Singer/Songwriter Cora Rose Lewicki

Cora Rose Lewicki, known to music lovers around Mount Desert Island as Cora Rose, will be performing a farewell concert at the college’s Gates Community Center on Saturday, May 30 at 8 p.m. Lewicki is known for her singing and song writing, and for her MDI performances during her time as a student at COA. While she is not actually graduating this year, Lewicki will be spending her senior year studying international trade in Ghana and Mexico. As in previous concerts, Lewicki will be performing her own songs, with possibly a few covers. She’s been playing piano since kindergarten, writing songs since 3rd grade, and started performing her own work in 8th grade.

“I am very grateful for the support COA and the MDI community has extended my way during my time here,” she says. “Coming to MDI without knowing a soul and building a community around me, face by face, has shown me the value of community! Everyone I’ve met the past three years, COA people and larger MDI community alike, have all been truly wonderful people to get to know. Thank you to all!”

Singer/Songwriter Cora Rose Lewicki

The concert also allows fans to sign up for Lewicki’s second album, “Turn the World,” which contains 13 songs, all original. Lewicki’s first album, made when she was 15, sold out before she arrived at COA. “Turn the World” has been two years in the making. While it won’t be available at the concert, there will be a sign-up sheet, and she will be able to distribute the album mid-June.

Underwater photography by Adam Kumm

Local artist and owner of the former Moss Gallery, Christiaan van Heerden will be showing watercolors at College of the Atlantic’s Blum Gallery along with underwater photographer Adam Kumm.

The two are exhibiting their work as part of their final projects as graduating COA seniors.

The show features 14 images taken of fish swimming through deep coral reefs in the Caribbean by Kumm and six large watercolors by van Heerden.

Kumm of Baltimore, MD has been studying ecology and natural history at the college while also working in graphic design and photography. A master diver, he spent three months on islands off Belize and Honduras, diving up to 120 feet deep, sometimes working upside down in a cave, closely following the exceptional creatures that live underwater.

His exhibit features images that are not always obvious, provoking the viewer to look more intensely at the photographs. Kumm worked underwater day and night. He likens the ocean world to an urban environment. The showy creatures are around during the day, while the strange ones—such as octopus—come out at night. But though his images portray a healthy reef, he says, “there has been great loss of species abundance.”

Some of Kumm’s images will run 2 by 3 feet; others are 30 by 28 inches and smaller.

A longtime Northeast Harbor resident and yacht designer, van Heerden is finishing up his degree at COA this year, transferring credits from Colby College in 1980 and an associate degree in small craft marine architecture. He spent much of his two years at COA working on affordable housing and sustainable agricultural issues—while also taking many of the art classes offered by the college.

“Taking JoAnne Carpenter’s watercolor class was an eye-opening experience for me,” says van Heerden. He is displaying six watercolors, each 22 by 30 inches, though one image features a brilliant sunrise in Charleston, South Carolina. This work focuses on the beauty found in the details of nature—fungi growing on a log or lichen on a stone. By painting these large, using subdued earth tones, frequently illuminated by one or two spots of brilliant orange tones the natural images become abstracted.

"Working Hands" by Hannah Stevens

College of the Atlantic’s spring series of senior work continues with “Working Hands,” a show focusing on the artistry of the hand. The exhibit combines the efforts of Becky Wartell of Portland, ME and Hannah Stevens of Canton, NY. Wartell is a weaver and all-around craftsperson. Stevens is a photographer who has spent the term photographing craftspeople in the highly artistic region in upstate New York where she was raised, known as The North Country.

Wartell’s project involves seven different items each woven with one of seven different fibers: animal fibers of wool and silk; plant fibers of cotton, linen and hemp; and two cellulose fibers (plant fibers that require heavy processing): bamboo and tencel. Her exhibit includes the graduation dress she made from silk she wove, a bamboo skirt, a woolen blanket and some cotton plaid fabric. At the reception, the runner on the food table will be made of linen woven by Wartell. Also part of the exhibit will be a loom on which gallery visitors can experience weaving. The resulting communal piece of fabric will be turned into a purse that will be sold to raise money for a weaving-related cause.

"Working Hands" by Hannah Stevens

Crafts have captivated Wartell since she was a child, when, she says, “I was obsessed with potholder looms.” She has since gotten much more sophisticated, using techniques such as double weave and designing her own overshot patterns. These are also colorful offerings; most fibers Wartell bought in colors, one piece was hand painted with fabric paints. “My biggest inspiration in my work is colors and how they interact with one another,” she says.

Weaving by Becky Wartell

Stevens was raised in the region known as the North Country of New York State. It is an area filled with craftspeople, among them Stevens’ mother, who makes paper and books. Having spent a lot of time at COA studying photography, Stevens decided to make her final project a tribute to the artists and craftspeople of her region. Her show focuses on the hands and their work.

“It’s a rich community to study people’s hands with a camera,” she says. Her exhibit features 30 photographs of ten individuals. Besides her mother, the artists include a calligrapher, printer, boat builder, knitter, beader, blacksmith and two silversmiths, one of whom weaves strands of silver echoing Native American basketry.

Acrylic Paintings by Haley Schwarz

A Chinese man and his Bosnian wife were resettled by the International Rescue Committee. They opened a noodle and dumpling shop out of a small window. They were very successful and now operate a much bigger restaurant in Charlottesville, VA. Photo by Michael Keller.

To celebrate the publication of his book, “Streets, Boundaries, and Other Places: Stories of Asylum,” College of the Atlantic senior Michael Keller is presenting an exhibit of photographs and narratives of refugees resettled by the International Rescue Committee in Charlottesville, VA.

“Too dangerous to go back” was the phrase many used to describe the nations that these people left, says Keller of his encounters with refugees in Virginia. His photographs and stories, he says, “show the resilience of refugees in starting over, in starting new lives.” The photographs depict resettled individuals from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Myanmar, China, Afghanistan, Togo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia.

Keller’s connection to refugees began on the soccer fields of the Charlottesville public schools. It continued through a 2007 Kathryn W. Davis Projects for Peace award, during which most of the exhibition photos were taken. At that time, Keller documented the experiences, hopes and dreams of mothers, fathers, students, political activists, gardeners, soccer players and entrepreneurs who have joined the Charlottesville community. His work continued through a Humanity in Action Fellowship in New York and Berlin. Come July, Keller will return to Europe to further his connection with refugees, funded by a Watson Foundation fellowship, one of 40 extraordinary college graduates nationwide chosen for a year of international exploration.

While Keller’s senior project is a collection of nine short stories based on narratives of resettled refugees that he has come to know, the exhibit is composed of the photographs and actual stories of refugees such as this one: “We couldn’t stay in Croatia because my dad was a Serb. My mom was Croatian. …There were people who didn’t care much about religion until the war started. …Then I had to move all of the time because my parents are of different religions. What is crazy is, it’s not really a big part of my life–religion. … It’s funny how it’s not that big a part of my life, but it’s affected my life to the core—everything. When war starts, religion just soars. The churches are full. The patriotic people are out on the street.”

-Donna Gold

The Bollywood Tempest at COA

College of the Atlantic’s production of “The Tempest” is unlike any you have ever seen. Co-directors Dan Mahler and Alicia Hynes have set William Shakespeare’s island fantasy as a Bollywood production, adding the music and dance style of contemporary Indian movies. Says Mahler, who last year created a masterful blending of music and dance in his direction of the Greek tragedy “The Bacchae,” “We can do this with Shakespeare because it’s so open-ended. The text transcends its time period. Choreographers are Tanvi Nair of India and Aishath Loofa Mohamed of the Maldives. Both are familiar with Bollywood style and the traditional dance upon which many of the numbers are based.

“The Tempest” takes place within just a few hours on an unnamed island where the banished sorcerer Prospero, former Duke of Milan, has been living for 12 years with his daughter Miranda and his library of books. Prospero, played by COA graduate student Ingrid Lindstrom, has the power to raise tempests and thus land voyagers ashore, thereby punishing his enemies. The play begins with such a storm and a shipwreck. Before long, Prospero reveals his own history to his daughter Miranda, played by Nina Wish. In typical Shakespearean fashion, the shipwrecked voyagers bring the promise of revenge, romance-and romantic complications.

Bollywood Tempest

“Traditionally ‘The Tempest’ has been considered a comedy,” says Mahler, “but it has a serious undertone. If you’re looking at it historically, it’s about Shakespeare trying to grapple with idea of new world. It’s one of last plays. A lot of people think-and I do, too-that Shakespeare wrote the character of Prospero as himself.”

The Bollywood Tempest at COA

Other cast members include Cora Lewicki as Ariel and spirits Saras Yerlig, Brianna Larsen, Sarah Colletti and Rain Perez, who are the dancers.

Self-proclaimed radical environmentalist Janusz Korbel has fought for years to expand the Bialowieza National Park. Photo by Matt McInnis.

Nature of Poland, featuring photos by Matt McInnis and ethnography by Mike Kersula. The exhibit explores Poland as a country of contrasting environments, from moss-covered old growth forests to smoggy industrial wastelands.

The exhibit came about following the annual United Nations conference on climate change hosted by Poland last December. Kersula and McInnis attended the meetings-but with more than the treaty process on their minds. They wanted to understand how people of a post-socialist society connect to nature.

Abandoned coal mines and steel factories are a common view on the train ride through the industrial region of Silesia. Photo by Matt McInnis.

Kersula, of Bellow Falls, Vermont, worked on ethnography. Having studied in Poland in high school and college, he is fluent in Polish and was able to easily converse with people from all walks of life. McInnis, of Portland, Maine, took a more objective eye, looking for the aesthetic moments that would frame the contemporary Polish sense of nature.

The combination was a powerful one for the pair. During their ten-week sojourn, they sometimes waited hours for the proper conjunction of light and setting, while also spending days speaking to various individuals. Says Kersula, “sometimes people were quite amused with our questions, like ‘What does nature mean in Polish?’ It’s not a question people usually ask.”

Anarchists from Poland and other European states protest the COP14 Conference on Climate Change. Photo by Matt McInnis.

But such questions led to some fascinating discussions-and striking photographs. The two talk about their time with Janusz Korbel, a journalist-turned-activist. Speaking about the forest, Korbel recalled to Kersula the story of an engineer, “a developer destroying nature. He starts to cry and says that he remembers from his childhood a beautiful river. And now, this river looks like a wide road, you know, it’s completely destroyed, and he starts to cry. So it shows very clearly that if we feel some connection with nature, it has value for us. Then we can protect it.”

The exhibit contains large photos, of up to 24 by 30 inches, and interview excerpts and translations. To see more of McInnis’ images, visit www.mattmcinnis.com.

Brett Ciccotelli

All three of College of the Atlantic’s Watson nominees have been awarded Watson Fellowships this year – despite the Watson Foundation’s reduction of the awards by 20 percent due to the economy. This prestigious fellowship funds a year of international travel to graduating seniors. In past years, fifty fellowships were awarded; this year, there were only forty, chosen from 177nominees from forty-seven of some of the best colleges in the United States.

In his letter congratulating COA and the recipients, Watson Foundation Director Cleveland Johnson noted that, “the elimination of ten fellowship slots has made this year’s competition especially fierce.” The awards to all three COA nominees, he added, “is a high honor given the extraordinary strength of the national pool of nominees this year and the reduced number of available fellowships.”

The students are Brett Ciccotelli, Nick Jenei, and Michael Keller.

Nick Jenei

“The approach of the Watson Foundation matches perfectly with the educational philosophy of COA.” said COA President David Hales upon hearing the news. “Both invest in passionate learners, creative thinkers and motivated self-starters who are encouraged to dream big but apply their ideas in practical ways. It is also a testament to COA’s academic excellence and effective and dynamic faculty-student relationships, which leads to a singular educational experience attracting some of the most wonderful students in the world.”

Ciccotelli, a native of Blackwood, NJ, has had a love of rivers since childhood. He will be exploring river deltas and coastal wetlands in Canada, Mexico, Italy, Bangladesh and Egypt to learn from those whose, “prosperity, security, and identity are inseparable from their wetland or river.” He also received an honorable mention from the Udall Foundation and a Craig Greene Memorial Scholarship, given by COA.

Jenei of Westlake Village, CA, has been focused on sustainable business while at COA. He will be looking into sustainable entrepreneurship and the future of business in India and China, seeking to “explore innovative business models that value people and the environment as much as they do profits.”

Michael Keller

Keller, who began in high school to befriend and then work with members of the immigrant population of his native Charlottesville, VA, will be looking at the experience of immigrants in Denmark, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, “to understand how refugees interact with environments to develop a new sense of place.” Earlier, Keller received a “Projects for Peace” award from Kathryn W. Davis, for his outreach and photo essay project, “Asylum and Acceptance: Seeking Peace in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Keller spent the fall in Berlin as a recipient of the highly competitive Humanity in Action Fellowship. Like Ciccotelli, he also received an honorable mention from the Udall Foundation.

The three projects are as follows:

Brett Ciccotelli: Change Along the Banks: Explorations in River Deltas and Coastal Wetlands

Wherever I have gone in my life, waterways have acted as portals to the places beyond the streets, places where nature and culture are hidden. As a Watson fellow, I will live in and explore five of world’s great river deltas and coastal wetlands. Traveling through-the Mackenzie, Colorado, Nile, and Ganges-Brahmaputra River Deltas, and the Venetian Lagoon-I hope to learn from those whose lives are linked to the ebb and flood of the water, whose prosperity, security, and identity are inseparable from their wetland or river.

Nick Jenei: Sustainable Entrepreneurship: The Future of Business in India and China

India and China face strong social and environmental pressures to transition to sustainable economies, yet their entrepreneurs are posed to adopt sustainable business practices due to the presence of innovative thinkers, growing economies, and pro-business governments. I want to learn from and collaborate with Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs who live in a very different cultural, historical, and political context than I do, and explore innovative business models that value people and the environment as much as they do profits.

Michael Keller: Mapping Asylum in Fortress Europe

I will engage refugees in mapping and interpreting their unique landscapes of migration as they start new lives amidst intolerance and strict asylum policies. Persecuted or forced to leave their homes because of race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion, refugees from diverse backgrounds are forming new worlds of innovation, entrepreneurship, and political action in European cities. I will explore places of sanctuary and resettlement in five EU nations to understand how refugees interact with environments to develop a new sense of place.

Each fellow receives $28,000 for the year of travel and exploration. COA has been invited to nominate students for this prestigious fellowship since 1982; twenty-eight COA seniors have now received this fellowship.

As interesting as the projects are says Johnson, “The awards are long-term investments in people, not research. We look for persons likely to lead or innovate in the future and give them extraordinary independence to pursue their interests outside of traditional academic structures.” Fellows have gone on to become college presidents and professors, CEOs of major corporations, MacArthur “genius” grant recipients, politicians, artists, lawyers, diplomats, doctors, journalists, innovators and researchers across a wide range of sciences and engineering disciplines.

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program was established in 1968 by the children of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of International Business Machines Corp., and his wife, Jeannette K. Watson, to honor their parents’ long-standing interest in education and world affairs.

College of the Atlantic was founded in 1969 on the premise that education should go beyond understanding the world as it is, to enabling students to actively shape its future. A leader in environmental stewardship and experiential education, COA has pioneered a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to learning-human ecology-that develops the kinds of creative thinkers and doers who can lead all sectors of society to promote sustainable ecosystems while meeting compelling and growing human

-Donna Gold

Apoorv Gehlot, senior, working in the GIS Lab

It’s not unusual for College of the Atlantic students to do extraordinary work during their 10-week internships and 10-week senior projects. Students have created large gardens, conducted original fieldwork, completed novels, written business plans. But seldom does their work make a difference for an entire city.

Senior Apoorv Gehlot has built a GIS emergency management system for the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino, CA, population 55,000. Should disaster strike, thanks to Gehlot, the emergency operations manager will be able to see at a glance what buildings are safe, who needs medical attention, where supplies are stockpiled, which roads are passable. As situations change, the manager will be able to update the map within seconds, so as to direct emergency assistance.

The task evolved while Gehlot was working as an intern in Cupertino’s GIS department. He was asked to evaluate vendor proposals for a visual emergency preparedness system using GIS. Gehlot looked at what companies were offering and judged them costly, cumbersome and hard to update. He then offered to create the program himself, as a senior project—knowing that there’s no better learning than a real-life project.

Using a GIS program that works with online mapping, Gehlot created a dynamic system that allows for numerous contingencies, even overlaying a contour map on the city street system—should, for instance, the emergency be a flood and so the question of higher ground become important. “You can’t predict what data you’ll need,” notes Gehlot. Knowing that, he worked to incorporate as many variables as possible. Gas leaks, impassable roads, severely injured citizens, supply caches and save havens all have their symbols on the map, making the disaster easy to see and so more possible to handle. The program relies on a satellite, so it will work even if electricity and phone systems are down.

A screenshot of the emergency incident software

The system was tested during a planned emergency exercise—and reworked where necessary. His goal, Gehlot says, was to make a system “so flexible that after I hand it over, my part is done.” According to Cupertino administrators, he was fully successful. “The application proved to be extremely functional,” wrote Teri Gerhardt, the city’s GIS coordinator. “The Emergency Operations Center displayed the map on the main projector screen giving the entire room a bird’s eye view of the disaster as it was happening in our city.”

Armed with rave reviews for his “passion and motivation to succeed” by Cupertino officials, Gehlot, who graduates this month, is now the web mapping producer of the independent consultancy firm, G4 Global Tech. He hopes to interest cities around Cupertino in the program he’s already created, because, as he says, “Emergencies are not within cities, they happen in regions.”

He’s not stopping there. Gehlot has also been working with Acadia National Park to create another web-based GIS map, this pinpointing and mapping all the beetles, mayflies, spiders and other creatures found during the park’s annual bio-blitz, so researchers can spot micro-environmental trends in the park’s fauna.

Raised in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, Gehlot came to COA from the Mahindra United World College of India. When college admissions officers visited the school to pitch their programs, he asked each of them whether he would be able to bring his science or math ideas to an economics professor to create a business. Though he and his classmates were wooed by top US colleges, only the COA representative said, “Of course you can plan to apply science to a real world activity.”

Sure enough, COA’s faculty member in economics, Davis Taylor, was Gehlot’s advisor, while faculty member in math and physics, Dave Feldman, along with GIS Lab Director Gordon Longsworth, were his project advisors, helping Gehlot frame the project in a way that is as useful and universal as possible. Finally, Jay Friedlander, who holds the college’s Sharpe/McNally Chair in Green and Socially Responsible business, has assisted Gehlot with other aspects of his work, so Gehlot is leaving COA with a business plan under his belt. But what’s most rewarding, he says, “is that it can possibly help save lives.”

-Donna Gold

Ashleha Khadse and Katarina Jurikova in Chiapas, Mexico

As politically engaged, probing women, Katarina Jurikova and Ashlesha Khadse were inspired by the struggles of the indigenous women of Chiapas against the changes wrought by NAFTA. Katarina, who is from Slovakia, and Ashlesha, from India, had no interest in just reading what others had to say about these women, they wanted to experience the routines of their lives first-hand: to rise at 4 a.m. with the women, learn to fashion tortillas from grainy masa harina, breathe in the wood smoke, touch the thick, beautiful embroideries of their traditional clothes, and help with tasks from fetching water to harvesting—all the while listening to the women’s stories.

Though Katarina and Ashlesha purposefully went to Chiapas without a firm plan, they found ways to get involved. “We joined the women’s movements and helped organize a march against NAFTA, volunteered for farming cooperatives, conducted human rights observations in several autonomous Zapatista communities through the Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Research (CAPISE), attended weekly meetings of an indigenous women’s coffee cooperative; … attended weekly seminars of La Otra Campaña and traveled to some of the most isolated communities in the Lacandon forest.” Eventually, they focused on the stories of seven women, spending much of their four months in Chiapas listening.

“Most women tended to talk about maize, the milpa, food, difficulties in making ends meet, the burden of extra work, and health, and so over the course of time, the women led us into their own analysis,” they wrote. They heard about how the Mexican government withdrew funding for education and health care, that flour that is not as satisfying to traditional tastes—nor as nutritionally viable—flooded the regional markets. Because people found themselves in need of money to pay for education, health care, they might sell their land in hopes of wage jobs on coffee plantations. When those funds didn’t suffice, the men frequently left for the United States.

“Far from helping [the women of Chiapas] achieve the promised improved standard of living, the NAFTA functions because women are taking on the onus to do what the government used to do earlier – provide health, education and welfare.”

Ashleha Khadse and Katarina Jurikova in Chiapas, Mexico

In conclusion, write Ashlesha and Katarina, “The findings of this paper contradict the arguments supporting free trade and neoliberalism as a solution to reduced poverty and greater democracy. One of the basic requirements of free trade and the theory of comparative advantage has been moving to cash crops. A shift to cash crops does not simply amount to an increased cash income and consequently raised the standard of living. Women in a coffee cooperative showed us that a reallocation of time and resources from maize to coffee has increased their existential insecurity. It has exposed them to the price volatility of international markets and put them at the mercy of consumer choices in the north and has brought only a meager rise in income.”

This shift to cash crops has also increased women’s work burdens, reduced the time they can dedicate to their children and food preparation. It has increased their dependency on outside food sources like Maseca maize flour which does not “fill them up.”

Far from being victims, these women are actively resisting the threats to a self-determined way of life and to their very survival itself. The focus on the state, media and the public sphere has disregarded hidden spheres of households as places where counter-hegemonic social movements are cultivated. However, women’s deep connections with the past and future generations and a threat to their survival have prompted them to become central agents in the resistance struggle that is springing up throughout Chiapas.

"Morning Routine," Grace Cherubino

Meaning arises out of context—and lack of context. A new course at COA, Multiples in Photography: Creating Context, explores this dynamic of understanding. Works from the course utilize double, triple, and multiple presentations of images (in the forms of diptychs, triptychs, quadtychs, and even quartychs and books!) as a means of developing photographic narrative technique; thinking about multiple ways of seeing; and ultimately, in the words of fourth-year student James Liepolt, “creating a photograph that conveys a greater message than any single photograph can.”

Visiting artist Denise Froehlich, who is teaching the course, says that a photographer can often “say more” with multiples—creating narrative tension and fields of reference for comparison and juxtaposition.

For the course, several students even created photographs in grids. These range from the traditional, such as Vivian Phillips’ “Sunset Tree,” in which a tree sits within a 15-frame grid, to the pointedly comic. Grace Cherubino’s grid, for instance, focuses on a man shaving; in one portion of the grid, however, there’s a woman shaving a painted-on mustache and beard. Adding a further twist to the concept of multiples in photography, the woman happens to be Cherubino’s identical twin—who did a photography independent study with Froehlich. Her work includes poetry added to a photographic book created by student Natasha Jet Logan.

All of the works (some of which may be seen below) are black and white giclee prints, many are arranged in a non-traditional manner, and a few utilize mixed media and alternative methods of installation.

The course concluded with a gallery show celebrating the student’s hard work. Images of the Multiple’s Blum Gallery Show can be seen on COA’s Flickr Photostream.

"Kerouac," Tatiana Aguayo

"Kite", River Black

"Sunset Tree," Vivian Phillips

Natasha Jet Logan

"Untitled," Katie Holler

"Untitled (tryptic)," James Liepolt

"Success," Hannah Stevens

"Arges Watchin Io," Willy Eckley

"Reverse Echo," Aishath Mohamed

"Nature's Knife," Willy Eckley

Anne Ariles

"Liquid Dream," Angelica Ullauri

Amelia Eshleman

"Oedipus Rex," Vivian Phillips

"Leap of Faith," Zach Whalen

"Dead Owl," Vivian Phillips

"Closing the Circle," Zach Whalen

"Free," Aishath Mohamed

"Identity," Grace Cherubino

"F*ck is a dirty word/But it comes out clean," River Black

"Untitled," Margaret Soles

Photo of the Blum Gallery Showing