“I really love the way that she thinks” was the way that Fine and Performing Arts teacher Ed Hing introduced photographer Claire Rosen on March 28 for the latest in the Photographers’ Lecture Series.
As Ms. Rosen flipped through slides of her work—moving from self-portraits based on fairy tales, to antique dolls and taxidermy, to dioramas of objects around her home—what became clear was that her particular way of thinking was unlike any other.
Capturing lipstick as it drips, the gleam of broken eggs, or cockroaches swarming a sneaker-strewn table—and making them look beautiful—requires particular photography skills.
On February 19, as part of the ongoing Photographers’ Lecture Series, commercial and fine art photographer Bill Diodato named some of those skills: patience, preparation, and the ability to stay true to yourself.
Please click here to read an open letter to the Williston Northampton community by Traci Wolfe, director of communications.
Each time Physical Plant wants to use a new decal with the Williston Northampton School seal—for a sign, a building, or on the side of a van—Barb Shepard, the administrative assistant, must first sit down and peel tiny pieces of sticker from around every tiny, wavy line.
For five years, the athletic department has worked hard to make uniforms, coaching wear, and travel suits consistent, but Mark Conroy, director of athletics, has noticed that teams still purchase shirts and other gear in odd colors, with designs entirely their own.
When Matt Spearing, director of student activities, ordered rally towels recently, he asked the supplier to come up with ideas for what a print of the school’s mascot might look like. He didn’t have any other image to base it on, he said.
“There was no consistency of font or format,” Spearing said. “It was just what we thought looked good.”
No matter where you looked on campus, one thing was clear, the Williston logo was in need of a makeover.
While the school has always had graphic identity—the visual way Williston is represented on everything from minibuses to business cards—there was little consensus around how that image was used. The seal, designed 25 years ago to imitate the wavy lines of a woodcut, was sometimes used together with the school name, but more often without. In digital form, the seal appeared blurry or too condensed.
To say that the final scores in the We the People state competition on Saturday were close is putting things mildly. With final scores in the 900-point range, there was a just a 12-point difference between the top two teams.
“It’s like being one point behind in a 90-point basketball game,” said Peter Gunn, faculty advisor for the school’s We the People team. “That’s how close it was.”
On Saturday, January 26, The Williston Northampton School team placed second out of nine schools—just a dozen points behind the winning Academy of Notre Dame. The second place finish was good enough for the team to earn a wild card ticket to the national championships in Washington, DC in April.
“Our young people made wonderful presentations,” Gunn wrote in an email. “They eloquently defended and extended their ideas in the following discussions.”
Kevin Martin pushed back the lid on the giant blue dumpster and stepped aside, letting a handful of students peer at a small mound of lemon rinds, lettuce leaves, broken eggshells, and brown paper bags.
“All of this is generated from the dining hall. It doesn’t come from anywhere else on campus,” said Martin, The Williston Northampton School’s director of dining services.
“Wow! That’s great!” exclaimed one of the students.
The students, members of the school’s Sustainable Life Club, were touring the school’s new compost system, which included the dumpster—a large example of the reduce, reuse, recycle motto they try to embody.
Although school officials have considered composting the waste from the dining hall for several years, it took a final push from these students to make the effort a reality. The new compost bin was installed in early January; on a cold Monday, club members admired the squishy results of their hard work.
The idea of collecting compost on a larger scale first occurred to Nick Pattison ’14 while he was working with the school’s community garden last year. The garden has two compost bins, which garden club members fill with prep scraps from the dining hall.
