Rain confines Arts Day to basement

April 01, 2009|By KATE S. ALEXANDER

CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. -- Steady rain might have postponed the more flashy demonstrations planned for Wilson College's Arts Day, but nature compensated by creating its own art of swirling mud and carved pathways.

As the gravel driveways ran with rivers of liquid earth and the drops played a calming interlude on the concrete Wednesday, students trickled into various buildings to express their rainy day blues in art.

"Will the rain ever stop?" one student asked as her galoshes splashed through a large puddle.

Rain cannot stop art, said Samantha May, president of the student art club, People's Republic of Art.

Letting a large sheet of glass crash into hundreds of pieces, May said the broken shards would become beautiful mosaics.

Behind Lenfest Commons is a plain gray wall that May said will soon sparkle with the mosaics.

"We have to look at that wall everyday," she said. "So we wanted to make it into something beautiful."

But instead of creating the mosaics outside Wednesday, students, faculty and staff huddled around tables in the basement of Lenfest.

Fine Art Professor Philip Lindsay said the art club hoped to put the mosaic on the wall during the event, but the rain made it next to impossible.

Mosaics were just one of the many forms of art students and the public could make at Arts Day, he said.

Arts Day is a "cross-curricular integration, practice and study of the arts within our broad curriculum."

Art is not exclusive to the fine art department, and the event allows those on campus who study other disciplines to show the art in their subject, he said.

"It is a celebration of the ways art plays a part in so many aspects of our lives," he said.

The day has given representatives of Women In Need a creative platform to raise awareness about violence against women, said Angie Tobias, education department manager.

Painting vinyl records has been a respected art form since the 1960s and it became the means Women in Need used to share their message of "one in four."

"Its a safer means of communicating," she said. "There could be victims painting but they don't have to identify themselves because this is safe for people to just come forward and talk or paint (how they feel)."

The college was able to hold most of the events scheduled for Arts Day indoors, yet the rain still dampened turnout for some of the activities, Lindsay said.

While events, including the raku ceramic firing demonstration and the cricket game, had to be canceled, Lindsay said the art department is moving Arts Day to the fall so there is a good chance those events could be back in October.

Wilson College has scheduled another Arts Day for Oct. 7.

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