Thurs., Mar. 21, 2013 at 7:00 p.m.
Council room, second floor, Bryan Community Center
PUBLIC HEARING
• Public Hearing of Draft Zoning Code
The Village of Yellow Springs is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. The Planning Commission meeting is wheelchair accessible. Any person requiring a disability accommodation should contact the Village Clerk’s Office at 767-9126 or clerk {at} yso(.)com.
The suburban home and garden that just went up inside the Herndon Gallery this week speaks of many things about the American culture. Its manicured lawn, the white pitched-roof house, and the square rooms with the things its inhabitants desire are all part of our appetite for consumption. What started out as the American Dream, according to curator Michael Casselli, has morphed since the post-war 1950s into an outsize need to consume everything from food to knowledge. And instead of an American pastime, consumption has become a global norm.
“Appetite: An American Pastime,” a new multi-media exhibit that opens at the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College’s South Hall this weekend. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 16, 7–9 p.m. On Sunday, March 17, at 1 p.m., the Herndon Gallery will host Lunch on the Lawn, a conversation and lunch event with participating artist Stefanie Koseff.
“Appetite” is the invention of Casselli, Antioch College adjunct faculty in media arts. It is a curatorial collaboration between Brooklyn artists Stefanie Koseff, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman, and Raul Vincent Enriquez and local political/cultural theorist Kurt Miyazaki. The Herndon was transformed by the two miles of wax paper it took to build the roof and the inner and outer walls of the house. Then each artist was asked to respond to the concept of “appetite” within one of four rooms of the house. The result is a multi-sensory interpretation of what, how and why people desire and some of the consequences of our human appetites.
The exhibition continues through May 24.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, from 1 to 4 p.m. For more information, please contact Dennie Eagleson, creative director of the Herndon Gallery at deagleson {at} antiochcollege(.)org or 937-768-6462.
More on this story will appear in this week’s Yellow Springs News.
Rotating food images appear on the platters from a projector above the table.
The John Bryan Community Pottery is sponsoring Hungarian potters Vera and Ferenc Bognar for a week of public studio time culminating in a workshop on Saturday. The event is the pot shop’s first international workshop.
The public is invited to observe the artists at work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings from 5 p.m.–8 p.m., with a suggested donation of $5 each evening. Each studio event will focus on traditional Hungarian forms, including water jugs on Thursday and vessels for children on Friday.
On Saturday, the public is invited to an all-day workshop, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., during which participants will view demonstrations by the visiting artists. Opportunities for hands-on participation will also be included. The cost for the workshop is $45; those interested should call 937-767-9022, or email jbcp.ys.com.
For an extended article on the visiting artists, see the March 14 Yellow Springs News.
Antioch College played host to Peter Rothbart, co-editor of FOUND Magazine, on Friday, March 8. Rothbart spoke in South Gym, sharing items published in the magazine which, true to its name, prints found items, most of which are submitted by readers. Letters, cards, photos, lists, notes, drawings, signs, memos and more, all misplaced or left behind by their original author or recipient, find their way into the pages of FOUND Magazine.
The contents of FOUND‘s print and web publications are often hilarious, because almost anything is funny without context. But aside from this, they’re like an object lesson in empathy: the first response, when finding a letter or to-do-list blowing by on the sidewalk, especially one that seems bizarre or unrelatable, is to try to demystify it, to put oneself in the author’s shoes. Rothbart, on occasion, further imagines the stories behind some of the magazine’s found content by writing songs based on select letters, notes, etc., borrowing from the original material and adding his own ideas about the events surrounding its composition.
An audio excerpt of Rothbart’s presentation, including an original song inspired by found material, is available below.
FOUND Magazine maintains an online archive at www.foundmagazine.com . Print copies of the magazine, which is published irregularly, are also available at the website.
Archivists are known for their fastidious fact-checking and meticulous record keeping, and former Yellow Springs resident Rod Ross is no exception. Ross came to town yesterday for a mini history residency that takes place at Antioch College this week. And he brings with him some surprisingly high-profile stories about the need for record keepers, such as one that received national attention this winter.
A 36-year veteran of the of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Ross knows a thing or two about how to get information researched and recorded. After Stephen Spielberg’s latest film, Lincoln, was released last fall, Ross received a call from Ken Sullivan, who had seen the film and had been inspired to do some research on the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in the U.S. What he found was that the state of Mississippi had voted against the amendment in 1865 (though it passed anyway) but a century and a half later in 1995, the state legislature finally voted to ratify the law. Except the state failed to send the paperwork, and the motion was never officially carried through.
“Ken was perturbed that Mississippi had passed the amendment but you would never know it because it was never recorded,” Ross said this week.
So Ross helped connect Sullivan to the Mississippi Secretary of State, the Federal Register and a host of other agencies so that in February 2013 Mississippi became the last state in the Union to pass the 13th amendment. Since then Sullivan has appeared on NPR and other radio shows, and the issue was aired with ample grief on the Jon Stewart Show.
Participants in Ross’s presentation tonight (Feb. 28) on “Lincoln and the 13th Amendment,” taking place at 7 p.m. at Antioch College’s McGregor Hall, room 147, will again be reminded that the dusty ledgers of the past really do matter.
Again, a lesson from the film, Lincoln, which despite the numerous Academy awards it garnered last week, has also received some attention for having rewritten some parts of the Civil War-era history. One example was the film’s version of the Congressional vote on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, in which two of the Connecticut delegates voted against the amendment. In fact all four of Connecticut’s delegates voted for the bill, as Connecticut Representative Joe Courtney pointed out last month in a story in USA Today. Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner said that he rewrote the vote for dramatic effect. But archivist Ross is eager to demonstrate at tonight’s event how researchers can verify the facts themselves by pulling the actual voting ledgers at the archives.
The Antioch College residency also includes historian and Antioch alumnus ’65, Bob Johnson, who will present a workshop on using presidential tapes for historical research. The program, which takes place in McGregor 149 tonight at 7 p.m. (same time as Ross’s program) will use White House audio recordings of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
On Friday, at 7 p.m., at the Coretta Scott King Center, the historians will host a panel discussion about the Freedom of Information Act and its implications for social justice issues.
Antioch College is hosting a forum on gun violence, “Guns Don’t Kill People,” on Friday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Coretta Scott King Center on Antioch’s campus. All are welcome and invited to attend.
According to an Antioch announcement of the event, “In the wake of tragedies like Newtown and Aurora, there has been renewed conversation about the role of guns in American society. Our panel will touch upon these varying points of view and what role, if any, guns should have in America’s future.”
Confirmed panelists include Larry Moore of Jamestown, who is the legislative coordinator for the Greene County Fish and Game Association and a southwest Ohio representative for Buckeye Firearms, Kelly Cameron from One Million Mom for Gun Control out of Columbus and Antioch College food service coordinator Isaac Delamatre.
To read the Yellow Springs News series, “Guns and the Village,” see the Feb. 7 issue of the News and visit the links below: