Community notes
T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts Nancy Andrews is the recipient of the 2021 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship award for a Maine artist working in the visual arts. In addition to a cash award, she will have a show at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in summer 2023. The three jurors, Ian Alteveer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellen Tani, an art historian, curator, and critic based in Washington, DC, and Danielle Jackson, a critic, researcher, arts administrator, and the cofounder and former co-director of the Bronx Documentary Center, were unanimous in their decision. Alteveer stated, “It was thrilling to review the work of so many talented Maine-based artists with such expansive and diverse practices. The work of Nancy Andrews made a deep impression on the jury. Her personal yet kaleidoscopic practice, across many media, centers narratives of trauma and discovery while inventing countless new possibilities for looking at the world.”
Linda Black ’09 stepped down as director of financial aid and started her new position as associate director of admission in January 2022. Linda has been a staff member of the college for seven years as of June 2022.
COA faculty emeritus Rich Borden, provost Ken Hill, trustee Jay McNally ’84, Pietro Cascia ’22, and Sara Lowgren ’20 (currently a graduate student at Gothenburg University, Sweden) presented the opening symposium at the XXIV International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology (SHE) in October 2021. Their presentation, “Building a College of Human Ecology: Reflections on the 50-year History of College of the Atlantic,” was part of a seven-day online event organized by SHE, Sociedade Brasileira de Ecologia Humans, and Sociedade Latino-America de Ecologia Humana. All conference presentations were recorded with simultaneous Portuguese, Spanish, or English subtitles and are available on the SHE website.
Ken Cline, David Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, was recently appointed as the coordinator of the Sierra Club’s Native American Land Rights Team. This national Sierra Club committee partners with tribes to promote tribal sovereignty and land and water protection. The team organized a fall 2021 conference that centered tribal people’s voices on ways that conservation groups can effectively collaborate with tribes on conservation campaigns. Rivers continued to be a major theme for Cline this year. Not only did he get to teach his signature Whitewater Whitepaper course in the spring (with help from COA alumnx Brett Ciccotelli ’09 and Bob Deforrest ’94) but in August 2021, Cline finally got to boat the Colorado River for 14 days through the Grand Canyon.
The Institute of Higher Nervous Activities Journal, edited by faculty members Dru Colbert and Nancy Andrews, released “Volume 2” in fall 2021. The new issue features the work of Chicago artist John Henley and the award-winning web series 195 Lewis maker Rea Leone Lewis. The Journal strives to showcase the work of previously underrepresented writers, visual artists, cooks, poets, politicians, homemakers, scientists, separatists, patriots, fishermen—creators from different worlds and terrains— in pairings that prompt unforeseen avenues of connection for the reader.
Darron Collins ’92 is proud to announce the publication of his first poem, “Maggie,” in StorySouth.
Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems Kourtney Collum would like to give a shout out to COA’s community fridge. The community fridge is a mutual aid resource for students started by Cyrus Johnson ’23, a student in Collum’s Active Optimism class in spring 2021. The fridge was approved by Campus Planning and Building Committee on a trial basis and is now managed by Collum’s work study students, Shreya Vinodh ’23 and Madi Person ’24. The fridge is open 24-7 and is completely supported through mutual aid. The motto is, “Take what you need, give when you can.” According to Kourtney, “It’s one small step towards ending hunger on campus. Very exciting.”
Jay Friedlander, the Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, traveled to Colombia on a Fulbright Scholar award in June 2021. During his month there, Friedlander worked with two Colombian universities on sustainable business, social entrepreneurship, and other topics. Friedlander has also been involved in a number of virtual conferences and presentations over the last 12 months, including a workshop for the Maine Center for Entrepreneurship Cultivator program to help food entrepreneurs develop a profitable business model. He delivered a paper on reimagining strategic planning at the International Social Innovation Research Conference, giving an overview of work he did at the Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest natural sciences institution in the Western Hemisphere. Other virtual presentations included a lecture and masterclass on unlocking innovation with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was also on the organizing committee for the Arctic Opportunity Explorers. The program, based out of Copenhagen, brings teams of students from around the world together to use the UN SDGs to solve problems in Arctic communities. Finally, Friedlander was a featured speaker at the Global Leadership Symposium at Rosario University in Colombia.
A long-overdue book of poems by adjunct faculty Arielle Greenberg called Come Along with Me to the Pasture Now, (named for a song by Johnny and June Carter Cash) originally due out in 2017, was finally released by Agape Editions, with cover art by Acadia-area artist Mark Kelly. The book, the publisher says, “maps [Arielle’s] decision to leave city life and an academic career, and relocate with her family to a rural area,” and asks, “what relationships do we have with the people and environments that surround us?” These are poems about “failures and doing better.”
COA music faculty Jonathan Henderson and collaborator Mark Dixon premiered their new work, Anechoia Memoriam, at the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference in November 2021. The piece is a long-form participatory installation for the Selectric Piano, an IBM Selectric typewriter that electromechanically controls an acoustic piano. The score for Anechoia Memoriam is composed of a list of 180 unarmed people of color killed by law enforcement in the United States. As the piece unfolds over seven hours, a sign invites passing observers to take a seat in front of the typewriter and perform from the score that scrolls by slowly on ticker tape. When typists participate, each letter typed is enunciated by specific notes on the piano. If no one types, the score scrolls by, accumulating on the floor in silence. Participation and non-participation, attention and inattention, ringing piano strings and silence are all elements of the performance. The piece was set to show next at the Universities Studying Slavery Conference in March 2022.
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and GeoSciences Sarah Hall, faculty member Dru Colbert, and visiting faculty Alexander Goldowsky joined Dorr Museum director Carrie Graham and Sahra Gibson ’20 to present the process of collaborative planning and design of the Maine Geopark at the 2021 New England Museum Association Conference. Gibson developed this idea of a public geopark focused on Maine’s unique geology as her senior project. Her project was further developed through the work of multiple students in multiple courses at COA.
Casey Schuller Jordan and her husband, Finn, purchased a house in Ellsworth in June 2021. The 1864 fixer-upper is a lot of work, but they are loving giving the house a new life while preserving its history. You may have seen them in the Islander this fall in an ad for Bar Harbor Savings & Loan (see picture). Casey and her husband were also very excited to add a dog, Elmer, to their family in November 2021. Elmer came to them as a rescue from Louisiana, but quickly embraced the snow and has enjoyed many walks around COA’s campus. Adopting a puppy has proven to be a lot of work too, but both adventures (the house and the dog) have been very rewarding.
Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany Susan Letcher has spent the COVID-19 times parenting, teaching, gardening, and working on manuscripts with an international team of coauthors. In the 2021-22 academic year, she published a short communication in Ecology and Evolution with a former student (though not a COA student), a paper in Forest Ecology and Management with a group of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Forestry, and two high-profile publications with an international consortium based at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one in Science and one in PNAS.
In keeping with adjunct faculty Rich MacDonald (’06)’s interest in teaching ornithology, he published Little Big Year: Chasing Acadia’s Birds in celebration of the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The book is an account of a year of local birdwatching told in Rich’s inimitable storytelling style, drawing on nearly five decades of experience as both birder and ornithologist. With the chickadee being the Maine State Bird, fittingly, his year started with a black-capped chickadee and ended with a boreal chickadee. In between, Rich’s stories include childhood banding of ducks on the Niagara River, biking in the dark to look for nightjars, hiking Acadia’s mountains in the winter to see snowy owls, and journeying to Mount Desert Rock in search of pelagic seabirds. Little Big Year is available locally and directly from Rich.
COA Magazine editor Dan Mahoney, also editor-in-chief of Bateau Press, was proud of the work Bateau did over the last challenging year. Bateau published two books, Drakkar Noir, by Michael Chang and How To Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World Ever! Encouragement for Struggling Creatives by Miss Expanding Universe, by Ashley Yang-Thompson. Bateau hosted two readings at Bar Harbor’s Lompoc Café as well. The Drakkar Noir reading was held in solidarity with a student group raising awareness and funds for victims of state-sponsored violence in India and the occupied Palentinian Territories. How To Be The Worst Laziest… was held in conjunction with the launch of COA faculty members Nancy Andrews & Dru Colbert’s latest installment of The Institute of Higher Nervous Activities Journal.
COA Mitchell and Emily Rales Chair in Ecology Chris Petersen, in collaboration with director of internships and career services Jill Barlow-Kelley, helped place six students in internships at nonprofits in Hancock County through a grant from the Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation (see page 51). Chris continues to work with state and local partners on intertidal conservation and management with grant support from the Broadreach Fund and through a Town of Bar Harbor grant from the Maine Shellfish Restoration and Resilience Fund. This work has involved collaboration with aquaculturists, wild harvesters, students, and town and state regulators on a wide variety of issues including changing town committee practices to include additional species within their management and reforming and standardizing both town reporting of management practices and marine resource data collection throughout the state. He continues to work on the Coastal and Marine Working Group of the Maine Climate Council, chair the Marine Resources Committee in Bar Harbor, and work as a member of the Downeast Fisheries Partnership, the Downeast Conservation Network, and Frenchman Bay Partners.
In October 2021, library assistant Catherine Preston-Schreck testified in the US District Court in support of a proposed settlement in the case Maine People’s Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Mallinckrodt US LLC. As a former member of Penobscot Alliance for Mercury Elimination and concerned citizen, Preston-Schreck testified in support of holding Mallinckrodt US LLC responsible for almost 50 years of mercury pollution of the Penobscot River. If settled, Mallinckrodt US LLC will be required to pay as much as $267 million towards mercury remediation of the Penobscot. Preston-Schreck is entering her seventh year as an election clerk for the Town of Bar Harbor. She is proud of the dedication and hard work of COA faculty, staff, and students to participate in elections, an effort noted by Civic Nation, who recognized COA for having the highest undergraduate voting rate in the country for the fall 2020 elections. Preston-Schreck is also beginning her third season as a part-time farm worker at Bar Harbor Farm, owned and operated by Glenon Friedman ’86 and Rose Avenia ’86. She is exploring the overlap of books and farming by writing book reviews for The Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener, the quarterly publication of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
During the 2021 spring term, Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies Steve Ressel redesigned his Applied Amphibian Biology course to facilitate student involvement in projects that addressed the research needs of two island partner organizations, such as surveying incidence of road mortality during spring migration of amphibians in Acadia National Park and surveying aquatic turtle diversity, vernal pool-breeding, and amphibian abundance at the Land and Garden Preserve. Students also carried out the fieldwork associated with a third project in relation to Ressel’s ongoing work on salt tolerance in spotted salamanders. Here they worked closely with Acadia National Park wildlife biologist Bik Wheeler ’09, MPhil ’18, and Dr. James Godwin of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory to examine salamander blood plasma osmolarity and immune response in relation to elevated salt.
During winter 2022, adjunct faculty Dani Robbins continued their recent ensemble project, songs from the edge of this dream. Robbins took part in a residency and performance of the piece at Engine in Biddeford, Maine in March 2022. They have also been collaborating with COA alum Zachary Taibi ’17 on a new dance film installation, NEST, which opened at the Portland Media Center in February 2022. Robbins also premiered a new duet at Arts at the Armory in Somerville, Massachusetts in late February 2022 as a part of National Choreography Month.
Despite being locked down in New Zealand, Jenny Rock ’93 met many stellar students by distance teaching several courses. Three of those students are potentially NZ-bound over the next year as research assistants or master’s students on research projects. In 2021, Rock produced more book chapters: “If the Ocean Were a Person,” in Intimate Relations: Communicating (in) the Anthropocene (which includes two of Rock’s illustrations) and “Narrative, Rhetoric & Science: Opportunities & Risks,” in Rhetorics of Evidence; plus several papers, including one she co-published with Zoom-met COA master’s student Elie Gilchrist ’23, “Creating Empathy for the More-Than-Human under 2 Degrees Heating,” in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. Rock and Gilchrist also introduced community arts practice into social & environmental risk assessment for the Dunedin City Council’s project, “Whakahekerau – Rakitea Rautaki Tai: A Community’s Vision for a Resilient Coast,”which was awarded the International Association for Public Participation’s 2021 Australasian Project of the Year.
Hannah Stevens ’09, the college’s archivist and cataloging librarian, is a participating member of two archives-related collaboratives that both achieved substantial milsteones in 2021. In May, the History Trust designed and launched—with support from Gordon Longsworth ’90 and the GIS lab—its first digital exhibit called Where Our History Is Housed. The exhibit is about the iconic structures that represent the member organizations ranging from a converted one-room schoolhouse to a former country store, to a summer cottage turned academic hall, a one-time convent, a repurposed fire station, and an iconic village clock. In June, the Maine Contemporary Archives Collaborative (MCAC) was selected for a 2021 Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History, which recognizes an achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history. The collaborative formed to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials related to Maine community members’ experiences of current events, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. In October, Hannah and two MCAC partners presented about the collaborative’s work at the Maine Archives and Museums annual conference.
