Fantasy soars during JC’s gallery opener

Jamestown College has for several years hosted a gallery opener in February that included high school art competitions and studio seminars. This year it will be a flight of fantasy.

Students involved in JC’s Art Club and faculty have been joined by JC admissions, poets, instructors as well as area movers and shakers to produce an art event, unequalled in previous years.

It is opened to the public and there is no admission charge.

The 4 p.m. slate of presenters includes people who live their own flights of fantasy. These people live lives based on creative expression and each in his or her own way has found creative expression within or beyond their vocation.

“Fantasy Takes Flight” opens with Kate Stevenson doing an international PowerPoint presentation. A world traveler, Stevenson heads JC’s foreign language department, is advisor for the campus’s International Students Organization and functions as a mother figure to students from around the world who are attending Jamestown College. She acts, sings and does some great impressions.

One of JC’s medievalists, Dr. Timothy Bratton, teaches in the history and political science departments. He and his librarian wife Phyllis toured Greece with a busload of art and history students (and James-town residents) in 2004. He has been a violinist with the JC orchestra for more than two decades. The Bratton’s creative children are artists and are following their parents footsteps into academe. Bratton will do a Greek mythology presentation.

One of JC’s Irish exchange students, Ciaran Gallagher, will speak and show examples of laces, crystal and porcelains brought from Ireland. He has been here since August and will play host to a North Dakota exchange student in Ireland next year.

North Dakota’s Poet Laureate, Larry Woiwode, author, professor of creative writing, actor and performer, will read two poems. He and his wife Carole, like the Brattons, produced an equally creative house full of children. Laurel is already an author and like her dad, is laying the ground for another generation of students to learn innermost expression through beautifully structured sentences.

Dina Laskowski, professor of education and mother to Bill and Dan, will be reading “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss. The wife of the late author Dr. William Laskowski, this vivacious Italian-born educator is a story-teller. She’s an artist, a craftswoman and an amazing cook. Her sense of humor draws out the most reticent recalcitrant in her classroom.

Student art work is on display and ISO will host a reception. The event is sponsored by JC’s Art Club (Liz Schloegel, Sarah Reely and Jami Moore officers), art department, admissions, Friends of the Fine Arts, the Look Beyond Committee and ISO. Money taken in from sales of art will go to charity.

If anyone has an item for this column, please send to Sharon Cox, PO Box 1559, Jamestown, ND 58402-1559

Tags: sharon cox, diversions, arts