Gabby Arenge ’14 and Evert Fowle ’14 came up with the idea for the Arts Task Force, an initiative to create more spaces of free expression on campus, while underground. There already exists a public artistic space at Connecticut College, but it also happens to be a subcutaneous tunnel connecting the basements of KB and Larrabee. It’s a hot and humid little room — a grungy, fluorescently lit, concrete echo-chamber. But the walls are covered in color. From scrawled Lord of the Rings quotations to stylized camel murals, students have taken it upon themselves over the years to layer the walls in paint and make the strange tunnel into something kind of special.
Fowle, current SGA president, and Arenge, Chair of Academic Affairs, were passing through the tunnel when they found themselves wondering why there wasn’t something like it at ground level. “People like that space and the concept of free expression,” Fowle said. “We just thought about what it would be like if it weren’t hiding under a dorm.” Their idea spiraled outward from there.
By means of their positions in the Student Government Association, Fowle and Arenge formed the Arts Task Force, which Arenge describes as “a student collaborative to design, initiate and implement arts space projects in the college community.” That is to say that both Fowle and Arenge want to encourage some of the expression happening in the KB-Larrabee tunnel, but in a more public and productive way. “We see this as a collaborative effort to enforce campus goals and build campus community through art,” Arenge said.
Fowle and Arenge expressed their thoughts to other members of SGA, and used the house senators from each dorm to test how well the task force would be received by students, and to see what sorts of ideas students might have. Their efforts proved fruitful. “I’ve been in SGA for three years,” said Fowle, “and this is some of the most excitement I’ve seen from the student body.”
The task force is still in its early stages, but its potential is exciting. Ideas include the creation of student murals in Harris, rotating gallery exhibitions in Cro, splatter-painting some of the blander buildings on campus and installing chalk boards or white boards around campus where students can draw in response to questions or prompts. “The response we’ve gotten is really great. People really want more art,” Fowle said.
There seems to be some evidence for his assertion in Conn’s recent past. Not long ago, the KB-Larrabee tunnel was painted over, whitewashing away multiple generations of student expression. Student reaction was negative and the walls didn’t stay white for long, but something seems lost now that the layers and layers of student art have been reduced to just one. Recently, the administration almost repeated this mistake with Earth House.
Anyone who’s ever been in Earth House will be immediately struck by the years of student painting crowding the walls, doors, cabinets and ceilings. Last spring semester, REAL had plans to wash all this free expression away, and might have done so if not for the protests of Earth House residents and other students on campus.
“The paintings in Earth House are from years of not only those who have lived there in the past, but also from many alums who were welcome to hang out and paint with friends. We didn’t want those memories to be erased,” said Phoebe Papademetriou ’14, a resident last semester of Earth House who worked with her housemates to organize an event encouraging Res Life to leave the art within the house as it was.
The event was a success, as students, faculty and staff were invited to Earth House to see the art for themselves and encouraged to leave their own artistic mark somewhere within the house. The effort required from the Earth House members in order to protect their free artistic expression is exactly the sort of thing Fowle and Arenge want to overcome with their work in SGA.
“We want to work through the bureaucracy to promote free expression on campus,” said Fowle. Both Fowle and Arenge hope that this free expression will be a campus-wide collaboration. “We’re really looking to partner with other art groups on campus and even other areas of SGA,” Arenge said. For example, they’ve already made plans in conjunction with the Environmental Affairs Committee to explore replacing the concrete slabs around the bike racks (soon to be installed in South Campus) with ceramic mosaics made by students.
Furthermore, the task force has considered collaborating with New London artists to create a mural in the surrounding city. “It’s about building a community through art,” said Arenge, something with which she is familiar, having conducted a Davis Peace Prize project this summer in Kenya, where she collaborated with members of multiple ethnic tribes in a community arts space.
“It was an experience that showed me how the arts can bring people together,” she said. On our campus, Arenge hopes that the efforts of the task force will engender a strong community and perhaps allow the campus to become more personalized for students both present and future.
Art lends itself to creating places of permanence, where the past can be immortalized. The Arts Task Force is an initiative focused on strengthening the present campus community through art, but if such a project results in a campus space where future students can see goals, aspirations and issues expressed by past campus communities, “Well, that’s kind of the dream,” Fowle said.
