitates programs in the Bucks County region and frequently utilizes the facilities at Bucks County Community College. As a retired teacher, Szatharmy has taught both high school- and college-aged students but emphasizes that girls ages 10-14, “haven’t yet made up their minds whether they want to pursue STEM fields or computer programming. In this sense, they are like sponges and soak up the Girls Who Code curriculum rapidly.”

Szatharmy notes, “Girls Who Code addresses girls who are

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homeschooled, as well.” Under her tutelage, young girls have learned to program a robot and how to write a game for a skyscraper in Philadelphia.

Liz Palena, a youth services librarian at Plainsboro Public Library, recently initiated a local Central New Jersey Chapter of Girls Who Code for grades three to six and seven to 12. The afterschool programs will include 12 sessions over the course of three months, meeting once per week at Plainsboro Public Library.

Personal laptops are not required for attendance as girls will have full access to the library’s many computers. Thanks in part to Palena’s efforts, as well as the current director, Plainsboro Public Library will be receiving an additional 10 new laptops and three 3D printers. Girls Who Code afterschool programs are entirely free to attend.

Palena says, “it’s important to introduce elementary- and middle school-aged girls to computer coding in order to let them know that this is an option.”

“What people also don’t realize is that coding can serve as a creative outlet,” she adds. Girls have used their computer coding skills and applied them to everything from fashion design to the fine arts and art installations.”

When asked about outreach, Palena says she mainly worked with school librarians at the local Plainsboro public elementary, middle, and high schools. She notes that STEM education is a particularly important part of the culture at the Plainsboro public schools, having gone through the system herself.

“Back then, I was one of four girls on the school’s robotics teams. It’s since changed a lot. The Plainsboro teachers are really pushing for boys and girls to get equally involved in STEM activities.”

Palena will be following and closely leading the Girls Who Code curriculum over the course of the three months beginning this September.

Amazingly, she also balances her full-time job commitments at Plainsboro Public Library with completing her graduate degree in information science at Rutgers University.

“I started out teaching after finishing my undergraduate degree, but found that I wasn’t connecting with students in the ways that I had hoped,” she says. “I had always worked in the school library when I was in college and Plainsboro Public Library is my hometown library and that seemed like a better fit. As a librarian, I was obtaining the level of outreach with young people that I had strived for as a teacher.”

But boys don’t have to miss out on all the fun! For example, Plainsboro Public Library offers a very popular Junior Engineer Club.

This September, the club will be using the 3D printers for the Annual Egg Drop Off. Boys and girls will use the printers to build a wellengineered cage to hold one egg. The cages will then be dropped off the roof of the Plainsboro Public Library. The winning design will keep the egg perfectly intact.

To find a Girls Who Code Club and/or campus activities in your area, visit www.girlswhocode.com/locations.

Learn to code, have fun, and join the sisterhood!

A History of Empowerment In 1814, Emma Hart Willard founded the country’s oldest independent school for girls in grades 9-12. Today, Emma Willard School is the leader in girls-first thinking—life at Emma means a girl holds every leadership position.

LEARN MORE at emmawillard.org

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For girls ages 6-14, visit emmawillard.org/summer

FALL 2018

URBAN SPIRITS 1.

2.

Perched on a hill in the historic Lambertville/New Hope area, our renovated 1740’s barn looks out on farm fields, animal pastures and the surrounding preserved park.

The Barn is available for private and corporate rentals to support the community and educational mission of the farm.

To inquire about rentals: reservations@thebarnatgravityhill.com.

3.

PRODUCT SELECTION BY JOANN CELLA

4.

1., 4. Elephant in the Room Design: Featuring fine consignment and retail furniture, home decor, and more. Vintage Mark 18/18 crystal decanter, $70; Set of four vintage crystal double old fashioned glasses, $30; Gold leaf tray, $45. “Cynthia Johnson” pillow, $185; Vintage Hazel Atlas cocktail shaker and glasses, $180; 1225 State Road (Route 206), Princeton. 609.454.3378; www.elephantintheroomdesign.com.

2. Sourland Mountain Spirits: Local, fresh, handcrafted, small batch spirits produced in a picturesque setting. Drawing from an aquifer at the base of the Sourlands range, our spirits are made using pure water filtered through micro-fractures in the geologic

FALL 2018

formations of the mountains. The distillery’s location surrounded by farms gives us the opportunity to develop a program of incorporating the freshest ingredients into our carefully crafted spirits. 130 Hopewell Rocky Hill Road, Hopewell. 609.333.8575; www.sourlandspirits.com.

3. Ironbound Hard Cider: Ironbound creates well-structured, perfectly balanced, complex ciders from 100 percent fresh-pressed apples grown in New Jersey and surrounding states using no product from concentrate, no added sugar, and no added sulfites. You can find their ciders in more than 600 bars and liquor stores throughout the state of New Jersey. 908.9404115; www.jerseyciderworks.com.

URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE

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Mezzo soprano Madison Marie McIntosh as Hansel, soprano Laura Kosar as Gretel, soprano Stacey Canterbury as The Gingerbread Witch and audience volunteers as The Gingerbread Children at a preview performance of Hansel and Gretel at Van Vleck House & Gardens in Montclair in June 2018. Photo by Heather Bobeck.

Thinking utside the Box Seats

Opera Theatre of Montclair’s Educational Outreach

BY DONALD H. SANBORN III

New York has the Metropolitan Opera, while Pennsylvania has Opera Philadelphia.

As such, it is tempting to wonder whether a company in New Jersey has a “phantom” of a chance of making a significant contribution to the scene.

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The cast of Rossini's La Cenerentola being surprised backstage at The United Way Theatre in Montclair on opening night by international tenor superstar Vittorio Grigolo (kneeling in center) in September 2017. Photo courtesy of Opera Theatre of Montclair.

O

pera Theatre of Montclair, the 2018 winner of the JerseyArts.com People’s Choice Award as Favorite Opera Company, and the first New Jersey company to be invited to join the New York Opera Alliance, chooses to answer that question by concentrating on making the art form accessible — to performers and young audiences.

The company’s website succinctly summarizes its three-part mission: “Performance opportunities for singers. Social justice through arts accessibility. Musical education outreach.”

“We do a lot of outreach performances in libraries, churches, and senior citizen centers,” says Mia Riker-Norrie, Opera Theatre of Montclair’s founder and general director. “We try to provide exposure to the art form, and accessibility to everyone. We feel that art really should be a right.”

Making young people a part of the process is a key component of this endeavor.

“We try to use as many students as we can in our productions; high school — sometimes even middle school — students helping out with ushering and tech,” Riker-Norrie says, though she admits that the company has not “delved into the social justice element nearly as much as I would like to do. I would love to go more into underserved communities.”

It is no secret that opera tickets can be expensive. What may be less well known is that there are companies that charge singers a fee to perform, as well as audition.

“Like other classical musicians, many singers train for most of their lives to do this work,” Riker-Norrie observes. “Unfortunately, companies frequently prey upon young as well as older underutilized singers — people who usually don’t have any money in the first place, and are desperate to perform. I have an ethical problem with that. It’s important to give singers opportunities to audition free and to sing for pay, whatever your budget.”

“Pay the singers — what a concept!” quips Joyce Korotkin, who designs sets for Opera Theatre of Montclair. “That’s something I love about this company: they are very fair to singers. Universally, emerging and even more established

Soprano Mithra Mastropierro in the role of Abigaille in OTM's inaugural production, Verdi's Nabucco, at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Montclair. Photo by Lianne Schoenwiesner.

visual artists are constantly paying for the opportunity to submit work to juried shows or to have their work be in a show.” Riker-Norrie agrees, “So we’re giving singers an opportunity to do a full role, or at least sing something in concert, and use their craft.”

INTERACTIVE OPERA To an extent, Opera Theatre of Montclair even offers members of the audience an opportunity to perform. The company has created an abridged, interactive production of The Magic Flute. “We call for volunteers from the audience, primarily kids,” Riker-Norrie explains. “Obviously they don’t sing, but we give them masks and let them be the forest animals.”

At the opening of the Mozart opera, “Tamino is being chased by an evil monster, so we have a dragon costume,” Riker-Norrie elaborates. “We’ll pick somebody who’s really enthusiastic, and once the scene is over I say, ‘Now you have to go sit down!’” Interactive versions of other productions in the company’s repertoire have been devised, including Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel.

“There’s one thing I would change about the interactive Hansel and Gretel,” Riker-Norrie admits. “The Sandman puts Hansel and Gretel to sleep, and the Dew Fairy awakens them. We thought, ‘Why don’t we get some bubbles, and we’ll hand them out to kids as they come in, with instructions not to use them until we get to this point?’ So I’d say, ‘Go on now, and wake up Hansel and Gretel.’ It was a little scary, because I had just realized that there would be a competitive mentality forming. We had poor Hansel and Gretel lying there, costumes drenched (with bubbles), and the kids started competing with each other to wake them up with the bubbles. I had to say, ‘Okay, they’re awake now.

You can go sit down!’”

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Soprano Nicole Guberman as Papagena poses with a young fan after an outreach performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute at Cedar Grove Public Library in April 2018. Photo by Heather Bobeck.

A curtain call at the Verona Community Center Ballroom in July 2018 following an outreach performance of Hansel and Gretel. Pictured from left: Mia Riker-Norrie, narrator; Laura Isabella as The Sandman; Raymond Storms as The Witch; Nathan Bahny as The Father; Allyson Carvajal as The Mother; Christine Rauschenbach as Hansel; Laura Kosar as Gretel; Barbee Monk as The Dew Fairy. Photo courtesy of Verona Public Library.

MUSICAL EDUCATION OUTREACH With Theresa DeSalvio, Korotkin designed the sets for Opera Theatre of Montclair’s first fulllength production, Verdi’s Nabucco, which was presented in January 2015, two years after the company was launched. “I’d always had a fantasy of doing scenery for theater,” Korotkin recalls. “I heard there was a new opera company in town, and I started looking into them. I went to a fundraising dinner they held, where I met Mia and a few other people. I thought I’d like to get involved in some way.”

When Korotkin met DeSalvio, “we discovered that we both were painters, and had gone to the School of Visual Arts at about the same time. So we had the same background, skill set, and the same aesthetic approach to things. We turned out to work very well together; we put the elaborate scenery for Nabucco together in two weeks.

From that point on, I remained on as their scenic designer.” Korotkin has subsequently designed the sets for all of the company’s main stage productions. For Hansel and Gretel, Korotkin is excited to be collaborating with David Gillam, a renowned theatrical costume and set designer.

A grant from the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence (MFEE) enabled Opera Theatre of Montclair to do workshops and perform their interactive Magic Flute at Renaissance at Rand Middle School, where Korotkin is the art teacher.

“When I started with this company, I learned that they have an educational outreach, so I asked if they wanted to come into my school and do a

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performance,” Korotkin says. “Mia said, ‘We’d love to.’”

Korotkin appreciates that Opera Theatre of Montclair aims “to educate children, as well as adults, about the joy of opera.

Opera has always been considered, in people’s minds, as a highbrow, very expensive thing that many, many people have no experience with, and feel they have no access to. At Renaissance, our focus always has been on the idea that when you expose young children to something early in their lives, they take ownership of it forever. If they are not exposed to it, then it becomes something that other people have, but they don’t.”

When the company performed at Renaissance, “they put on a fabulous show,” Korotkin enthuses.

“My school doesn’t have an auditorium, so all the kids — about 275 — were sitting on the gym floor for approximately an hour and a half, watching this opera in total silence, absolutely spellbound. You could hear a pin drop. There wasn’t a single kid in that audience who misbehaved or had to be moved.

At the end, one student came up to me, and he had tears in his eyes. He said, ‘This was the most spectacular thing I have ever seen! I don’t even have words for it. I’ve never seen anything more amazing in my life!’ That was the general attitude.”

The following year, there was a return visit.

“Our entire seventh grade was going on a field trip to the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center to see a full dress rehearsal of The Barber of Seville,” Korotkin says. “Mia offered to come in and do an introduction to it in the school. We gathered the whole seventh grade in a classroom, General Director Mia Riker-Norrie parking a moving truck and they brought in singers and a keyboard, and on opening night of Handel's Acis and Galatea in Montclair. Mia narrated. Mia narrates fabulously well. She Photo courtesy of Opera Theatre of Montclair. makes it fascinating, and such fun! They told the

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story; singers sang specific parts, and introduced the students to what the opera is about.”

“THE WILDLY WHACK WORLD OF OPERA” In addition to art, Korotkin teaches “an incredibly unique class,” RikerNorrie says. “At Renaissance, it’s required that all seventh graders take an opera appreciation course.”

Korotkin explains, “I started teaching that course with the idea that this old musical form in Western culture would be experienced by seventh graders, and in so doing they would not feel that it’s forbidden, inaccessible to them, or irrelevant. It would be something that’s part of what they grow up with, as their natural birthright in the world, to access the arts.”

“The course’s full title is Introduction to the Wildly Whack World of Opera,” Korotkin continues. “It’s not based on deep musical concepts. I’m not a music teacher, I’m an art teacher who wants to impart the profound beauty of this genre. I connected it to the social studies curriculum, which covers the Enlightenment. My course is a way of bringing Enlightenment concepts to life, in a way kids will understand.”

Korotkin adds that the students “also get to do their own versions of costume and scenic design after having studied an opera. Sometimes I have them write their own operas and perform them. Usually they perform them in rap, because none of them are willing to get up and sing in front of each other, but they love it.”

HANSEL AND GRETEL Opera Theatre of Montclair’s upcoming production is Hansel and Gretel, which will take place at the Central Presbyterian Church in Montclair.

Performances will be at 4 p.m. on September 22, 23, 29, and 30. The production will be directed by Stacey Canterbury, and conducted by Elizabeth Hastings. “It will be fully staged, with costumes,” promises Riker-Norrie.

“We have a 22-piece orchestra,” Hastings adds. “We’ve been trying to get interest in it by doing previews for kids. We played to over 120 kids and parents the other day; we were a hit!”

The idea of adapting the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale into an opera was that

of Adelheid Wette, who wrote the libretto that her brother, composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921), set to music. The opera premiered in Weimar in 1893, conducted by Richard Strauss. “Humperdinck was Wagner’s copyist, so he was very familiar with the Wagnerian style,” Hastings observes. “There’s a lot of that sound in this score.” The opera’s best-known pieces include the duets “Brother Come and Dance with Me” and the “Evening Prayer” (“When at Night I Go to Sleep”).

“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Korotkin says. “There’s always the deeper metaphor that adults pick up on that children don’t. To me, opera is all about the emotions that motivate human behavior. It’s about inter-relationships and deep human issues — with unconscionably gorgeous music.”

Hastings agrees. “Everyone thinks Hansel and Gretel is for kids, but there’s a lot there for grown-ups. When I was a kid, I went to a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan. I didn’t understand half of what was going on, but I loved it! I wanted more, and I hope that kids — and parents, too, who may be intimidated by opera — will get that out of this. It’s a gorgeous score.”

INSPIRING FUTURE AUDIENCES AND PERFORMERS “There’s a violist who was one of my middle school students way back when, and he’s now a professional musician working with our company,” Korotkin says. “I used to play opera in my art class. He would always come right up to the stereo, and stick his ear literally right next to it. He made no art in my class; he just could not tear himself away from the music! I understood what was happening. This kid was totally inside that opera, and I was not going to be the one to pull him out of it. To be sure, years later he ended up playing in our orchestra.”

Hastings recalls, “before I got to know Mia, I had written to her to say ‘I love what you do, I love your logo, I love your outreach, and I love what you do with kids. You’re doing everything right — keep it up!’ A lot of people are intimidated by opera, but Opera Theatre of Montclair has done so much to involve the community.”

To learn more about Opera Theatre of Montclair or to purchase tickets to Hansel and Gretel, visit its website at operamontclair.org. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, all donations are tax deductible.

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BUILDING A CHAMPIONSHIP CULTURE: AD Pat Hobbs and Rutgers Have Big Hopes in the Big Ten

PHOTO BY BEN SOLOMON/RUTGERS ATHLETICS

BY DONALD GILPIN Rutgers is embarking on its fifth year in the Big Ten Conference, and Athletic Director Pat Hobbs, in his third season with the Scarlet Knights, has a clearly defined goal in sight: the creation of a championship culture.

Hobbs refers to his “five-year turnaround plan,” which he adopted when he arrived in November 2015, and he looks forward to exciting developments on the field, in the classroom, and in the institution as a whole as Rutgers’ impact on the Big Ten and the Big Ten’s impact on Rutgers continue to grow in the coming years.

“One of the reasons I was attracted to the job was because Rutgers is now part of the Big Ten Conference,” says Hobbs, who had previously served as law school dean and athletic director at Seton Hall University.

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PROUD OF BEING JERSEY For Hobbs, the key to the success of Rutgers’ teams, as well as financial success for the athletic department and the success of the whole Big Ten enterprise, revolves around building that championship culture. But he

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acknowledges that even with positive attitude and focused investment of financial and human resources, it won’t happen overnight.

“That takes time,” he said, “and depending on the sport it can take a little bit more time. We’re now making the investment that’s required in order to develop our student athletes and provide the coaches with the resources they need so that they can be successful, so they can recruit against the best and develop our students when they come here, and then go on to success on the field.”

After taking charge, Hobbs wasted little time in making two major investments in personnel, hiring head coaches Chris Ash in football and Steve Pikiell in basketball.

He noted the investments in facilities that are accompanying Rutgers’ progress in the Big Ten: the RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center, scheduled to be completed by July 2019, which will feature a state-of-the-art practice facility for the men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling, and gymnastics programs; and this year’s groundbreaking for the Gary and Barbara Rodkin Center for Academic Success, which will consolidate athletic support services and provide a home for men’s and women’s lacrosse and soccer programs.

“We’re really making the investment across our programs in ways that are going to have a dramatic effect in terms of our on-field success as we go forward,” he said. “So we don’t just say we’re going to build a championship culture. We have a confidence about that. And we have a grit about that, and that’s part of being Jersey, right? We’re proud of being Jersey, and we have to make the investment if we’re going to compete against the Ohio States and Michigans of the world.”

BRIGHTENING FINANCIAL PICTURE Though budgetary concerns have been almost as challenging as the daunting competition on the field for Rutgers Athletics in recent years, the financial outlook is brightening. “Our budget and financial picture will continue to improve as we move forward,” Hobbs said. A six-year Big Ten phase-in for Rutgers brings increasing funds to Rutgers each year with the first full-share check from the Big Ten, some $44.5 million, scheduled for 2021 and annual increases anticipated each year after that.

“We become full participants in Big Ten revenue share in 2021, and they’ve positioned themselves well in media rights revenue,” Hobbs said. “But that’s just one source of revenue to us. I say to folks, ‘we don’t have an expense problem, we have a revenue issue.’ Our expenses in terms of our overall budget rank near the bottom of Big Ten teams. We’re not spending at the level of most of the other institutions in the Big Ten, but we’re spending what we need to spend.”

He continued, “We’re very careful about our resources, but as we have success on the field, ticket sales grow and contributions from donors grow. Also, sponsorship dollars to the institution grow, and, ultimately, we get better deals, whether it’s an apparel deal or a media rights deal, all that comes from a championship culture, creating success and then capitalizing on that success as we go forward.”

Hobbs compared himself to a CEO hired to rebuild a troubled business. “When I got hired about two and a half years ago, I told everyone this was a five-year rebuild, not unlike taking over a company that has struggled, making investments that are required to turn that company around. We’re in the middle of year three of a turnaround.”

Excited about the increasing momentum of the rebuilding, Hobbs predicted visible progress in the year ahead and significance success over the next two to three years. “We’ll see some nice success with some of our programs this year, a preview of what’s coming down the road, and by

PHOTO BY BEN SOLOMON/RUTGERS ATHLETICS

T

he challenges are formidable, and the past two and a half years, on the field and off, have been difficult. In addition to overall winning percentages at just around .250 (about three losses for each win) in conference play since 2014, Hobbs also inherited a program afflicted by various scandals entangling two previous athletic directors, football players dismissed from the team for alleged criminal conduct, a suspended head coach, and more.

“When I took the job, I met with the staff on the first day and we talked about the negative feedback loop that we were in, and the need for that to end,” Hobbs said. “There’s lots of different metaphors that people use. ‘If you’re in a hole, stop digging,’ is one. We’re going to think positively, and we’re going to work positively, and we’re confident as we go forward you will start to see more and more moments where we’re performing on the Big Ten level.”

Hobbs emphasized the importance of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Big Ten influence on scholastic matters as well as athletics at Rutgers. “It’s the premier athletic conference in the country, with a great focus on the quality of the academic institutions that are a part of it,” he said. “All of the schools in the Big Ten are part of a consortium, where we share research and faculty work together. It’s the power of many.”

He described research projects underway with extensive collaboration among Big Ten institutions. “The Big Ten receives more research dollars than other conferences. There’s great work going on. There’s collective work in the field of cancer research that’s very significant, and we’re a part of that with our Cancer Institute at Rutgers.”

Hobbs continued, “So there’s the simple pride of membership, but also there’s the real academic work and research that’s going on in ways that are benefiting everyone in the country. It’s something we can all be very proud of.”

The 14 Big Ten Academic Alliance member institutions collaborate on a number of programs, collectively educating almost 600,000 students and conducting more than $9 billion in funded research, from which Rutgers has benefited significantly.

Hobbs went on to discuss the exposure, publicity, prestige, and status that Big Ten membership has brought to Rutgers, affecting prospective students and others. “There’s much more interest in Rutgers University on the part of students applying from states where other Big Ten schools reside,” he noted. “We’re getting more applications from the West than Rutgers has ever seen before.”

He emphasized the national exposure and the positive effects of Big Ten Network media coverage. “Because we’re participating in athletics on the big stage, more people are seeing what Rutgers is all about on a football Saturday. We’re nationally televised every Saturday. Watchers are also seeing our basketball participation and our other sports.”

Traditionally benefiting from strong interest and many admissions applicants from New Jersey, Rutgers, according to Hobbs, now has also grabbed significant attention from outside the state. “The Big Ten footprint,” he notes, represents a population of about 85 million.

“We’re recruiting now at a level we were not recruiting at five years ago,” he said. “Some of the best athletes in the nation are now looking at Rutgers and giving the school consideration. This bodes very well for our performance on the fields and the courts in the years ahead.”

Rutgers Athletic Director Pat Hobbs, shown above in the student section at a football game, is looking forward to a “very exciting football season in 2018.” (Photos courtesy of Rutgers Athletics)

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Head Football Coach Chris Ash at Big Ten Football Media Day. (Photo by Ben Solomon/Rutgers Athletics)

year five we’re going to be percolating along pretty nicely,” he said.

Looking forward to “a very exciting football season in 2018,” Hobbs pointed out the rebuilding that had taken place in the first two years under Ash, but admitted “We’ve not had the success yet that drives ticket sales.”

He did not hesitate, however, to present the solution, with evidence to support his vision. “Winning solves everything,” he said. “We’ve had a significant uptick in wrestling and men’s basketball season ticket sales, and in women’s basketball. As people see more success this year, that picture’s going to look a lot brighter by the end of this academic year. I would say morale is good, and it’s going to get even better.”

Hobbs cited a “great moment” in the men’s basketball team’s performance last spring in the Big Ten Championship Tournament in Madison Square Garden.

“I think we surprised some people by getting into the third round of that tournament,” Hobbs said. “We had very significant wins against Indiana and Minnesota in the first two games, then playing Purdue, one of the top teams in the country, in the third game. We were the talk of the town in a very positive way, whether you turned on sports radio or watched the nightly sports report.

“And that affects income and morale, too. We’ve got a long way to go, but people are working hard. They see success in pockets in ways that get people excited about where we’re going.”

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In looking back over the past two and a half years as athletic director at Rutgers, Hobbs reflects on the pressures, responsibilities, and rewards that come with the job and the particular challenges of Big Ten membership. “There are no days off for the athletic director at Rutgers,” he said. “This is the State University of New Jersey, and we’re very proud of that. We take that as a responsibility, not just to the folks who have attended Rutgers or are at Rutgers, but to the citizens of New Jersey.

We receive tax dollars to support what we do and we want to deliver for the folks of New Jersey.”

He concluded, “I take that responsibility very seriously every day.

I like walking around the state of New Jersey and hearing people speaking encouragingly of the vision, the plan we’re putting forward. When we get to a certain level of success then we can take a deep breath and keep marching, because the rest of the conference is not going to lie back and let Rutgers come in and dominate. We’re going to have to earn every piece of it.”

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View of New Brunswick across the Raritan River, Shutterstock.com.

Rutgers Gardens, courtesy of Yelp.

Rutgers Scarlet Knights football team, 1897, Wikipedia.

The Frog and the Peach, courtesy of Yelp.

Destination:

New Brunswick Nestled by the Raritan River in New Brunswick, Rutgers University is home to a diverse range of history and traditions. An intercollegiate rivalry with Princeton University, a real-life armored and mounted Scarlet Knight, and a romantic ritual connected to the legendary Passion Puddle are all classic traditions — and so is eating a Fat Sandwich, a sub roll packed with enough French fries, chicken fingers, and mozzarella sticks to earn the name. That mix of thoughtfulness and playfulness is everywhere in New Brunswick, and you can find plenty of both in just a day’s travel.

Starting the day at Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus offers a bevy of options. If you’re feeling quiet, the Zimmerli Art Museum hosts eight revolving exhibits at once, ranging from galleries of paintings commemorating the Russian Revolution, lithographs from 19th-century Paris, or photographs capturing everyday working life in 1970s America. The museum’s permanent collection contains over 60,000 works, ranging from 20th-century American sculptures and Italian Renaissance paintings to Soviet nonconformist art.

The PaparazZi Café is also conveniently located nearby.

Venturing from the abstract to the concrete, the Rutgers Geology Museum houses a 2,400-year-old mummy, fluorescent minerals, and a mounted mastodon skeleton. Founded in 1872, the museum has kept its Victorian aesthetic intact as local geologists have donated more and more samples of fossils, rare minerals, and Native American artifacts.

If you’re more interested in venturing outside and appreciating a beautiful day, grab a Fat Sandwich from a grease truck and walk it off in the Rutgers Gardens. Dozens of seasonal flowers are in bloom at a time, and

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WILLIAM UHL

over 20 specialty gardens like the Shade Tree Collection and the Bamboo Forest blanket the expansive garden grounds. Rutgers Gardens is open 365 days a year and is one of the few botanical gardens in the country that does not charge an admission fee. Heylar Woods, adjacent to the gardens, has winding trails through nearly 70 acres, along with features including a stream, an old quarry, and a labyrinth. Be sure to stop by Passion Puddle before you leave campus — old Rutgers legend has it that if student couples from Cook and Douglass dorms walk three times around the pond together, they’ll live happily ever after.

For lunch, the options are similarly diverse. Hansel ‘n Griddle offers snappily-named wraps like the veggie-filled Crop Circle and the cheesepacked Mouse Trap, quesadilla-like crisps, fresh-pressed paninis, and the “Best Wings in Town” (“And we mean that!”, the menu adds). Open from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m., breakfast or lunch are ready whenever you need it. For a more formal sit-down meal, the highly acclaimed The Frog and the Peach is only a 15-minute walk away from Rutgers. For smaller meals, the restaurant offers fancy treats like Chicken Liver Pâté, Za’atar Spiced Flatbread, and Peekytoe Crab Salad; for larger appetites, there’s Black Truffle Ricotta Gnocci, Pork Loin Schnitzel, and Braised Spanish Rabbit. Between its highclass menu and relaxing atmosphere, The Frog and the Peach has a smallcity sophistication to match the abundance of art and entertainment New Brunswick has to offer.

For evening entertainment, New Brunswick has year-round offerings in the many theaters in town. The Crossroads Theatre, “the nation’s premiere

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African American theater,” offers energetic performances, such as the offbeat comedy Back to the Real or the NAACP Image Award-winning musical Fly. Similarly, the George Street Playhouse’s 2018-2019 season is packed with both thoughtful plays, like the courtroom drama The Trial of Donna Caine and The Immigrant, and playful musicals like Little Girl Blue: The Nina Simone Musical, which weaves together jazz singing and civil rights activism.

In addition to its theatrical seasons, the State Theatre New Jersey also hosts performances like classical violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Brooklyn Paramount Reunion Jubilee of Stars, eclectic performer Alan Cumming, and improv comedy duo Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood. Stepping out of the theaters, the streets of New Brunswick are lined with culture from the past and present. The New Brunswick Jazz Project organizes musical performances all throughout the year, with the Central Jersey Jazz Festival taking place mid-September and featuring musicians like Teri Lyne Carrington, Dave

Stryker, and Carla Cook, with venues ranging from the Historic Court House to the open-air stage on George Street.

Before heading home, you can stop by one of the many eclectic restaurants for dinner. The Frog and the Peach’s dinner options are just as formidable as lunch, but KBG, the Korean barbeque and grill, poses a more casual alternative.

Its menu combines Korean classics like kimchi and bulgogi (literally “fire meat”) Image courtesy of New Brunswick Jazz Project. with tacos and burritos, bringing an East-meets-West spin to its savory meals. And for $9.45, the I Want KBG Bowl has everything but the kitchen sink.

However, if you want to recapture that college night-on-the-town feel, Stuff Yer Face has the perfect combination of beer, burgers, and signature strombolis. Its menu boasts over 30 kinds of “bolis,” including the Meatball and Eggplant Boli, the Vegetaboli, Big Mac Boli, Barbecue Chicken Boli, and the build-it-yourself My Favorite Boli. What it lacks in high-class ritz, it makes up for in nostalgia — you can practically taste the youthful energy, looming exams, and camaraderie of college life.

A city shaped both by Rutgers’ students and scholarly educators, New Brunswick bridges the gap between exuberant adventure and thoughtful tradition in its art, entertainment, and food. While you might have missed the chance to meet a college sweetheart by Passion Puddle, there’s still time to take your love to see New Brunswick’s gardens and galleries — right after you get a Fat Sandwich.

Rutgers Geology Museum, Shutterstock.com

Monmouth Museum Holiday Exhibition:

FABULOUS FOOD

November 18 - December 30, 2018 Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18th, 4:00 - 6:00pm The Opening Reception is free and open to the public.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday: 10:00am - 5:00pm; Friday: 10:00am - 9:00pm; Sunday: 12:00 - 5:00pm Admission: $8

Family, Friends, Fun, and Food! This year, the Monmouth Museum’s Annual Holiday Exhibition, Fabulous Food, celebrates the intersection of art and food. In this merry and mouth-watering international juried show.

The Main Gallery will also feature our popular Winter Wonderland Model Train Display, fun for children of all ages!

765 Newman Springs Road P.O. Box 359, Lincroft, NJ 07738 732.747.2266 info@monmouthmuseum.org www.monmouthmuseum.org

Penn Station, watercolor, by Peter Meadowsong

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

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– J.R.R. Tolkien

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Novel Approaches to the College Search

BY STUART MITCHNER

I

never had to deal with the college search process. The Indiana University campus was five blocks away, and since my father was on the faculty, the cost was minimal. I’ve never regretted staying at home. Besides making some lifelong friends, I wrote a novel, having figured out a plot in a sophomore geology class taught by a man whose amusingly morbid mannerisms influenced my depiction of a predatory professor at a fictional Eastern college. So even though I didn’t go away to school myself, my main character did, and came home to Indiana disillusioned about love and life. When the book was published the summer before my senior year, several reviewers gave me credit for at least not imitating J.D. Salinger, while others took the patronizing tone of the notice in the New York Times snidely titled “College Capers.”

The Saturday Review quoted Picasso to the effect that “it takes a very long time to become young.”

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YOUNG ADULT FICTION High school students looking for a fictional preview of the college experience can find it in young adult novels like Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (St. Martin’s Griffin $18.99). For instance, the main character, who has just moved in, is about to make her first trip to the dining hall for breakfast, except she doesn’t know where it is or how it works: “In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can’t google.) Like, where does the line start? What food can you take? Where are you supposed to stand, then where are you supposed to sit? Where do you go when you’re done, why is everyone watching you?”

Others books in the genre are Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay (Dutton $17.99), where the world she creates is “fragile but profoundly humane” (The New York Times Book Review), and Megan McCafferty’s Charmed Thirds (Broadway $13.99), which “captures the college years with incredible grace and insight,” according to YA author Joseph Weisberg.

The one college guide that combines the semblance of a narrative with slick imagery, splashy design, and unplugged information from students around the country is Seventeen Ultimate Guide to College: Everything You Need to Know to Walk Onto Campus and Own It! (Running Press $19.99). Put together by Ann Shoket and the editors of Seventeen, it lives gaudily up to its Trumpish title. Parents looking for prestigious placements may see the book as the epitome of bad taste and doubtful advice, with its glossy ad-style photography and confessional titles like “I Went Hookup Crazy!” from a coed at the University of Michigan, who admits that “hooking up with so many guys in the same frat made me embarrassed.” She tried texting her “guy friend” but “after seeing me hook up with so many of his frat brothers, he stopped answering.”

Parents may wonder what “hooked up” signifies and conclude that the only way to own the campus is to join the Girls Gone Wild crowd.

STANDARD SOURCES The standard sources for information about choosing and gaining admission to college are guides like The Princeton Review’s Complete Book of Colleges ($29.99) and The Best 382 Colleges. The Complete Book promises user friendly profiles of 1,355 colleges and universities. Barron’s

COLLEGE NOVELS Profiles of American Colleges tops that by describing more than 1,650.

Creating College Lists: Your Guide to Using College Websites to Pay Less for a Better Education by Michelle Kretzschmar (Kindle edition $2.99) focuses on “one of the most ignored resources in creating a college list: the college website.” Loren Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives (Penguin paperback $18, revised by Hilary Masell Oswald) is “smart and credible,” according to The New York Times. Pope (1910-2008) was education editor at the Times “during the college-going chaos of the late 1950s started by the GI Bill.” In 1965 he opened the College Placement Bureau in Washington, D.C. Believing that “uninformed choices could account for heavy dropout, transfer, and failure rates,” he had a personal stake in the enterprise, having been given poor advice from what was then called the Office of Education.

Not long after graduating from Bowdoin College, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote and published at his own expense ($100) a novel based on his experiences there. Fanshawe appeared anonymously in 1828. Although it was well reviewed, Fanshawe did not sell well, and Hawthorne burned the unsold copies. While poor or indifferent sales are the norm in the college novel genre, a notable exception is Erich Segal’s Love Story (1970).

Some significant 20th century novels with campus settings include Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961), Vladimir Nabovov’s Pnin (1957), and Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe (1952), which is based on the author’s teaching experiences at Bard and Sarah Lawrence. A roman à clef set in Princeton was literary critic John Aldridge’s Party at Cranton (1960).

Among other novels of literary merit set in Princeton, the most famous is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920).

ADMISSIONS AS A SUBJECT A Princeton University admissions officer is the protagonist of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission (Grand Central $24.99), which “gleams with acute insights into what most consider a deeply mysterious process,” according to The New Yorker. Another more recent novel in the genre is Korelitz’s The Devil and Webster, (Grand Central $27). An NPR review finds the novel “wittily on target about, among other things, social class, privilege, silencing, and old-school feminist ambivalence about power.

It also takes on Korelitz’s home subject, the insanity of the college admissions process.”

A VOTE FOR “FRANNY” Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway never went to college. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane went but never graduated, like J.D. Salinger, the creator of literature’s most famous drop out, Holden Caulfield. That said, my vote for the best fiction on the subject would go to Salinger for his novella, Franny (1961), which begins on the platform of the Dinky station in Princeton the weekend of the Yale game. In the dedication, Salinger mentions his 1-year-old son Matthew, who would land on the same station platform two decades later as a Princeton student.

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HARD CIDER IS MAKING A COMEBACK IN NEW JERSEY AND NEW YORK

BY LAURIE PELLICHERO

A favorite beverage of our Founding Fathers, hard cider has been experiencing a resurgence in popularity. Similar to the path of the craft beer and spirits industries, hard (fermented) cider production has been growing each year as new makers join the fold in the region and across the country.

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PHOTO COURTESY OFSHUTTERSTOCK.COM PHOTO COURTESY OF MELICK’S HARD CIDER

ard cider has been enjoyed in the United States for hundreds of years, with its history dating back to the first English settlers. The colonists used apple seeds brought from England to cultivate orchards, and cider soon became a staple of every American table. It was consumed morning, noon, and night, and seen as a more sanitary substitute for water.

New Jersey cider was especially popular. Rumor has it that George Washington even called Newark cider “the champagne of ciders.”

When immigrants from Germany and other regions brought beer to the U.S. in the 20th century, interest in hard cider waned. Orchards began to dwindle, and then the Temperance movement led to an end to all legal production.

After Prohibition, orchards began to make a comeback, but cider wasn’t made on the same scale. The recent revival of hard cider has come in the wake of the microbrewing culture that started more than 20 years ago, as craft makers began experimenting with small batch cider as well as beer.

In New Jersey, Melick’s Hard Cider is produced fresh from the farm to the bottle at Melick’s Town Farm in Oldwick, Hunterdon County. Melick’s Farm is the largest apple grower in New Jersey, with 25,000 apple trees. True representatives of the Garden State, they also have 50 acres of peach, nectarine, plum, and pear trees, along with four acres of wine grapes.

Founded nearly 300 years ago, the farm is run by 10th generation

farmers, siblings Peter, Rebecca, and John Melick, with continued support from their parents George and Norma.

The apple orchards cover nearly 120 acres of their 650 acres of land.

John Melick said the farm has been producing and selling fresh cider for more than 50 years, and they added hard cider to the mix four years ago.

“The time was right to add it as a new product,” he said. “We used experts and employed traditional and modern techniques to produce and perfect the blends.”

Melick’s now produces about 10,000 gallons of hard cider each year, along with 100,000 gallons of fresh “sweet” cider. The apples in their hard cider are handpicked and crafted into cider on their traditional “rack and cloth” cider press. The cider is then fermented in small batches to preserve the unique character of their farm.

Melick’s Hard Ciders include Lemon Shandy, an unfiltered cider shandy that combines a blend of apples, lemons, and pure cane sugar. Their new Semi-Dry Traditional Cider uses champagne yeast to produce a crisp, refreshing hard cider that is light on the palate with no added sugar.

The 1728 Traditional combines champagne yeast with Old and New World cider apples to create a crisp, semi-sweet, and full-flavored hard cider. Jersey Ginger combines fresh ginger, a touch of sweetness, and a blend of Old and New World cider apples to make a crisp, semi-dry, fullflavored hard cider.

George’s Tart Cherry is made with Balaton and Montmorency cherry

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PHOTO CREDITS FROM LEFT: PHOTO COURTESY OF MELICK’S HARD CIDER; PHOTO COURTESY OF TERHUNE ORCHARDS; PHOTO COURTESY OF STEPHEN JOHNSEN FOR IRONBOUND HARD CIDER.

juices, and John Melick said they have a new hops variety hard cider, King Ironbound Hard Cider was founded by Charles Rosen with the mission Street Hops, aimed those who like beer. of reestablishing the maker economy in the Newark area, and helping to Melick’s also produces an apple wine that is fermented using champagne rekindle the once powerful Newark economy by actualizing the potential yeast and a blend of fresh-pressed apples, as well as a Pinot Noir and of chronically underemployed workers including refugees, immigrants, and Chardonnay crafted from their four-acre vineyard. those previously incarcerated.

The Melick Town Farm Cider Mill and Orchard features pick-your-own Newark has been home to a wide range of industries, and its first, along apples, along with hayrides and hard cider sampling on most weekends with quarrying, was the making of hard apple cider for export to New York in September and October. The farm store is open seven days a week in City and beyond. the fall.

Ironbound is the name of a district Melick’s Cider Mill and Orchard in Newark, alluding to the company’s is at 19 King Street in Oldwick. Their roots as both a hard cider company hard cider can be purchased in bottles, and collective of businesses born out cans or on tap to taste or take home of Newark’s rich history and embracing in a growler. It is also available as its contemporary landscape. many liquor stores throughout the “This historic and cultural connection state, and is featured at local festivals. between the city and cider makes 908.439.2318; www.melickstownfarm. the revival of Newark cider, and the com. return of its prized cider apples, the Speaking of apple wine, Terhune logical foundation upon which to build Orchards Vineyard and Winery, owned meaningful jobs around the production and operated by the Mount Family, of place-appropriate goods,” said Rosen. also produces an apple wine made “New Jersey has been making from their own apple cider. You can the best American cider since before try it in the tasting room at the winery America was America. And believe it Friday through Sunday from noon or not, the most celebrated cider in the to 5 p.m. Bottles are also available country was Newark cider! Yes, Newark! seven days a week at the farm store.

Not Boston. Not the Hudson Valley. Not Terhune Orchards Vineyard and Winery New England. But Newark.” is located at 330 Cold Soil Road in He noted that in the 18th and 19th Princeton. Call 609.924.2310 or visit the centuries, the best versions of Newark website at www.terhuneorchards.com. cider were made from Harrison, Sitting on 108 acres in the New Canfield, and Graniwinkle apples — Jersey Highlands, Ironbound Hard Cider John Melick, co-owner of Melick’s Hard Cider. Photo courtesy of Melick’s Hard Cider. varieties that originated in and around uses fresh apples from the orchard at Newark. Ironbound is bringing these Ironbound Farm as well as apples from local, small-scale farms in New old Newark cider apples back to life at its farm.

Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania to give their ciders a “bold, fresh taste.”

“Ironbound Hard Cider uses both bittersweet and juice apples to They pride themselves on using 100 percent American apples, not from produce an accessible blend that is more traditionally crafted than massconcentrate or from overseas. produced hard ciders,” said Erin Baschwitz, sales and marketing director

PHOTOS COURTESY OF IRONBOUND HARD CIDER, FACTIONED STUDIO; SKETCH COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

at Ironbound Farm, who noted that the Harrison apple is the focal point of their orchard.

Baschwitz said that New Jersey is following the craft beer trajectory with local, artisanal ciders. “It is growing — Ironbound is a badge of what it means to be a Jersey cider.”

She added that Cameron Stark, Ironbound’s cider maker, is a winemaker who trained with legendary Napa Valley winemakers Robert Sinskey and Bob Levy. “Cameron works with apples in an ingenious way to get the best flavor,” she said.

Ironbound Hard Cider varieties include Original Ironbound, a semi-dry classic hard cider; Gooseberry Ginger, made with farm-grown ginger and locallysourced gooseberries; Summer Cider, infused with fresh-squeezed lemons and farm-brewed ice tea; and Wood’s Folly, a hopped cider. This fall’s Devils Harvest features sour cherry, white pepper, and cranberries from the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Their tasting room, scheduled to open this fall, will also feature special limited varieties. They plan to host special events pairing the cider with food made from local ingredients, and also make the space available for corporate and special events.

Ironbound Hard Cider is available throughout New Jersey. Ironbound Farm is located at 360 County Road 579 in Asbury, N.J. Call 908.940.4115 or visit the website at www.jerseyciderworks.com.

It makes total sense then that craft hard cider is especially popular in the state, with at least 83 makers throughout New York according to ciderguide.com.

Just a sampling includes Original Sin in New York City; Kings Highway in Brooklyn; Furnace Cider in Sag Harbor; Brooklyn Cider House, Kettleborough Cider House, and Yankee Folly Cidery in New Paltz; Graft Cider in Newburgh; Hardscrabble Cider in North Salem; South Hill Cider in Ithaca; Orchard Hill Cider Mill in New Hampton; Angry Orchard in Walden; Stone Bridge Cider in Hudson; and Empire Cider in Geneva.

New York is also host to a number of cider festivals. This fall, Cider Week Finger Lakes runs from September 28 to October 8 (www.ciderweekflx.com).

Pour the Core Long Island, in Heckscher State Park in East Islip, is on September 29 (www.pourthecore. com).

Cider Week New York City, a production of the New York Cider Association, is November 2 to 11 (www.ciderweeknyc.com).

The weeks are “intended to cultivate an appreciation for New York’s orchard-based cider by showcasing its diversity, food-friendliness, and excellent quality.”

Cheers!

HARD CIDER IN NEW YORK STATE New York State also has a long history of apple farming and production. According the njapplecountry.com, New York is the second-largest apple producing state in the country. Only Washington state produces more apples than the Empire State, which averages 29.5 million bushels of production annually.

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匀 刀䔀吀䄀䤀䰀䔀刀匀 吀䠀䔀 儀唀䤀䔀吀 匀吀刀䔀一䜀吀䠀 䈀䔀䠀䤀一䐀 䄀䴀䔀刀䤀䌀䄀ᤠ 䌀伀一吀䔀䴀倀伀刀䄀刀夀 吀刀䄀䐀䤀吀䤀伀一䄀䰀 伀嘀䔀刀匀䤀娀䔀䐀 吀刀䄀一匀䤀吀䤀伀一䄀䰀 䄀唀䈀唀匀匀伀一 吀䤀䈀䔀吀䄀一 䄀一吀䤀儀唀䔀

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THOUGH NOT A MEMORIAL, MAYA LIN’S NEWEST WORKS PAY HOMAGE TO EINSTEIN AND THE DINKY

BY ILENE DUBE | Photography courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum

At the heart of the Lewis Center for the Arts complex on the Princeton University campus — just south of Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and Cargot Brasserie, the restaurant in the repurposed cargo shed of the old Dinky train — the earth undulates in wave-like craters.

SITE PLAN COURTESY OF MAYA LIN STUDIO

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L

ike quirky hillocks with straight edges, they beckon a visitor of any age to climb to the top and roll down sideways, just as a child might. And I can’t help thinking that’s just what the earthwork’s artist, Maya Lin, hopes we’ll take away — not her name and bio as one of the most important artists working today, but rather a place to honor and connect with earth and grass.

The Princeton Line, as it’s called, will be joined by a second Maya Lin work commissioned by Princeton University Art Museum. Fifty or so feet away, a water table will be installed sometime in late 2018/early 2019. Made from jet mist granite with a base that will form an oblate spheroid, the fountain will be situated within a gravel plaza and appear to float above the ground. Concrete seating will edge the back.

The fountain’s veil of water is planned to be wispy as it falls from the 12-foot-long tabletop. The table’s elliptical shape was inspired by diagrammatic drawings of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. The idea for the water weir is based on the black hole, and the jet mist granite, which has a white, almost starry patterning, is intended to “reflect the galaxy” — an allusion to the work of one-time Princeton resident and physicist Albert Einstein.

Princeton’s John McPhee served as yet another inspiration for Lin — his writings on the stratified layers of the earth were the basis for her wire-drawing in space. “I like to reveal things you might not be thinking of,” she says.

“Every water table needs a weir (a fence or dam placed in a body of water to divert or regulate its flow),” Lin said during a visit to the

“WHEN I FIRST VISITED THE CAMPUS I FELL IN LOVE WITH THAT STEEP HILL IN AN UNDERUTILIZED FIELD,” LIN SAID OF THE LOCATION FOR “THE PRINCETON LINE.” Princeton University campus in spring. Her earlier water tables are sited on the campuses of Yale and Brown; each has inscribed text. This water table is planned to be the most abstract of the three.

Lin considers both The Princeton Line and the water table to be in dialogue with one another, “an exploration of a drawing on an angled plane that walks you down a steep slope, and the more formal water table which returns the form to where it originated. Scott Burton’s piece Public Table was the inspiration for my very first water table, the Civil Rights Memorial — and now I can come full circle with this new work.”

Installation began in April. This is Lin’s first Earth Drawing in a public space in the United States — another of its type is the Eleven Minute Line (2004) at the Wanås Foundation in Knislinge, Sweden.

“By making a work in which she shapes and draws a line in the earth, together with the most abstract of her water tables to date, I am certain that Maya will make a lasting and engaging mark on our campus,” says Princeton University Art Museum Director James Steward, who has known Lin since his days as director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where he served from 1998 to 2009 prior to coming to Princeton. It was there that Lin’s first Wave Field work was commissioned.

“When I first came to Princeton I thought [a work by Maya Lin] would be a great addition to the Campus Art Collection, and I reached out early in my tenure,” Steward recounts. “Her response was favorable,” although the first sites he’d pitched did not resonate with her. “Because she is passionate about the environment I thought the space in front of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment would appeal, but the site was too constrained for her,” he says. (That space was subsequently filled by Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Uroda.)

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“When I showed her the site plans for the Lewis Center, she found the site more open.”

“When I first visited the campus I fell in love with that steep hill in an underutilized field,” Lin said of the location for The Princeton Line, thus titled because it is sited where the Dinky tracks once traversed the campus before it was moved 400 feet to make way for the Lewis Center, completed a year ago. It is also a play on the name of the line that connects Princeton to the transit world beyond. She says her pieces usually title themselves right before they are finished — the water table is yet to be named.

A 2016 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Lin first achieved national recognition for her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., while she was still an undergraduate at Yale. Lin received her bachelor of arts in 1981 and a master of arts in architecture, also from Yale, in 1986. Her design was chosen in a national competition, but went on to stir controversy. The starkly simple slab of polished black granite was inscribed with the 57,661 names of those who died in Vietnam, arranged chronologically by date of death. Since its completion, Americans have flocked to the site to grieve, to contemplate the consequences of war, and to heal. “…the cost of war is these individuals,” she said. “And we have to remember them first.”

Lin’s body of work includes large-scale, site-specific installations; intimate studio artworks and memorials; houses, apartments, a library, a skating rink, a bakery, two chapels, and a museum; gardens and landscape architecture; and a line of furniture and clothing. Her 59 Words for Snow consists of thin layers of paper waxed over with encaustic.

She has questioned whether she is an artist who practices architecture or an architect who makes art. Frank Gehry, one of her professors at Yale, told her to forget about the distinction and just make things, according to a 2002 New Yorker profile of Lin. She likes working on outdoor projects that are open to the public, where she can have greater impact than with buildings, where only a few can enter. She has used sonar to map the ocean floor and satellites to reveal things about the natural world, such as disappearing arctic ice.

Lin’s earthworks begin with a model, just as with buildings. When working on architectural projects, she told an audience on campus, there may be only slight modifications from the model, but with art, “you’re expected to morph the model and change it to fit the site.” For The Princeton Line, “the scale is human and playful, with the curves leading you up or down hill.” It is “unique to the terrain,” she says. “How can I talk to people through the curvature of the earth?”

The Princeton Line has been compared to Lin’s Storm King Wavefield (2007-8) at Storm King, the sculpture park in New York state. Viewed from above, the undulating swells of earth appear to naturally rise from and roll along the grassy terrain. Set against a backdrop formed

by Schunnemunk Mountain to the west and the Hudson Highlands to the south and east, the seven nearly 400-foot-long waves, ranging in height from 10 to 15 feet, recall the experience of being at sea. Lin’s earlier wave fields are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Miami, Florida.

Storm King Wavefield was an environmental reclamation project, a sustainable reworking of the former gravel pit that supplied material for the New York State Thruway. When Storm King was founded in 1960, a significant portion of its grounds consisted of large stores of gravel in surrounding fields. The ravaged landscape was in turn landscaped and shaped anew by the very same gravel.

This back story excited Lin. Working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which sanctioned and supported the reclamation of the site, Lin collaborated with landscape architects to utilize the existing gravel and topsoil at the site.

Lin has been “extremely concerned about the environment” since growing up when the Clean Air Act was taking shape, and Ohio’s Lake Erie caught fire, leading to petitions to ban steel traps. Lin’s parents, having escaped Communist China, settled in Athens, Ohio, near the Appalachians.

The project that she is devoting herself to these days — what she terms her “last memorial” — is “What is Missing?” It is a “global memorial to the planet” and includes a book, materials in scientific institutions, and a website. Whatismissing.net traces the ecological

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Names of Vietnam war casualties on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Names in chronological order, from first casualty in 1959 to last in 1975. Shutterstock.com

“The Princeton Line” site under construction at the Lewis Center for the Arts complex.

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history of the planet and is intended as a global effort to help protect and restore nature. Looking at “species that have or will go extinct; that we will never know because we destroyed their habitats before we ever could get to know them,” it “emphasizes that by protecting and restoring forests, grasslands, and wetlands, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species and habitat. ‘What is Missing?’ is a wakeup call and a call to action, showing us how to reimagine our relationship to the natural world and showcasing how we could live in ways that balance our needs with the needs of the planet.”

“One-third of our soil is missing,” Lin notes. “Because of the songbirds in decline, our sound landscape is missing. How can we protect it if we don’t realize it is missing? As an artist, how can I get us to rethink what we’re doing? More gas is spent every year refueling lawn equipment than was lost in the Exxon Valdez.”

Sustainable grasses were used for Storm King Wavefield, but sod was employed for The Princeton Line. “In order for the heavy clay soil to hold its form over time, it was supplemented with soil amendments, and to keep it from eroding, we had to use sod instead of seeding it,” says Steward. Lin gave the nod to sod because “she is a pragmatist as well as an idealist.”

The Princeton Line is surrounded by newly planted trees to frame the site, using native

plants where possible. Lighting, also designed by Lin, illuminates the scape for nighttime visitors.

Her mantra is “Through conservation, nature comes back,” she says. “You have to give people hope.”

At press time, The Princeton Line was barricaded with orange construction fencing as the sod settled, but in fall it is expected that visitors can enter and lounge in the bowl shapes, as if a chair, or enjoy outdoor performances in the “natural” amphitheater.

With the art museum’s plans for expansion — an architect is expected to be announced this month — the museum is making plans for a two-or-more-year closure. A new building will replace the existing building. “A simple addition is not possible,” says Steward. “We are landlocked.” He is exploring different ways of keeping the museum “open” off site, such as the Titus Kaphar installation in front of Maclean House did last winter.

“We have to try diverse approaches to show we are still able to put interesting art in front of the public,” he says. Maya Lin’s The Princeton Line and to-be-named water table, along with the entire Campus Collection, are yet other ways to keep the museum in the public eye.

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