This is why Gadeliya says a recent gift to fund the purchase of 13 new Steinway upright pianos is so important. The support of the Lawrence J. and Natalie D. Portell Foundation, Persbacker Foundation, and Jean and Richard Widmark Foundation allows students to play pianos that are world renowned for their superior quality and sound.

“Steinway uses the best quality tools and materials out there to create a piano that has unrivaled tonal quality, unrivaled beauty, and a sound that has been described as coming the closest to the breathing human voice,” Gadeliya says.

Grace Nieh ’26 (SFA, EDU), a double major in piano performance and elementary education, appreciates having the opportunity to practice and perform on Steinway pianos because of the distinct difference between Steinways and other pianos.

“It’s a completely different experience than performing on other brands,” she says. “There’s definitely a greater dynamic range that you can’t replicate on other pianos.”

Sangwoo Park, a first-year doctoral student studying piano performance, agrees.

“The Steinway pianos have a really soft, warm tone,” he says. “When I play a Steinway piano, it’s really easy to control, so it’s helpful for me to perform and listen. It’s a great experience for me.”

The Portell, Persbacker, and Widmark Foundations’ gift also resulted in significant progress in UConn’s quest to becoming an All-Steinway School. The School of Fine Arts has worked for many years to reach this distinction, earned when at least 90% of an institution’s pianos are Steinways.

All-Steinway status is a prestigious accomplishment for music programs.

“There are not that many All-Steinway Schools, even among the top conservatories in the U.S. Acquiring the All-Steinway status will really set UConn apart,” Gadeliya says. “Having All-Steinway status will demonstrate to high level music students and faculty that we really value quality and try to provide the best possible opportunities and equipment to our students. This will make them much more competitive on the national and international stage.”

Currently, UConn is about 75% of the way to All-Steinway School status. The School of Fine Arts hopes to achieve this goal within the next few years. Donor support is crucial for the School’s ability to make this happen.

“Steinways enrich our community with incredible concert experiences. That’s what the beauty of music is, that it draws communities together and inspires them,” Gadeliya says. “Reaching All-Steinway status would also enrich the learning experiences of our students and show our commitment to excellence as an institution.”

Support The All-Steinway School Fund. 

She landed the role, and in the few short months since, it has become not only a passion project but a meaningful opportunity to gain the experience she needs for a job in the industry.

Cummings joined her fellow student staff members in celebrating the launch of the 27th annual print edition on Thursday, April 25, at Barnes & Noble in Storrs Center. 

A culmination of a yearlong interdisciplinary effort that includes both student staff positions and a course offered in the spring, the award-winning journal of literature and art pulls literary submissions across multiple genres from all over the world and showcases the top content.  

At the event, contributors read their featured work and staff members shared words of gratitude about their time putting the magazine together. 

“The launch party is one of my favorite times in the year because you get to actually hear contributors go up and read the poems or the stories that you’ve loved and cherished and stared at while editing, and you get to hear them talk about it,” says current Editor-in-Chief Allison LeMaster’24 (CLAS), a double major in English and journalism .  

As Long River Review editors, students work together on panels to review submissions and select work to be featured, edit and refine submissions, and designing publish a physical journal and a website.  

For Cummings, it’s been a rewarding and unique opportunity to learn about the publishing industry, a career path she plans to pursue after she graduates.  

“Things don’t always have to do with the writing, the photography, the art, and everything–so much more of it is management, organization, communication, and those kinds of skills,” she says. “It was kind of intimidating at first, but I’ve come to love it because those are the things that help put together a product, like a publication.” 

She added that it’s a wonderful feeling to see the final product of the group’s hard work.  

“I love the satisfaction when I have it in my hands,” says Cummings “Like today, when we got them, I wanted to cry. It was like ‘Oh my God, we all worked on this, and it all came together and now we have it in our hands.’ It’s such a beautiful moment.”  

The publication has also been a learning opportunity for students who plan to go into other fields.  

“I want to be a journalist, but this has prepared me a lot for editing — I’m a pretty good editor,” LeMaster says.  

LeMaster, who is also an intern at the Connecticut Mirror, covering the legislative session, said working on the literary publication with different narrative and literary styles helped her develop storytelling skills that will help her as she pursues a career in journalism. The experience will help her tell important news stories in a way that helps capture an audience’s attention and connect to them.  

But it’s not just the practical skills LeMaster and Cummings enjoyed about their time with the literary publication. LeMaster, a commuter student who recently transferred from the Hartford campus, says working on the publication allowed her to get acquainted with the campus.  

“What was cool about being the editor-in-chief is that you’re allowed to have your passion project and also help people get involved with it and see how cool it can be working with authors, working with staff, working with people who care about literature,” LeMaster says. Gaining that experience is just so awesome.”  

In an age of digital publication, the students agree that creating something tangible is a special kind of satisfaction.   

“There’s no feeling like getting that magazine in your hand and being like, ‘I helped create this,’” LeMaster says. “It’s such a cool feeling.”  

Fitzgerald currently serves as Vice Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona and has a multifaceted background as an administrator, as well as an artist and educator in the field of lighting design.

“Deanna brings an extensive background and record of achievement in managing complex budgets, overseeing endowment and scholarship distributions, and leading strategic initiatives,” says Anne D’Alleva, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. “This speaks to her ability to navigate the administrative challenges of higher education while remaining focused on the core mission of fostering student success and artistic excellence. Her reputation as a creative, transparent, empathetic, and pragmatic leader aligns well with the School of Fine Arts values and priorities.”

Fitzgerald’s appointment begins August 1, 2024.

“I couldn’t be more excited to lead the next chapter of the excellent and important work being done in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut,” says Fitzgerald. “The determination of the faculty toward student success and the institution’s commitment to the Arts is indisputable. I look forward to getting to know all who are invested and dedicated to UConn SFA, and rallying them toward a bright future in which the Arts are integral to all that UConn does and the communities it serves.”

Academic Experience

Fitzgerald joins UConn School of Fine Arts with 20 years of experience in higher education. Prior to joining the University of Arizona in 2020, she served at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory as the Special Events Production Manager and the University of Utah’s Marriott Center for Dance as the Resident Lighting Designer and Technical Director and as an assistant professor.

Other academic ranks in Fitzgerald’s career at the University of Arizona include Associate Dean for Academic and Student Success, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Director of the School of Music, Associate Director for Theatre programs, and Interim Director of the School of Dance.

She earned a bachelor’s degree at Flagler College in Florida and her master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music in Ohio.

Career in the Arts

Fitzgerald has contributed her lighting design skills to numerous domestic and international projects such as the premiere of the Las Vegas adaptation of STOMP Out Loud and tours of the original STOMP production, the Cirque Mechanics: Boom Town tour, Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo, La Boheme, and more.

She is a regular designer for the Rogue Theatre in Arizona and has created designs for the San Francisco Opera’s Merola and Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Young Artist programs. Fitzgerald also created original dance designs for choreographers including Deborah Hay, Ben Levy, and Andy Vaca.

She is also a published author. Her works include the book “The Heart of Light: A Holistic Primer to a Life and Career in Lighting Design,” and the articles “An Introduction to Neurodiversity for the Lighting Designer and Educator,” and “Contemplative Practices for Designers, Technicians and other Theatre Professionals.”

Other Prestigious Roles

Fitzgerald currently serves on the Western Region Exam Committee for United Scenic Artists and as a General Editor for Theatre Design and Technology magazine.

Previously, she has served on the Boards of Directors for the University Resident Theatre Association and the United States Institute of Theatre Technology and fulfilled other roles with notable companies such as the Cincinnati Ballet, the Opera Theatre Music Festival in Lucca, Italy.

Next Steps

Fitzgerald will take over for Interim Dean Alain Frogley, who served in the position for two years. Frogley will return to the position of SFA Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Research and Creative Practices full-time once Fitzgerald’s appointment begins.

“The entire SFA community is thrilled by the appointment of Deanna Fitzgerald as our new Dean,” says Frogley. “Her multi-faceted administrative experience and inclusive vision will be crucial as we enter a new era for the school and for higher education.”

“Sincerest thanks to Alain Frogley for his dedicated service as Interim Dean of the School,” says D’Alleva. “His leadership has significantly contributed to the advancement and success of the arts at UConn over the past two years.”

When she conceived the idea for the project in 2017, her first stop was to the Essex Rotary Club Shad Bake. The way they cook the fish – using galvanized nails to pin strips of pork fat over seasoned fish fillets then tipping the oak planks vertically over a fire to allow the oils to run out – particularly interested her, she says.

She also was interested in meeting the people who filleted the thousands of tiny bones from the fish, those who came to the bake, even those who stayed away. What were their stories? How did they relate to that section of the river’s 410-mile span? What do they think about the river? What’s the view out their windows? How does the river affect their daily lives?

A piece of fish – much different tasting than the bluefish she grew up catching and turning her nose up at during summers on Long Island Sound – started the journey that she expects will be ongoing at least a few more years as part of “Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories.”

With several dozen photographs from the project on display at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point until April 28, Pritchard, a photography professor in UConn’s Department of Art and Art History, says she expects “Abiding River” to be as large as “More than Scenery: Yellowstone, An American Love Story,” a 15-year endeavor that culminated in a 240-page book published in late 2022.

The river, with 148 tributaries and 7.2 million acres, merits just as much attention.

A single entity; not a composition of pieces

“Stage One of these projects is to start to figure out what’s there, what’s interesting, what’s happening, what do I need to know about, what do I need to learn more about, and who do I need to talk to,” she says, quoting an 11th century Japanese gardening book that in part says, “begin by considering the lay of the land and water.”

By the end of the first half of her Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, Pritchard says she got to that place and around that time happened to share her book plans with friend Walter Woodward, UConn professor emeritus and retired state historian.

He implored her not to structure the book in terms of regional identities – that is, the Great North Woods, the Northeast Kingdom, the Upper Valley, and down to what Pritchard has dubbed “Second Home Country” near the mouth in Connecticut.

The river is a single entity, not a composition of pieces into a whole, he told her.

“I thought about that for a couple of years, and recently concluded the book is going to reflect the fact that the river – the watershed, the hydrological system – is a thing. One thing. But the way people live with the river is not. Each region is different and so are the people’s lives and experiences,” she says.

In images of the fish viewing room at the Robert E. Barrett Fishway at the Holyoke Dam in Massachusetts, harvested broadleaf tobacco in Massachusetts, used hypodermic needles tossed aside at the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge in New Hampshire, the inside of an electrical substation in Vermont, even the Trinity College women’s rowing team at practice in East Hartford, she conveys the river’s reach into daily life.

“Historically, it’s a landscape of many different people,” she says, “beginning with the Indigenous people who have been here almost since the glaciers receded. It’s a landscape from which people have been pushed out. But it’s also a landscape of tremendous history in the formation of our nation. It’s a landscape of tremendous history in terms of technology. It’s a landscape of tourism and what that does to a region.”

And all along there are so many bridges.

Photographs of the French King Bridge in Erving, Massachusetts, and the Founder’s Bridge in Hartford, which she’s privately titled “Cathedral of the Highways,” are part of the Avery Point exhibition.

She says these bridges and others play a significant role in the lives of those who live near and on the river, with people crossing the waterway for work, family, business, and recreation – even if that means, in Vermont and New Hampshire, leaving one state for the other.

That’s one of the reasons she’s also included in the exhibition a photograph of the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry in Connecticut, one of two ferries on the river that bills itself the oldest continuously operating ferry in the U.S.

‘Human influence all along the river’

“I feel strongly about protecting the environment. We need the environment to stay healthy and protect us,” she says.

But along the river, a competition of interests, between the needs of people and the needs of the wild, is noticeable.

“In this project I’ve been learning about boreal forests in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire, which seem tremendously pristine, but, in fact, there’s ample evidence of acid raid,” she says. “You can find human influence all along the river.”

Most of the Google alerts Pritchard gets on the Connecticut River, she says, are for news stories about bodies and cars being dragged out, flooding the result of excess rainfall and snowpack, and sewage spills: “The river is a notable example of what’s happening in our time in terms of lack of vigilance as our government collapses.”

Here in Connecticut, she says, the river is a socioeconomic dividing line, breaking the state in half. Fairfield and Litchfield counties in the west, for instance, have residents with far more wealth than those living in the east at the Rhode Island border.

A photograph of a home under construction in the Hamburg Cove area that’s eight miles north of the Sound is evidence of that, she says. It’s a sight she happened upon in 2018 as she was traveling through “Second Home Country.”

The opportunity was there, so she took the picture. But oftentimes, Pritchard says, photos are more deliberate and planned – like when she returned to the same blooming wisteria vine three consecutive years to catch it at its perfect peak.

“When I was younger – and I still do this but I’m better than I used to be – and I would go out to make photographs, I would have a list of things to shoot and cross them off the list,” she says. “Those photographs were OK. But when my list was done and I could open my awareness, that’s where the good photographs were, when I found something I didn’t expect.”

Much the same as she didn’t expect to like the taste of shad – although “The Founding Fish” by John McPhee about shad helped her understand its significance to the river and prompted her initial interest – Pritchard says she learned, very early on when still ruminating on the idea for the project, that even as a New Jersey girl her family roots extended into the Connecticut River valley.

Her grandfather grew up in Wethersfield and genealogical research shows an early family member in Connecticut in 1646.

“It’s no wonder my wife and I chose to raise our three sons in the Quiet Corner,” she says.

Over the years since, Pritchard says she’s learned countless more about the river – like, there are more than a dozen dams across the main stem and they’re all for hydrological electricity development, operated by multinational corporations, save the Holyoke Dam that’s run by a co-op.

She also learned that until recently, Massachusetts property owners who had on their land one of the thousands of smaller dams on the river weren’t liable for damage downstream if their dam broke. That law recently was changed and many of the dams were removed, which has inadvertently resulted in a healthier ecosystem.

On one trek out to take pictures, Pritchard says she went seeking a bald eagle nest – even though she says ospreys and their return to the area tell a better ecological story – and found it in the tree line adjacent to a homeowner’s beautifully manicured lawn.

“You don’t even know the eagle is in the picture because it’s so small,” she explains. “But the important part of the story is that the husband grew up in that town, went away for school and work, and when he and his wife retired and moved back, he remembered the house from when he was young.”

She continues, “Back then, there were no windows on one side of the home because the river was so polluted. Today, there are windows, and the river is gorgeous.”

More than two dozen photographs from “Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories” are on display as part of an exhibition by the same name at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point until April 28.

But there are a handful of others he keeps close, too, pinned under the clear case around his cellphone, and declaring things like “Focus on your long-term goals, success is soon yours” and “Be content with your lot. One cannot be first in everything.”

It’s sage advice that Lasek ’26 (SFA) has collected from a basket of fortune cookies in Buckley Dining Hall, a place that’s like a close friend to him and so many others in the School of Fine Arts – no wonder those adages are dear.

Dakota Earley-Dyer ’26 (SFA) and his friends started a group chat when they were freshmen to arrange their regular, pretty frequent, trips to the dining hall just across the street from the Music Building in the south corner of campus.

BuckyBrekky, the chat’s official name, has morphed into just a regular group text stream, but it’s important to note, he says, that it started because of that special place and continues to pay homage.

“Personally, I like going there between Marching Band and Pep Band rehearsals,” Ashton Tyler ’25 (SFA) says. “Pep Band is high intensity and Marching Band has rehearsals outside and then inside. For brass players, you’re pretty much playing until you can’t play anymore, and, for me playing the trumpet, having Buckley as a place to regroup and sit with all your friends is reenergizing.”

Most music majors can easily tell you their favorite memory or what they like best about Buckley, though, Mark Paine ’25 (SFA) might just be the most unique of the lot.

He wrote a song about it, “Ode to Buckley,” a sentimental tune formed with a ditty he had in his head for a while and just didn’t yet have a place for, that questions where music students will eat when the hall closes later this spring.

‘Where will they go, where can they go, to get what we had’

John Buckley Residence Hall was built and named in 1969 after its eponym, a Stafford native who grew up in Union, was a UConn trustee for 14 years from 1926-40, and served as a U.S. attorney under two presidents.

Today, the hall houses only Honors students, alongside its neighbor Shippee Residence Hall, but in different stints through the years was open to all students and often was the place School of Fine Arts students landed, thanks to its proximity to the Fine Arts Complex.

“I always found it interesting when I was over there that in the middle of the day you could hear the trumpets from across the street because the music students were rehearsing,” Executive Director of Dining Services Michael White says. “I always thought that was a pretty cool thing about Buckley.”

As with many dorms at UConn, Buckley was built with a dining hall and at one time was carpeted – yes, it once had carpet, White says – but not much else has changed in 55 years.

White says the service area has been switched around some and minor upgrades have been done, but largely it looks the same, save most notably the addition of solid, thick-lacquered, sturdy pine tables, chairs, and benches, a hallmark of the place, about 15 years ago.

In the early days of UConn, students generally ate where they lived, keeping the number of people at each hall in line with roughly the number of people living in the building. Both Shippee and Buckley had dining halls, for instance, even though they’re right next to each other.

The number of students that Buckley served rose when Shippee’s dining hall closed in the 1990s. But when South Dining Hall opened in 1999, Buckley’s patronage began to drop off, White says. Downtown Storrs started to take shape between 2012 and 2014, and eateries there gained popularity, further impacting its customer base.

Buckley shifted to a Monday to Friday schedule to compensate. It started hosting special events, like Calzone Night or a sliders bar, to draw people. It even catered to its Fine Arts base, nestling musical notes among the décor and piping in music – literally avant-garde jazz one afternoon.

With seating for 252 people, Buckley drew 358 for dinner one mid-February night this semester. By comparison, McMahon Dining Hall, with a capacity of 500, fed 1,672, White says.

Considering the price of food and cost of operations, the math works out to about $9 per transaction in all the dining halls, he says, with two exceptions – Gelfenbien Commons in Towers because the Kosher kitchen requires extra workers, and Buckley, where it’s $12 per transaction because of the facility’s age.

“There’s a small niche of students who love Buckley, and we know that,” White says. “They love its intimacy and its proximity to the Fine Arts Complex, but they’re not getting the best value from their meal plan. We try really hard for them, but Buckley is limited in space, equipment, and the potential for upgrades.”

Discussions about closing Buckley – just the dining hall; the residence hall will remain open – came with construction of the new dorm near Mirror Lake and in it the opening of a 500-seat dining hall, dubbed New South for now.

White says New South will have a juice bar, vegan and vegetarian sections, comfort food and grill stations, a massive salad bar, and a first for campus – a smoker and rotisserie section.

Dining Services hopes to move into New South this summer and, White says, the goal is to have it ready in time for the fall semester.

‘All the friends we made along the way, the swipes we paid’

When Paine heard in the fall that Buckley was closing, he took his nugget of a song and fleshed it out, drawing from the band Chicago for inspiration and adding lyrics and other musical parts – piano, saxophone, trombone, trumpet, electric guitar, electric bass, and drums.

He recruited a team of musicians from his ensembles and classes, people he’s shuffled across the street with for breakfast after 8 a.m. Harmony class or Piano with Kenneth Clark. And they practiced with a performance for their peers in mind.

All music students at UConn are required to participate in a weekly Convocation course – “Convo” for short – from 1:25 to 2:15 p.m. every Friday in von der Mehden Recital Hall. One might describe it as a departmental student meeting, a noncredit but required time to gather as a group.

“When I started at UConn it was actually twice a week,” Eric Rice, professor and department head, says. “The idea is that this is a venue for sharing student performances and for providing information that is important to music students but doesn’t get transmitted as part of a regular class.

“We had a session recently on musculoskeletal health, exercises that students can do to prevent themselves from getting too fatigued while practicing or performing. And at least once a year we do a session on hearing health, which is incredibly important for musicians,” Rice says. “Those are required by the National Association of Schools of Music, so as part of our reaccreditation we need to get this information to students.”

Also, during Convocation, Rice says he brings in professional musicians to give masterclasses and devotes one session per semester to hearing from students, a time when they can vent about empty soap containers in the downstairs bathroom, or rehearsal practice load, or anything else on their minds.

“Convocation has evolved quite a bit in the last 20 years,” says Rice, who is stepping down next year as the longest-serving music department head. “I’ve been leading the class for the past decade in my role as department head and I strove to build a sense of community.”

Part of doing that is fostering a supportive atmosphere.

Students are required to perform during Convocation at least four times while at UConn, twice as a soloist and twice as part of a chamber group. The last three or four Fridays of each semester are devoted exclusively to these performances – there are, after all, 175 student musicians here.

With approval from their applied music teacher – so, for instance, their clarinet instructor – students ready for these performances, which sometimes can be nerve-wracking, Rice explains, because many are used to performing as part of large ensembles with the protection and near anonymity that provides, not standing on stage alone for all to see.

Thus, the importance of that sense of community, friendship, and support.

Performances run the gamut, Rice says. A student might perform an acapella arrangement of a pop song. A group of tubists might offer an arrangement of Christmas carols. Students might very well perform a piece by Mozart or Brahms to get them ready for their juries, the semester-end solo performance in front of a panel of professors.

So, it wasn’t exactly unusual that Paine and his crew last semester performed “Ode to Buckley,” an original composition with a sweet, if not silly at times, feel. Paine notes in the lyrics of a perhaps not-so-much-favored dish: “And all the scrod, I pray to God. I wish that it could stay.”

Sarah DiMiceli ’24 (SFA) was setting up her drum set ahead of the performance, she says, when Rice asked her what the song was going to be like – keep in mind that one student held up a “Save Buckley” sign during an earlier Convocation.

“Like a breakup song,” she replied. “But it also has happy undertones in a way. Buckley has just had such a positive impact on all of us.”

Then, Chandler Creedon ’24 (SFA), who’s usually a saxophonist, asked Rice to borrow his microphone. He says Rice gave him a raised eyebrow, in a sort of “you’re singing?” kind of way.

And then they belted it out, with a standing ovation at the end.

‘The shuffles done under the sun, the dinners sat down late’

Rice says that at the end of each academic year, the department gives out a series of superlative awards as another way to build community and join together those who might sing or play, compose or perform.

“The Buckley Shuffle,” DiMiceli says, nodding her head as if she’s in on a gag. “So, the Buckley Shuffle is famous, and it’s been around for years.”

“I’m the reigning Best Buckley Shuffler,” Creedon proudly proclaims.

Rice describes the Best Buckley Shuffler award as “perhaps the most coveted,” determined through an online poll, much the same as the other awards.

“Best Buckley Shuffler is the student who most successfully jaywalks through Storrs Road traffic to get to Buckley and also gets back after having eaten,” Rice explains. “It’s just part of our culture among the music students.”

DiMiceli says that when music students whisper to each other, “Buck Shuff,” they all know that means “Wanna go?”

“I just really like the food at Buckley,” she says. “Chicken nugget day is a really great day. I’m also a big fan of the perogies with sweet potato.”

Colin Quigley ’25 (SFA) says Buckley is part of the tradition of being a UConn music student, and he’s heartened to see this year’s freshmen shuffling across the street after Ear Training class, just the same as he did.

“They all sit at one table, and they all just become great friends,” Quigley says. “It’s just been a constant for all of us.”

Rock versions of Christmas songs, Michael Jackson’s greatest hits in reggae style, the lyrics of “All Star” by Smash Mouth over the melody of a Taylor Swift song, all of which have been piped in overhead at one time or another, are just a few of the things that will be missed.

In the fall semester, Andrew Rozzi ’25 (SFA) says, one of the workers brought in their dog, Otis, and students ogled and roughhoused with the pooch after finishing their meals. It’s something, he suspects, he’s not likely to see at other dining halls.

The single peak fond memory for me – because it’s just so consistently very nice – is just sitting down with friends, that everyday kind of thing. That we can just go across the street and have fun, eat, talk. It has just good vibes, I suppose. — Mark Paine ’25 (SFA)

“The single peak fond memory for me – because it’s just so consistently very nice – is just sitting down with friends, that everyday kind of thing. That we can just go across the street and have fun, eat, talk. It has just good vibes, I suppose,” Paine says.

Having a place nearby is especially important to music majors, Paine explains, because perhaps more than other majors they’re in the same building for as long as 12 hours each day, with classes that start at 8 a.m., rehearsals that convene in the afternoon and evening, performances at night, and time in a practice room in between.

“The music major is a very physical major because you have to be present and doing the thing you’re in school to do. There’s not a lot of online work. It’s playing or singing or composing. So, a lot of the time, all our work gets done in this building. We’re here all the time,” Creedon says.

Lasek adds, “Just because of this group, we’re talking a lot about being music majors and our relationship with Buckley, but really it’s the entire School of Fine Arts. You could talk to a similar group of people on the other side of the building, in Dramatic Arts or Art and DMD in Bishop, and they’ll give you the same answers about Buckley. It’s very unifying across the whole school.”

Students who recorded “Ode to Buckley” are Mark Paine, composer/keyboard; Chandler Creedon, saxophone; Sarah DiMiceli, drums; Dakota Earley-Dyer, vocals; Jacob Lasek, electric bass; Andrew Rozzi, trombone; Ashton Tyler, trumpet; and Colin Quigley, electric guitar.

“She had a man’s handwriting,” says Thomas Long, a professor emeritus who taught writing in UConn’s School of Nursing. “Her handwriting was big and loopy, even her contemporaries commented on that.”

During Dickinson’s life in the 1800s, Long says, men and women were taught different penmanship styles. Men would learn to make broad strokes, while women were instructed to keep letters diminutive to match the way they were expected to be: petite, quiet, unassuming.

Long’s collection of more than a dozen mostly anonymous scrapbooks from that time – more precisely, penmanship fascicles, commonplace books, and friendship albums – offer example after example of handwriting from the time, much of it female script and, unfortunately, none of it from Dickinson.

But the personalized books, which Long has donated to the UConn Library and Archives & Special Collections, are part of a 19th century practice Dickinson would have known about and in which she may very well have participated.

“People would have passed these books around, in some cases carrying them from town to town, for others to write things in them – verses that were memorized, poetry you wrote, quotable quotes that were overheard. Sometimes you can find pressed flowers between the pages or even small sketches. Also, when people came to visit, they would sign the books, so they served as autograph books, too,” Long explains.

Eventually, book publishers caught onto the practice and began to print blank books with leather covers, much like today’s journals, maybe peppering in empty pages of music staffs or embossed frames screaming for creative attention.

But oftentimes, people handstitched together scraps of paper, a prized possession of the simplest kind.

It’s no wonder, Long contends, that Dickinson left behind such handsewn fascicles with hundreds of her poems in a dresser drawer when she died. Her means of publishing wasn’t eccentric; simply a popular, deeply personal, method for the time.

“Self-publication in handwritten booklets was a much more common way of writing than had been originally thought. It’s the mainstream way 19th century women were published,” Long says. “When you look at these books, you’re seeing what people read and loved. This is the lived experience of poetry in people’s lives.”

Back then, he says, poetry was everywhere in society. It was published in the daily newspaper and sung during Sunday church services. Even today – as the country recognizes National Poetry Month in April – music playlists include songs replete with poetry, and social media posts are captioned with inspirational poetic snips.

Long says poetry is important, first, for pleasure, the simple joy of reading verse, and second, to commemorate the big, beautiful, and dramatic turning points in life – death, birth, marriage, graduation – if only in a greeting card.

“Oftentimes they’re trite, silly, and sentimental,” he says of greeting cards, “but the fact is we turn to poetry in life’s intense moments. There is no more noble medium for expressing the mystery and intensity of our lives. It takes us out of the everyday. The lines of a poem speak to us in a way that a paragraph of prose would not.”

Decades ago, Long happened upon the first commonplace book of his collection at an antiques show in Virginia Beach, the same one where much later he discovered a page from the famed Beauvais Missal.

He describes the initial find as a homemade anthology of verses assembled by someone who lived in Massachusetts. One poem is titled, “Formation of a Lyceum,” another is dedicated to someone called Little Willy. There’s one written on the death of Miss Cogswell and another written on the death of someone named Ranny Harris.

“It was only a little Black girl, for whom the bell did toll,” he reads of Ranny Harris, noting the historical importance of such a poem in antebellum New England.

“Tom has a way of filling the gaps in our collection,” Melissa Batt, an archivist at the Archives, says of his donation. “These are wonderful documents of 19th century writing practices, but they also tell us about the networks of females who contributed to them, the friends, family, mentors, perhaps even lovers, with whom these women circulated.”

In some of the books, the authors practiced their penmanship, Long says. They pressed in newspaper clippings of poems and other items. In one, someone pressed a clover and on the next page another sketched a flower.

Long picks up a book he found among a lot of miscellanea in Plymouth, England, a gift from 19th century playwright James Sheriden Knowles to someone named Jemma Haigh. There are autographs from various people and a pressed lithograph inside.

“Scrapbooks are a way of making meaning of a period in your life – girlhood, young adulthood, a change in one’s life, graduation,” Batt says. “This collection draws us into bigger questions about history and tells us something about the assemblers and the way they’re processing what’s happening around them. It’s really a form of journaling.”

When UConn students visit the Archives for classes and she brings out various objects for study, Batt says the scrapbooks and friendship albums are what they’re drawn to most. Perhaps it’s what they can relate to, she posits.

But what about those who find poetry inaccessible?

“You were schooled during the ‘interpretation regime’ that said there are secret meanings in poems,” Long suggests to someone. “The hunt for hidden meanings gives most of us a headache. Why not look at poetry just for pleasure?

“One of my favorite lines comes from the French poet Stephen Mallarme,” he continues. “It translates roughly to, ‘To precise a meaning erases your mysterious literature.’ Poetry is meant to be lived with and loved. It’s really that simple.”

The ensemble of sidemen and solo artists was formed by bassist and primary composer Michael League in 2004, starting inconspicuously enough as a group of college friends at the University of North Texas’ Jazz Studies program. Three years later, a serendipitous intersection with the Dallas gospel and R&B community in Dallas transformed the music into something funkier, more direct, and more visceral.

Snarky Puppy is a collective of sorts with as many as 25 members in regular rotation. They each maintain busy schedules as sidemen (with such artists as Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, and D’Angelo), producers (for Kirk Franklin, David Crosby, and Salif Keïta), and solo artists (many of whom are on the band’s indy label, GroundUP Music). At its core, the band represents the convergence of both Black and white American music culture with various accents from around the world. Japan, Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Puerto Rico all have representation in the group’s membership. Snarky Puppy has won Grammys for both Best R&B Performance and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, most recently last year for “Empire Central.”

For more information or to purchase tickets, go to Jorgensen.uconn.edu.

Chris Bullock, a saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who joined Snarky Puppy in 2005, spoke with WHUS on the Good Music show, (Wednesdays from 3:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.) about being a part of the group and his own solo career.

“Thank you,” she adds after asking the actors to back up three lines and begin again. “Please,” she begins when telling the flutist to lengthen the interlude. “This is going so well,” she offers to those around her during a break in the action, prompting everyone to find a piece of wood to knock on for continued luck.

“Taurus” has been several years in the making and uses shadow puppets to tell the story of the Taurus constellation in which Zeus, disguised as a white bull, abducts princess Europa.

Meanwhile on stage, a 15-foot-tall puppet, Harry the Giant, is outgrowing his house – a metaphor for growing too fast or outgrowing oneself – and live actors discussing mythology and a story one of them is writing both take on the heavy subject of the nature of love.

The show has been several years in the making and comes thanks to a Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) award to build Harry the Giant, a UConn IDEA Grant Program award to create the other character puppets, and D Series funding from the Department of Dramatic Arts to bring the production to the stage.

It’s a collaboration between the Department of Music, Department of Dramatic Arts, and the Puppet Arts and Design & Tech programs in the School of Fine Arts.

“I want to keep promoting ‘Taurus’ and hope it has a life after UConn. It’s my first piece for adult audiences since what I do in my home country of Canada with my puppet company there is for kids 12 and under,” Papillon says.

Performances will be held Friday, April 12, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, April 13, at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, April 14, at 2 p.m. at the Nafe Katter Theatre in the Fine Arts Complex. Free tickets are available online. (KP)

The overall story of “Taurus” is assembled through three different worlds featuring various forms of puppetry, and creator Papillon (top) says the idea for such a structure derived from her studies of “Cathay: Three Tales of China,” a puppet play by Ping Chong.

The first world uses shadow puppetry through a large silk screen to portray the myth of the Taurus, some of which is performed by Kelly Whitesell (bottom) through her masked shadow character Europa. Papillon says she chose this path for the first world since shadow theater is “one of the oldest forms of puppetry” and was one of the easier ways to portray the sensitive events of the mythology.

For “Taurus’” second world, Papillon says she wanted to “balance the mythology with a fantasy world that would truly take the audience outside of themselves” through the visual metaphors of Harry the Giant and several other rod puppets.

The third world of “Taurus” includes live acting and uses the entire theater as a university classroom where professor Cedric (played by Matt Sorensen, top center right) stands onstage and discusses the myth of the Taurus with students Marlene (played by Kat Corrigan, top center left), Jessica (played by Papillon, top far left), Laura (played by Harley Walker, top far right) and Kelly (played by Madeline Altman, not pictured) as they sit in the audience.

As the play goes on, the live acting world melds into the other two, such as when Harry the Giant emerges for the first time and interacts with Corrigan’s character Marlene (bottom right).

Papillon said the live acting and university setting help add a sense of realism and “grounds” the two worlds that feature puppetry so that the audience can relate to them more.

“I think overall the different visual worlds create awe and pathos, which allows us to transport the audience,” Papillon said. “The play is about taking them outside themselves such that they may better look within.”

All the onstage performers help bring the show’s various puppets to life, like Vic Basilio (top left), who operates Harry the Giant’s right hand while Papillon (top right) operates his left hand.

However, many of the show’s performers take on multiple roles throughout the show. Walker (middle left) operates the shadow puppets shown on the silk screen when she’s not operating rod puppet Blue or acting as Laura, Whitesell (middle right) provides live singing while portraying Europa, and Sorensen (bottom) operates Harry the Giant’s head in addition to acting as Cedric.

Papillon says that although she had originally hoped to have more performers involved so most of the cast would not have to double-up, she was ultimately glad the roles worked out the way they did.

“Having the same people performing the different worlds helped them become invested in the overarching vision and understand the through line of the play,” Papillon says. “We also developed a wonderful synergy as a team, which allows us to truly trust each other and rely on our scene partners.”

The sounds of the show are also just as varied as the visuals. Some lines are spoken live through Sorensen, Corrigan, Papillon, Walker, and Altman’s acting, while others, such as Harry the Giant’s lines performed by Tom Tuke, are heard through a recorded soundtrack.

The musical aspects of the show that are performed live include singing by Whitesell (top center) and instrumental solos by flutist Devora Trestman (bottom right) and violinist Krystian Pawlowski (not pictured).

On the impacts of the live music, Papillon says the live flute made her feel “like her breath in the flute infused the fairy with a new life” and that the violin “relates to the sensuality of the Taurus story.”

As she took her first bow following the run-through, Papillon says all she could think of was gratitude for the cast and crew standing alongside her and scattered throughout the theater who helped bring the most complex work she has ever produced to life.

“We had such a great time throughout the rehearsal process, and our first run on Saturday testified of the commitment everyone made to this show,” Papillon says. “It’s been profoundly humbling for me to watch the team come together like that and unite around a vision that sprouted from my artistic seed.”

“Taurus” premieres at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 12, with additional performances at 2 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 13, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 14, in the Nafe Katter Theatre. Admission is free, and those who wish to attend can book a ticket online. Livestreams are also available on YouTube for the Saturday matinee and Saturday evening shows. (SH)

Sure, the anticipation of World Cup games might threaten to get the best of her, she admits, but there’s one thing that’s far more nerve-wracking than playing the physical and sometimes blatantly brutal sport – putting her Sony A7 III camera in the water to take pictures of it.

“When I was first training with the underwater case, even though I tested it three times and it didn’t leak, I was so nervous to put my camera in and dunk it,” Bedoya ’25 (SFA) says. “I’m scared even today, and I’ve spent about a year in the water with it.”

Bedoya comes from a family of swimmers. Her father is a swimming coach who played underwater rugby in his home country of Colombia and introduced his daughters to it when they were old enough. Bedoya herself started swimming competitively at 7, always with the 100 and 200 butterfly on her mind, and picked up underwater rugby in high school.

While the family has played part in advancing the popularity of the little-known sport in the United States – there are only a dozen teams in the country, according to the sport’s national organization – Bedoya has joined an even more elite group, that of photographers who get in the pool alongside players.

As an art and art history major concentrating in photography and video, she married her two loves into a single project thanks to a scholarship from the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network that allowed her to purchase gear, spend last summer in the pool, and interview professional female sports photographers who’ve jockeyed their way onto the sidelines.

Family friend and Connecticut photographer David Lopez became Bedoya’s mentor years ago, as she watched him work with her underwater rugby team, she says.

“He would take videos and pictures and let me see what he was doing and explain why,” she explains. “Once I got to UConn, I was fortunate and very blessed to win the BOLD scholarship to merge my two favorite things, but even before then, in all my art projects whether it was ceramics, painting, or drawing, I tried to focus on underwater rugby because I’m so passionate about it.”

Underwater rugby is a sport that’s played in three dimensions, Bedoya says, because players can move in all directions – above, below, beside, around – other players. A weighted ball is carried between two goals that look like metal trash bins in an attempt to score.

Players wear ear padding for protection, masks over their faces, fins on their feet, and a snorkel. They stay underwater, moving much like minnows in an aquarium, for lengths of time as they move the ball from one end of the pool to the other, coming to the surface long enough to only blow out the water in their snorkel and suck in a deep breath of air.

The sport shares only a name with the game of land rugby, although the two do involve a similar sort of physicality. In underwater rugby, though, spectators watch the game on video monitors because all the action happens beneath the surface.

The Connecticut Makos boasts both men’s and women’s teams, although neither are currently training, Bedoya says, because finding a suitable pool has proved difficult. In the interim, if she and her teammates want to play, they join the Newark Sea Lions in New Jersey on weekends.

“I’ve gotten concussions before, and I’ve blacked out twice because you’re holding your breath so long. Now that I say it, it is a pretty dangerous sport. But I’ve always been in the water, so I do really enjoy it,” she says.

Bedoya’s BOLD project, “Women in Sports: Behind the Lens,” was born from her love for photography and lifetime as an athlete, she says, and started with her interviewing nine female photographers who either serve as team photographers in national leagues or otherwise focus their work in athletics.

That included NHL photographer Sophia Price, Miami Heat team photographer Cristina Sullivan, freelance photographers Laura Wolff and Jody Hou, and NHL photographer China Wong.

“My biggest takeaway from talking to all of them to use one word, I’d say determination,” Bedoya says. “You need to be determined in your work, you need to be professional, and you need to make sure those around you know you’re in the position you’re in for a reason.”

She learned from the professionals that female sports photographers sometimes aren’t issued accurate credentials to get them into games. Sometimes their work isn’t credited. Sometimes they’re told to step away from the action, so they don’t get hurt.

That’s unfair, she says.

With all of that in mind, Bedoya says she looked for a place to practice her sports photography, quickly deciding the sidelines of underwater rugby games was where she wanted to be.

It was a good place to start, she says, because she was familiar with the sport, even as other photographers might find it strange to jump in a pool, snorkel on mask, fins on feet.

Bedoya did not use an oxygen tank because she’s not certified for one, so she did what she does during games: She held her breath, and can do so, while moving, for up to 90 seconds, or roughly three laps around the pool.

“I knew the outcome would be great and that I’d bring something to the project that the average photographer wouldn’t because they don’t know the game,” she says.

The hardest part was putting the camera, despite its waterproof case, in the water. The next hardest was keeping it underwater because it kept wanting to float. The third hardest was accounting for the bubbles caused by the players’ movements that dotted almost to obscurity the final images.

“Sometimes I’d see a player with a ball and their teammate was on the other side of the pool, and think to myself, ‘I could just put my camera down and help,’” she says. “I needed to manage my headspace. I was there to shoot, not as a player, and needed to get into my zone and start photographing.”

That resulted in a series of photographs depicting images of determined individuals, powerful in their stance, fierce in their eyes, yet oftentimes graceful in their underwater rhythms. The exhibition was on display in the Art Building in early February.

Those who didn’t see the show will be able to catch the next, on display in April during the art and art history department’s annual spring BFA art show. As a senior, who will finish classes in December, Bedoya will be one of dozens showing off their work in the Art Building.

“It was hard for me to say I’m done with this project let me move onto another one my senior year,” she says. “My advisor told me to do what makes me happy and excited, because no one wants to work on something they’re not inspired by. I’ve learned a lot since last summer and have put those new techniques to work.”

Even as recently as early this month, she traveled to New Jersey for a game.

She also notched another new experience in her hoped-for profession when she was asked recently to photograph a UConn men’s hockey game.

“I was like, ‘Of course!’ Do I know a lot about hockey? Absolutely not. Have I ever shot a game? No. Would it be a great experience? For sure. I think that was something I got out of my interviews last summer,” she says. “Even if you don’t feel 100% prepared, don’t limit yourself. Just push through and remember that you were asked for a reason. Maybe someone sees something in me that I don’t see. Just have that confidence to say, ‘Yes, I can do that,’ and then show up with confidence and show you can do it.”

Back then, they’d communicate with their parents and grandparents in the tonal language that they say requires the speaker to almost sing. When they went to school, though, English became first nature and bit by bit their ability to speak Vietnamese vanished.

“If I were to ask any of my older relatives to tell me their personal stories in English, their experiences during and after the war and their experience coming to the United States, I don’t think I would get the emotional breadth that they would want to express,” Pham, who uses they/them pronouns, says. “My mom is fluent in English, my dad is too, but I don’t think they would be able to say precisely how they feel except in Vietnamese.”

Conversely, Pham says they have trouble expressing themself to the rest of the family. It’s an intergenerational struggle exacerbated by the tug of cultures, languages, and history.

In “From Grandfather to Mother, From Mother to Daughter,” Pham’s most recent art exhibition on display in the Department of Art and Art History where they’re studying painting and drawing, Pham seeks to convey their emotion without words – feelings of rebirth, love, and reflection – to the very family members at the center of it all.

“It’s a little dodgy in my opinion, but it’s one step forward,” they say.

Pham’s parents emigrated from Vietnam in their early 20s, born after the Vietnam War yet still influenced by its long-lasting effects on the country. Pham had a traditional Vietnamese home life – pho and bun bon hue on the table at dinner.

Their upbringing as a second-generation immigrant was sheltered, they say, an effect of the atrocities their parents and grandparents experienced. People were safe when they were home. Even friends’ houses, especially when their parents were strangers, weren’t safe enough.

“What that did was isolate me more than other people in my age group. I never knew what it was like to just walk around, or use a map,” they say. “I also grew up in a very suburban town, so wherever you needed to go you needed a car, and when you need a car as a child, adult supervision comes with it.”

Pham’s first year at UConn happened in the fall of 2020, still in the throes of the pandemic. Their second year included relaxed restrictions, campus living, and finally the feeling of being out in the world during a time of self-discovery.

They considered getting a tattoo but landed on a platinum streak across their dark hair.

“Body modification is looked down upon in traditional families,” Pham says. “I talked about it for a long time and my mom kept saying, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ But I went ahead and did it anyway, and she got really upset, which meant I got really upset. That was the kicker for a conversation about who owns my body. Does she own it or do I?”

Winter break that year included rubs from family members who quipped about the so-called freshman 15 and an imperfect complexion, Pham says, and prompted upset all around.

But when their mother’s father, separated and living across the country, told Pham not to upset their mother, “It was like a giant spark in me, and I knew we needed to unpack all of this. That’s what this project is all about,” they say.

With financial support from the UConn IDEA Grant Program through the Office of Undergraduate Research, Pham created about a dozen paintings for “From Grandfather to Mother, From Mother to Daughter,” including one of their absent grandfather whose leaving caused strife in the family.

“My work has a lot of Buddhist and Vietnamese imagery,” Pham says. “I’m trying to reinforce this willingness to rebirth oneself. You’re always going to have to experience change, especially as immigrants who have to change the way they think because that’s the nature of moving somewhere else.”

Several of their pieces depict people walking forward or stopping to look back, a sort of self-reflection that’s healthy, they say, when one looks back to see from where they’ve come.

“This one is my mom,” Pham says pointing to the painting of a women with hands crossed and eyes closed. “She’s sitting on a lotus, that’s the national flower of Vietnam, and lotuses in Buddhism represent rebirth. A lot of the other imagery here is moments in time or transitional moments.”

Pham shows some of these snapshots in time – a child, a mother and daughter, the outside of a building – on an enlarged replica of a lotus root. Lotus flowers have deep roots, they explain, and it’s common in Vietnamese cuisine to eat slices of the root, which has holes in it much like Swiss cheese and is where Pham painted those snapshots.

On a three-section piece of artwork, each representing a Buddha bead, Pham painted family portraits. Their mother is a Buddhist nun, while their grandfather was a Buddhist practitioner, and they say they wear their collection of stone and wood beaded bracelets as a reminder of who they are.

“When I was growing up and got whiny about something my dad would always tell me that when he was a kid, he sold potatoes for money,” Pham says. “I have a recording of my grandmother telling me her war story, but I have to translate it into English because I can’t understand it, sadly.”

Their family speaks with a southern accent, they say, and, even if they were to take language classes, there are nuances in the way they speak. Pham easily would be picked out as a nonnative speaker.

That may be one reason they’ve never visited the country.

It’s not that they don’t want to, Pham says. Flights are expensive, and whenever they suggest a village to visit, their mother notes that it’s not a village anymore. The small locales from where their family came have become tourist destinations or attractions for YouTubers.

Painting is a way for Pham to reconcile the ever-present internal conflict of the past versus present, young versus old, contemporary versus traditional.

“I really liked cats as a little kid, and every day I would just draw cats, realistically or unrealistically in cartoon form,” they say of their artistic origin story. “And the internet exposed me to different styles of art. That kept developing and I thought I should do this as a career. It’s a way for me to be vulnerable and bring out the vulnerabilities in others.”

One of the first paintings Pham created in the immigration series shows the palms of eight hands, fingers curled in, with wrists forming a wreath around a bright sun in the center. Lotus petals make a bed behind the hands.

“It’s meant to represent the hands of the Buddha,” Pham says. “At some Buddhist temples, there are statues with Buddha or another figure having hundreds or thousands of hands surrounding him. What it represents to me is that we are all trying to help each other. And these hands represent the way that we continue to heal from the things we’ve suffered. Rebirth through healing and rebirth though helping other people.

“The other painting here, with the mother and daughter surrounded by hands, it’s the immigrant parent trying to help the child, but it’s not help the child needs or wants,” they continue. “A lot of older Asian relatives have their opinions about what you should and shouldn’t do, and they tell you because they want to help. Sometimes it comes off in not a great way, but it’s all done through love.”

As is Pham’s art.

“From Grandfather to Mother, From Mother to Daughter” is on display through Saturday, March 30, in the VAIS Gallery, Room 109, in the Art Building.

Released in November, “Dolls of Our Lives” is an offshoot of the eponymous podcast the pair have hosted since 2019. Each episode of the podcast analyzes a specific book in an American Girl character series through the lenses of history and pop culture. (For example, the episode “Classy, Bougie, Ringlets” discusses the book “Samantha Learns a Lesson,” placing it in conversation with other modern-day classics like Selling Sunset.)

In their book, Mahoney and Horrocks get to break away from the American Girl literary world to consider how the brand – its characters, its stories, its publications, and even its merchandise – shaped the real lives of girls (and others) across the country. 

“We wanted to expand the mission of our show to not just tell our stories, but to explore what it meant for generations of fans and people for whom it mattered,” says Mahoney. 

Living History

The book’s origins feel as magical as receiving a burgundy doll-sized box for a birthday: Mahoney and Horrocks were contacted by an editor from Macmillan Publishers, who had listened to the show and recognized something special. This editor wasn’t alone – the show attracted media buzz from the likes of The New York Times, NPR, and UConn Magazine, while the book prompted a warm-and-fuzzy feature in The New Yorker. As Mahoney and Horrocks know all too well, revisiting the world of American Girl is a surefire way to get people talking. 

But the creators are careful not to lean on nostalgia. In contrast to, say, pretending that Molly lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by nuclear war (a fan’s childhood anecdote recounted in the book), their engagement with American Girl’s legacy is marked by careful attention to history and critical analysis. 

“I think people who are really drawn to these kinds of conversations, they’re fascinated by reviewing something they loved, or still love, with a different lens and different outlook,” Horrocks says. “And I think that is very different than just reveling in something you used to take pleasure in. … The brand wanted to spark curiosity, and that worked.” 

Within the book’s 243 pages, Horrocks and Mahoney trace the evolution of the American Girl brand, from its founding as Pleasant Company by educational entrepreneur Pleasant Rowland in 1986 to its present-day incarnation as a Mattel subsidiary.

They share firsthand interviews with women who helped bring American Girl history to life, among them Mary Wiseman, a Martha Washington living history performer at Colonial Williamsburg; Ingrid Hess, an illustrator who worked on the iconic AG book “The Care and Keeping of You”; and Courtney Price, the first girl who got to trace her own family’s history by being transformed into a paper doll for American Girl magazine. 

“I did a lot of 19th century history when I was in grad school, so it’s nice to talk to and write about people who are still with us,” says Mahoney. “Someone I can call on the phone – what a gift!” 

Better (Research) Together

For as long as they have been collaborators, Horrocks and Mahoney have never lived in the same state. Mahoney works as a Digital Scholarship Strategist for Trinity College-Hartford; Horrocks works as an interpretive park ranger in Rhode Island. Like their podcast, their book was made possible by virtual collaboration, file-sharing, and the occasional joint excursion to Colonial Williamsburg. 

“A lot of times, it feels solitary when you do research – you go to an archive, you’re reading books,” says Mahoney. “But this felt like a joint effort.” 

The virtual space in which much American Girl content exists also lent itself to a new kind of historical work, one that took both historians beyond the realm of anything they’d tackled before. 

“I think what’s really different is usually you’re visiting an archive that’s been set up by other people,” says Horrocks. “Really, for this, we created the archive: the archive is in our Google Drive, it’s in other people’s Flickr account, it’s in things that people chose to share with us. There isn’t a singular place that you could go to access all these materials, so we’ve had to build up a kind of borrower’s library of all of it.” 

This work has allowed us to engage people who think history is not for them.

Historical training like hers, Horrocks says, tends to focus on physical artifacts. This has equipped her well to consider how objects like books, dolls, and accessories actually held meaning for the young people to whom they were important. 

“I think what makes [our work] different from a corporate-minded history is, we’re curious about the ephemera in a book,” she says. “We’re curious about how people actually use the products, not just how they were produced and then stored in an archive.” 

This democratic approach creates products, like the podcast and book, that virtually everyone can appreciate. Horrocks and Mahoney take the specialized training and knowledge they acquired through their graduate studies and transform them into public-facing scholarship you don’t need an advanced degree to wade through – childhood afternoons spent networking with Felicity and Kaya will suffice. 

“This work has allowed us to engage people who think history is not for them – which is the people public historians most want to reach – and actually get them involved or interested in conversations about history that they think didn’t include them or weren’t of interest to them,” says Mahoney. “And that’s probably been the most rewarding public history piece of it for me.”

Molly Gets Kicked Out

Asked which American Girl doll would be most likely to get a UConn history Ph.D., Horrocks doesn’t hesitate. 

“It has to be Julie Albright, because of the women’s basketball team,” she says, naming the spunky young San Franciscan who contends with the real-time implementation of Title IX at her elementary school. “I could see her hauling into a 1980s lecture in a power suit.” 

Mahoney offers a counterpoint in Kit Kittredge, an aspiring journalist who grows up during the Great Depression. 

“Kit could have come of age and been part of the Federal Writers’ Project, perhaps doing oral histories, and then maybe she gets into the UConn history Ph.D. later in life, kind of as a retirement project,” she says. 

“Just thinking about it,” Mahoney adds, “I think Molly may have tried to get a Ph.D. in history, but she would have been kicked out for basically doing ‘Great Man’ World War II history.” 

For what it’s worth, Mahoney and Horrocks are both self-identified “Molly”s. Thankfully, their collective body of work shows no warning signs of veering into this sort of uncritical hero-worship. 

While both historians enjoy the success of their recent publication, they don’t expect to close the book on their work together anytime soon. 

“My intention is to keep going, thinking about how I can reach people about public history, using pop culture as a shared language to access historical questions or historical thinking,” says Mahoney. The response to the book, she says, “makes us feel that we’re on the right path, trying to do work that can meet people where they are … and take them somewhere else.” 

The front door of the home was a full pane of glass, completely see-through and screaming for curtains by today’s standards, she says, so there was no hiding from the men who showed her an FBI badge and asked for her mom.

“She’s not home yet,” she told them. “Can I ask your names?”

“No need for names. Just tell her we’ll come by another day.”

Masud says she watched as the men turned and walked away, down the sidewalk and into a dark-colored Cadillac parked on the street, then drove away.

The minutes-long encounter might have rattled anyone – young or old.

For Masud and her family, though, the FBI at that time surveilled much of their lives, tapping phones and tracking whereabouts as government agents searched for Masud’s uncle who was accused of passing a gun to prisoners’ rights leader George Jackson and sparking an uprising at San Quentin Prison in 1971.

“I was told you never talk to your friends about this,” Masud says of the FBI and the story of her extended family. “I was told you never mention the name Stephen Bingham to anyone.”

‘The past is never dead’

An assistant professor-in-residence jointly appointed in UConn’s Department of Digital Media & Design and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, Masud was 8 when her uncle vanished from his life in California after the tumultuous events of 1971 when Jackson, three correctional officers, and two inmates were killed.

She says she and her brother didn’t really understand what had happened, especially since Bingham had visited Chicago only a few months prior, roughhousing with the children in favorite uncle style.

“I grew up thinking he was probably dead,” Masud says, noting that even her grandparents in southeastern Connecticut contended they didn’t know what happened to their youngest child. “But the FBI kept coming by our house and our phones were tapped, so you could say it cast a shadow over my childhood.”

Nonetheless, as children do, Masud grew up. She went to college at Brown University, then went to work for an overseas nongovernmental organization.

By the time Bingham returned home, turning himself in to police and later facing charges of first-degree murder, Masud had settled in South Asia where she made films with her Bangladesh-born husband, Tareque. Geography stymied a chance to reconnect, more than just hearing about one another in family circles, until a few years ago when she herself came home.

What did he do all those years?

What was it like to assume a new identity?

Who was this person he’d become?

“I approached him about telling his story in a documentary. He waffled at first and said he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it,” she says. “He said that what happened was in the past. But as I found out later, it was very much in the present for him. The past is never dead.”

Over the course of three long interviews with Bingham, Masud learned about her uncle’s involvement in the Freedom Summer Project in 1964, his work with Cesar Chavez and the farm worker strikes in California, and his early career as an advocacy lawyer.

She answered the questions of what he did during those 13 years, where he went, and how he survived. She learned about his French wife, his continued activism, his child.

And in interviews with his legal team, friends, family, acquaintances, and supporters, she learned so much more about the Stephen Bingham who she remembered only as the fun uncle who wore a leather jacket and rode a motorcycle.

Telling more than just one story

“A Double Life,” which premiered late last year and will be screened at UConn in April, lays out not just Bingham’s story, but considers the roles of lawyers in social movements and how racial tensions in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s affected so many aspects of life, including Bingham’s case.

“The family is also part of the story,” Masud says. “There are intergenerational tensions that were important to talk about and it was important to address the legacy out of which Steve came – this background of white privilege, grandson of a U.S. senator, son of a state senator.”

Throughout the film, Masud lets Bingham and his associates tell the story, interjecting as narrator only a few times. The film isn’t her story after all.

Privately, hers is one of speculation: Could she have walked by her uncle on the streets of Paris in 1983 when she was studying there abroad? It’s also part shared experience: Both had close loved ones, a husband and a daughter, killed by motor vehicles in different years and different places, and still both found strength in that loss to fight for improved road safety.

“I remember the moment I met Steve after he came out of hiding because I have this visual of him kind of backlit and all I could see was his hair. Somebody said to me, ‘Oh, here’s Steve.’ I couldn’t believe I was meeting him, and he was walking toward me. It was very strange because here was this person who all these years I thought was never coming back and might even be dead, yet there he was,” she says.

Masud says that even nearly 30 years later, as she was getting up the nerve to approach him with the idea for a documentary, she was intimidated – her, an award-winning filmmaker who’s worked with survivors of mass atrocities and genocide.

“Even though he’s a very warm person, he’s also sometimes reserved or standoffish. I think that was part of the change that happened in his personality because of the time he spent underground, always being on guard, always looking over his shoulder,” she says.

She also says she hesitated in asking him because she didn’t want to be the source of more trauma as Bingham relived his past. But realizing time heals and older age often prompts reflection, now ended up being just the right time for the project – for both of them.

Masud is back in the United States, rebuilding a life here after her husband was killed in 2011 in Bangladesh along with most of her film crew. “A Double Life” is her first feature-length project in the U.S.

“I was in Bangladesh for most of my adult life with almost a different identity. It wasn’t a secret identity, it wasn’t underground, but it was a bifurcated existence because when I came back here, I felt like a foreigner,” she says. “I could identify with what it must have been like for Steve. He was completely immersed in the culture of a different place. It was similar for me.”

She says Bingham doesn’t regret the years he spent living underground and would have regretted only not returning to the U.S. His father, Masud’s grandfather, paid his annual dues to the bar association, so Bingham wouldn’t lose his license and could go right back to practicing upon his return, should he return.

“If this film gives audiences some insight into what Steve went through, if it gives them some inspiration and teaches them the importance of sticking to your principles even through adversity, then I’d be happy,” she says. “I would be glad if it gives them a deeper understanding of not just a particular historical period but how that resonates in the present and what we have to learn from that.”

“A Double Life” will be screened Monday, April 1, at 4 p.m. in the Konover Auditorium in the Thomas J. Dodd Center for Human Rights. It was screened at the Pan African Film & Arts Festival in January and the Mill Valley Film Festival in October, where it won an Audience Favorite Award.

Nickel Creek has revolutionized folk and roots music since first performing together as children at a pizza parlor in San Diego in 1989, signing to acclaimed roots label Sugar Hill Records after wowing the bluegrass circuit for a decade. Nickel Creek quickly broke through in 2000 with their Grammy-nominated, Alison Krauss-produced self-titled album, which showcased not just their instrumental virtuosity but their burgeoning songwriting prowess.

Nickel Creek, which performs in Storrs for the first time as a group, includes mandolinist Chris Thile, violinist Sara Watkins and guitarist Sean Watkins.

Thile, a MacArthur Fellow, is also a founding member of Punch Brothers, who performed at Jorgensen in 2022, and former host of “Live From Here” on National Public Radio. Sara Watkins last appeared at Jorgensen in 2019, as part of I’m With Her, a trio of musicians that included Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. Sean Watkins has released six solo recordings and is also a member of the duo Fiction Family and the group Works Progress Administration (which includes Sara and Benmont Tench, former keyboardist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and was featured with Nickel Creek in Acoustic Guitar Magazine in 2023 that highlighted his guitar style in a lesson feature.

Sean Watkins spoke with WHUS on the Good Music show, (Wednesdays from 3:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.) earlier this week about his guitar playing and how Nickel Creek has evolved its music over its 35-year collaboration.

For more information go to Jorgensen.uconn.edu

Listen to the interview here:

“Putting my work on a wall is extremely vulnerable,” she says. “If you ever see me at an art show, I usually walk away and if someone asks who painted a piece, I’ll point to the person next to me. I identify as a surrealism/realism painter. I want you to look at it, figure it out, and not have to think too much.”

It might also be the reason Ford paints under the name Brie Miyoko and leads a dual life as a human development and family sciences major, with plans after graduation to focus mostly on a career in child development.

But her painting, “I Don’t Bang or Slang on Gang,” which is on display as part of the “Symphony of Colors” exhibition at the Ferguson Library next to UConn Stamford, marries both her interests. The piece was inspired by a photograph a friend took during a visit to Ivory Coast and shows four boys wearing smiley-face stickers, making silly faces, and staring down into a camera lens.

“To me, it’s ‘Black boy joy’ of just being carefree on the beach,” Ford says, momentarily breaking from her credo of not talking about her work. “They’re just children, not something to be demonized or targeted for failure. They are just Black children who want to have fun.”

And as much as she doesn’t like the spotlight, “Don’t Bang or Slang” was featured in all the promotional materials for the show that features Fairfield County artists, many connected to UConn Stamford, through the curating skill of Isabella Montenegro ’19 (SFA).

Montenegro says her curating experience started during the pandemic on Instagram when she’d go to exhibitions, take pictures of works that moved her, and post them online – during a time when, for many, visiting an art gallery wasn’t enough reason to leave the house.

And while she didn’t consider that curating, others did and suggested she apply to The Norwalk Art Space as its first Korry Fellow in curating.

That successful application prompted a handful of curating opportunities in Fairfield County and a seat on the board of the Stamford Art Association, which approached her in late 2023 to ask if she’d be interested in putting on a show at the Ferguson Library for Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March.

She titled it “Symphony of Colors” because she says she wanted to tell a harmonious story of Black artists and their experiences.

“After the artists dropped off their works and I started figuring out what walls everything was going on, when I was done hanging everything, I sat down, looked around the room, and had the biggest smile,” she says. “This show felt so special because a lot of the artists are my friends or people who I’ve become close with the past year.”

Montenegro says she doesn’t consider herself an artist – she notes that if she drew a picture of a dog, it wouldn’t much look like one – but does call herself a “creative” and does see now that she has an artistic eye when figuring out how to group sometimes disparate works, whether in size and shape or subject matter.

The show, after all, is about the artists, she says, and in the case of “Symphony” 14 Black artists, some of them young and emerging and others who are more defined in their work.

Take, for instance, Brea Young ’19 (SFA) who has exhibited in four shows yet says this one is perhaps the most special – she used to visit the Ferguson as a young child, borrowing books and sitting for story time.

“I’ve always been an artsy person and enjoyed the artwork displayed at the library, but now coming here and saying, ‘That’s my piece,’ to be able to bring my niece here to see the show and my work, is extra special,” she says.

Her painting, “Power Puffs,” which shows the silhouette of a Black girl from the forehead up with Afro puffs on top of her head, is one that Young says was inspired by her inner child. It was her favorite hairstyle growing up, one she describes as a “superpower” in which she felt most confident.

“My niece looked at that piece and said, ‘I do my hair like that! It looks like me,’” she says, remarking she hopes the young girl also feels powerful in the hairdo.

Montenegro says that many of the pieces refer to the artists’ experiences or childhood – Young’s other work in the show, “Untitled,” is a round canvas depicting a pattern reminiscent of the loud prints on Coogi sweaters from the 1990s, with which she says she was fascinated as a child.

Tara Blackwell (Malone), who is associate director of UConn’s Center for Career Development for the regional campuses, has been a painter off and on most of her life, she says, working steadily over the last decade and drawing inspiration from one of her favorite television shows growing up: Sesame Street.

“Young, Gifted & Black – Roosevelt Franklin” depicts the Sesame Street character who was on the program from 1970-75. She says that as a young girl his song, “The Skin I’m In,” resonated most with her.

Kermit the Frog’s song, “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” also helped Blackwell work through feelings of acceptance, she says, and her piece by the same name pays tribute to that while tying in the struggle of the more contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

“I was a very shy child and wish that I was able to use my voice more in certain situations. I think I still feel that way now as a woman,” she says. “Through art I use my voice. It’s interesting because I’m very soft spoken and quiet, but my artwork is very bold, bright, colorful, and kind of satirical as well.”

Montenegro has paired Blackwell’s third entry “Good Trouble” – one of a series of paintings that display fortune cookie-type sayings and in this case declares from civil right activist John Lewis, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble” – with paintings of Malcolm X and Lewis, a former U.S. representative.

“I didn’t ask for any of the artists for specific works. I also didn’t ask them to send me a photograph ahead of time. I just gave them the theme, title, and what I was looking for, so when they dropped off their submissions that was the first time, in many cases, that I saw them,” Montenegro says.

In some instances, like with the John Lewis quote, the pairings came naturally. On the two curved walls of the gallery space, though, Montenegro needed to get a little more creative.

“I grew up taking art classes but there wasn’t anything that I felt confident enough about to keep pursuing. In high school I took a marketing elective, and at UConn was drawn to DMD with a concentration in digital media strategy for business,” Montenegro says, adding of her work as curator, “I’ve now come full circle.”

“Symphony of Colors” is on display through March 21 in the Third Floor Auditorium Gallery at the Ferguson Library’s main branch, 1 Public Library Plaza, Stamford. It’s two blocks from UConn Stamford in the city’s downtown.

She talked about the elements of art – think, lines and shapes, colors and textures – in Irving Katzenstein’s “The Lake” and Frank Vincent Dumond’s “Spring Willows.” She asked how the two works are different in mood and style and wondered whether the artists would depict each scene differently on another day.

On task to earn their Art merit badges, the Scouts from Tolland considered what they learned, then dove into their own projects, creativity sparked and imaginations wild.

It was a sight Sixsmith and all the staff at the Benton had longed for – the smell of paint in the air, youngsters hunched over pictures of glaciers and volcanoes, voices discussing technique and whether the fire at their last campout looked the same on paper.

This was the group to christen the museum’s new educational space with hands-on artmaking.

After so long, the room off the East Gallery now has a public purpose with fresh white walls, sturdy floors to withstand childhood creativity, and a couple dozen chairs in the Benton’s signature orange.

“Teachers and parents like to have a hands-on component in museum programs,” Sixsmith, curator of education for K-12 and community groups, says. “You take what you learn in the gallery space and apply it in the creation of something hands on. Before we had this space, we’d have to go outside or grab a corner somewhere else in the museum.”

Benton Executive Director Nancy Stula says the room once served as a break room for staff and lately had been relegated mostly to committee meetings. The walls were pink and there was a leather couch that gave it a lounge-type feel.

About a year ago, the School of Fine Arts offered much of the funding necessary for the revamped space and within eight months renovations were complete, Stula says, with the room opening officially at the start of the spring semester.

Amanda Douberley, curator and academic liaison, says she also has used the space in her work with undergrad and graduate students at the University.

In late January, she arranged about 30 paintings, prints, and photographs on top of a bookcase that wraps around half the room for a group of grad students and faculty members from UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies to examine. The group is curating an exhibition for the balcony gallery to coincide with WGSS’s 50th anniversary this year.

At the same tables where the Scouts adorn their paintings, adults are seated to analyze the intricate patterns and delicate details of works from the Benton’s collection.

“It was a chance to see these objects up close and go through the process of elimination to decide what fits best in the exhibition,” Douberley says. “To see the works this close is much better than making decisions based on a little photo that’s online. This space is perfect for that with the directional track lighting because you can see small details.”

Over the last 25 years, Douberley explains, museum education has begun to emphasize visitor engagement and participation rather than encourage a passive experience by just listening to a person talk.

Both, of course, offer some level of understanding, but the engagement part allows for more meaningful learning.

“Museum as Classroom: Teaching and Learning with Art,” the East Gallery exhibition co-curated by Douberley and Sixsmith and open until March 8, highlights the ways the Benton’s collection is used to help students understand classroom material.

Take a look at the wall of seven World War I-era posters that Sherry Zane, WGGS interim director and associate professor-in-residence, uses to teach. A personified Statue of Liberty encourages the purchase of liberty bonds, a Red Cross nurse corrals orphans of the war, an angel implores Americans to “Share in the Victory” and purchase war savings stamps.

“The students talk about what they think is happening in these images, the relationship between image and text, and since the course is Gender and War, the students look at pairs of posters and think about the ways they can analyze them through the lens of gender,” Douberley says. “Usually in a group discussion, we’ll bring out more ties with the course material.”

She adds, “We have a growing roster of faculty who put a visit to the Benton on their syllabus, so having the education center is very helpful. Until now, I’ve been hauling tables out of the closet and setting them up in the gallery where there’s lots of distractions.”

During the fall semester, more than 1,100 students in 68 classes across a dozen departments came through the museum for guided and self-guided visits, Douberley says, a number that’s expected to grow with the new dedicated space and a growing collection of more than 7,000 objects.

And the range of departments is varied from the expected Department of Art & Art History to the perhaps unexpected German, French, landscape architecture, and history departments.

Stula says an engineering professor who teaches fluid dynamics is working with staff now on an upcoming exhibition.

This means, the critical looking wall that Douberley designed for the exhibition, showcasing the inquiry-based learning the Benton promotes and featuring Connecticut artist Earl Kenneth Bates’ painting “Experience,” could very well be used by an earth science class, for instance.

“Begin by describing what you see. What is the first thing you notice,” one thought-balloon writing prompt posted next to the painting asks. “Instead of showing a geranium framed by a window, we see the plant from outside looking in. Why do you think the artist chose this vantage point,” says another.

“We don’t provide the stereotypical idea of just a walk and talk,” Douberley says of what the museum offers. “Instead, we’re really asking visitors to participate, so we can layer back in information. This fall dozens of First Year Experience instructors brought their classes to the museum for a critical looking workshop, in which students sharpen observation skills, practice empathy, and foster critical thinking by examining a single work of art.”

Whether young students studying patterns on a set of four pillars painted by Liz Whitney Quisgard – which are on display in the exhibition along with two of her paintings – or older students looking at a pair of Nigerian masks, also on display, in their development of a stop-motion art project, the Benton’s offerings are for all academic disciplines.

“I love hearing the students’ reactions to a piece of art,” Sixsmith says. “I like to hear about what they’re seeing, what makes them say that, how they feel about the artwork, and how it relates to their life. That all contributes to making the museum a place they feel welcome and comfortable.”

Douberley says she learns from the students almost every day, even though she has a Ph.D. in art history.

“That might seem counterintuitive,” she says, “but the kinds of questions people ask, the connections they make often spark a new thought for me. Museum education and working with university audiences is why I became an art historian.”

Along with University and Scout visits, the Benton also hosts homeschool students, K-12 field trips, a four-week Summer Art Academy for young children, a First Thursday program for UConn students, and online exhibitions.

“When I first started here, I was surprised to learn just how many UConn freshmen had never been to a museum – any museum,” Stula says. “That’s why it’s so important to introduce them to the museum and make them feel like it’s their space and it’s a place for them.”

After all, that’s the goal of the five-year-old music series that came to UConn thanks to a donation from benefactors John and Jean Lenard: to allow adults to celebrate a music genre that requires the precision and skill of a surgeon and develop youngsters’ appreciation for the reticent beauty of the art form.

“Some students have told me after a concert it was one of the most beautiful things they’d ever heard, and those are the students you try to encourage to come back again and again,” Rodney Rock, Jorgensen director, says.

Since its outset, the Lenard Series has welcomed area K-12 students with free tickets and encouraged UConn students to take advantage of the free ticket policy for Huskies. This year, though, Rock says, Jorgensen is offering free tickets for the Lenard Series also to college students outside UConn.

It’s an effort both to grow Jorgensen’s audience and expose young adults to the music of trios, quartets, and quintets as their musical tastes are developing.

“There are folks who love classical and orchestral music, but not chamber music. Then there are people who love chamber music, but don’t like orchestral music,” Rock says. “I don’t know anyone who loves all types of music.”

Chamber music, he explains, is performed by a small group of musicians, like a string quartet, for instance, or a woodwind trio. Contrary to the sound of a large orchestra, the talent and skill of individual musicians in a chamber ensemble is on full display.

Audience members can track the notes of the clarinetist the whole way through or hear the pluck from the singular violinist.

“These are some of the best musicians out there. It’s one thing to play in the safety of a 60- or 90-piece orchestra on stage. It’s another thing to be in a trio, quartet, or even a quintet. You’re pretty exposed, and if you mess up it’s going to be obvious,” Rock says.

Since it’s a small group of musicians, an intimate setting is preferred, Rock says, such as the more formal parlors or sitting rooms of long ago or the comfortable living rooms of today.

“Most people think of chamber music as pieces written during the classical and romantic periods, but there’s lots of chamber music still being written today,” Rock explains.

And Jorgensen is where chamber musicians are eager to play.

Rock says word of the Lenard Series and Jorgensen’s commitment to the genre has traveled far, prompting booking agents to regularly call him pushing to get their ensembles on the main stage.

But it’s not the same proscenium stage used by most groups visiting Jorgensen. Rock says that for the Lenard Series, the seats in the front half of the floor are removed and a portable thrust stage is constructed to bring musicians closer to the audience.

With mezzanine lights turned off, what transformed into a 1,500-seat audience feels more like a venue a third the size, Rock says, giving the illusion of intimacy.

During the pandemic, Jorgensen did not use this setup to give audience goers enough room to spread out and, simply, feel comfortable attending performances again. With that in the past, the chamber setting has returned.

Still, Rock adds, with 1,500 seats, there’s plenty of room to stay distanced.

“In general, chamber audiences tend to be smaller anyway. An audience of 400 to 500 people is very good, and that’s what we have generally. Last fall, we presented the Emerson String Quartet on their final tour, and we had 700 people for that concert. That was extraordinary,” Rock says.

Spring 2024 in the Lenard Series starts with Imani Winds, a wind quintet, on Feb. 6 and moves to The King’s Singers, an a cappella group, on Feb. 22. Next comes Mnozil Brass, known as the Monty Python of the music world, on Feb. 28 and Takács Quartet, a string ensemble, on March 19. Bennewitz Quartet, a Czech ensemble, on April 3 and Ray Chen, a violinist, on April 16 round out the series.

Rock says the Lenards – Jean, a former UConn professor of molecular and cell biology, and John, a 1961 UConn alum – like to see a variety of ensembles on the program, not just wind or string groups, for instance.

“That’s what this spring semester speaks to,” Rock says.

Variety is what Rock says he hopes the new Huskies in his FYE class get when they learn about the arts, Jorgensen, and its offerings. These are students who may never have attended an arts performance, let alone heard chamber music.

“It’s an opportunity to grab these incoming freshmen right at the start, educate them about audience etiquette, and expose them to different types of art forms, whether dance or music,” Rock says of the class. “I tell them if they don’t like it, that’s fine, just tell me why. Most, though, give the experience a chance and most students are really impressed.”

Tickets to Jorgensen’s performances, including the Lenard Chamber Music Series, can be obtained online. UConn students seeking tickets to a performance in the Lenard Chamber Music Series should log into the Jorgensen’s site using their NetID. All other K-12 and college students – and UConn students seeking free rush tickets to other Jorgensen shows – should email the box office, jorgensen.tickets@uconn.edu.

With the help of Curator and Academic Liaison Amanda Douberley, Thorson created an exhibition exploring this question, which opened at the Benton on January 16^th and will run through July 28^th.

‘Seeing something is not the same as looking at something’

The exhibition presents a partnership between art and science, one helping to deepen the understanding of the other to hopefully broaden what we see.

“Artists always override and influence reality, which is what they’re supposed to do,” says Thorson.

The exhibition’s primer explores six themes including phenology, climate change, measurement, climate, weather, and seasonality while featuring works in the Benton’s permanent collection to explore these themes in five sections. As a geologist who spent years publishing papers reconstructing the Earth’s past climates and teaching about current global climate change, Thorson challenges visitors to experience the art through a geological lens to develop a mindfulness of how climate change is impacting their lives.

Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors are met with two paintings, one of a winter snowfall, and one depicting a fall scene with bright yellows and an outcropping of large, smooth stones that seem to undulate across the landscape. Thorson explains they are descriptively named “whalebacks”:

“See, even in this painting, you see geology.”

Initially, Thorson approached the Benton with the idea of studying phenology through art,

“If paintings captured what a landscape looked like every day of the year, then one could reference that in the future and see, for instance, whether or not there are snowbanks or the timing of flowers blossoming, or the birds flying, and whatever the future timing of those events would be earlier or later,” says Thorson.

Douberley and Thorson realized early in the proposal stage that most of the artwork did not have the specific date and location data vital for studying phenology. Douberley also points out that creative license taken by artists can complicate using paintings and drawings as scientific evidence for the study of phenology. But after reconsidering, Thorson reasoned that exact dates were not necessary to show changes over time or to think about what the future holds.

“If we were unable to see climate change via the phenology of then-and-now comparisons, perhaps we can learn to see the effects of weather in paintings, regardless of whether the artist was aware of them or not. This is the theme the exhibition is based on,” says Thorson.

‘Then and now. Now and future’

With climate change, phenology is disrupted for many plants and animals, from periodical cicadas likely emerging earlier, to certain plants setting leaves or blooming weeks earlier, the seasons are shifting.

Looking at the collection of paintings, etchings, drawings, and photos, observers are encouraged to ask questions like “How would this look if it were painted today?,” or “What will this look like in 2100?.” The themes capture some of the pressing changes on the horizon, from rising seas to desertification and changing urban climate.

“One painting is from 151 years ago in the Boston Harbor and as Boston grew, the additional asphalt and stone warmed the urban climate more than the adjacent areas and superimposed regional warming,” explains Thorson. “It shows foggy conditions, but how might the patterns of fog have changed since then?”

An etching shows Paris in 1879 after thick snowfall, but the city receives only minor snow today. A couple of prints show Venice, which is already grappling with rising sea levels. To emphasize local conditions, paintings and drawings show the New England coast, and Thorson explains that coastal erosion means the landscapes depicted may no longer be there because the coast has eroded by tens of meters since the paintings were finished.

“I want people to be mindful of phenological changes and more aware of how their lives are already being impacted by climate change,” he says. “If you can see changes, not just from the news, but in your own life, that’s important. My premise is to help people become more mindful and take further action.”

Thorson approaches this challenge carefully from the outset which can be seen in the first two sentences of wall text:

“The projections for climate change during our lifetime are scientifically robust. The outcomes will be generally disruptive, and the costs will be shared unevenly across the globe.”

“This is serious business,” Thorson explains. “We start with a fact, but we don’t want to be too harsh.”

The text goes on:

“Being mindful of climate change in your daily life can help you make the needed adaptations towards a more just and sustainable future.”

Creating that personal connection to climate change is vital. The exhibition also included eight photos of familiar sights around Connecticut where Thorson asks the question “What will this look like in 2100” with captions that help get the observer thinking about specific changes on the horizon.

“Will we have the same kind of trees? How will the coastal marshes look with rising sea levels? Will the sandy soils continue to be productive in extended times of drought? These are the kinds of questions I asked that I want people to be thinking about because the odds are these things will look very different.”

Douberley says the feedback has been very positive so far.

“The response to the exhibition from instructors has been fantastic. We had four classes visit this week alone! Professor Thorson’s engaging wall texts make the show ideal for students and serve as instant conversation starters.”

The importance of a question mark

Thorson was careful in his approach and explains that the question mark in the exhibition’s title was intentional. Rather than telling people what they are seeing, he wanted to actively engage observers.

“It’s very different to ask a question, ‘Can you see climate change?’ than to state that ‘You can see climate change.’ Every one of us sees the world differently, we have a model in our heads for what the world is like. I think science makes information and the humanities and the arts make meaning from that information.”

This collaboration between science and humanities can help us engage with the question. Thorson points out an important distinction to help grapple with the concept that weather and climate are not the same.

“I like to quote Mark Twain: ‘Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.’ We cannot see climate, what we see are the effects of climate.”

‘Continuous Change’

To help emphasize the distinction between climate and weather, the exhibition also displays rocks and tools from Thorson’s teaching collection in separate pedestals. The tools measure current weather conditions.  The rocks indicate dramatic climatic conditions in Earth’s past. Thorson chose a colorful variety of clues from black coal to red petrified wood, to white coral, to a brown stone faceted by sandstorms.

“We can see climate in the rock record. Rocks tell the story. Geologists first detailed climate change by telling these stories and that’s one of the reasons that I taught the first course on global climate change mechanisms here at UConn in 2002. Rocks are proxy records for climate we can understand by figuring out things like what’s the threshold temperature or condition to generate ice sheets or the wind speed needed to pick up billions of grains of sand and heap them together. Coral reefs only exist in a certain temperature range and that gives you an envelope of paleoclimate.”

The final images show climate clues from UConn’s little-known Stone Pavilion.  The slabs fronting it and the stones from which it was built are glacial in origin. One of its specimen stones is from an ancient coral reef in Iowa, which used to be as salty as it was subtropical.

The exhibition ends with the idea that though change has been continuous, it’s now happening at a much faster pace than normal. Thorson points out that this epoch of Earth’s history is referred to as the Anthropocene, from the Greek for “human,” since humans are the driving force behind these rapid changes.

The rapid rate of change is visually represented on a screen playing the Berkely Earth animation of global mean temperature anomalies from 1850 to 2022. The eerily mesmerizing loop starts largely blue, then gradually grows increasingly red as the dates draw closer to the present, as temperature anomalies creep and remain above normal and toward less livable for many humans. The data corresponding to the colorful trends are sobering.

Pointing at the end of the animation, Thorson says, “2023 would have been literally off the chart since it was the hottest year on record.”

Though it is a continuous part of Earth’s history, previous climatic changes usually took tens of thousands of years, while current shifts are taking decades. The exhibition ends with a bittersweet send-off:

“Earth will continue to be a beautiful place…. with or without us.”

There are upcoming public programs associated with the exhibition including one on February 16, where Thorson will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition and another on March 1 where the Benton will host “Building a Sustainable Future,” a salon mounted in collaboration with UConn’s Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship including a discussion panel that will examine how the next generation is leading the charge of building a more sustainable tomorrow. The exhibition will also be complemented by a podcast that invites listeners to explore climate change through visual art, personal reflection, science, and conversation. The podcast is a production of students enrolled in Collaborating with Cultural Institutions and hosted by WHUS Radio and will soon be available.

It’s the place where the show she’s had in her head for a decade and performed in bits on “America’s Got Talent” and “The Incredible Talent of France” will come to fruition in its entirety – even if she says it’s still a work in progress.

Baird says she designed “Nothing Really Matters” as a portable production and, yes, her 20-foot-tall rig for aerial acrobatics travels with her. That’s right: Baird is an aerialist who’s mastered and taught the skill of mid-air acrobatics.

Over the last 24 years, the Texas native has gone from circus school in Vermont to puppet school in Connecticut and traveled the world in between.

“I am a physical storyteller. I really like to tell stories nonverbally because it creates a universal language that can be understood among different audiences,” Baird, who also once trained as a mime, says.

Whether through hand-to-hand acrobatics with a partner or with the help of an aerial fabric sling held up by a four-legged pyramid rig, Baird uses movement to convey experiences, thoughts, and moods.

In “Nothing Really Matters,” she adds a backdrop of animation and puppets to the mix to ride a horse, get chased by a bear, fall off a cliff, and get shot out of a cannon, all while staying suspended mid-air in a sling.

That’s what’s fun about the show, she says, staying in the same place in the center of the stage yet traveling so far.

“I call it a one-woman show, but not a one-woman production,” Baird says. “I have a whole team of graduate and undergraduate students working on the show with me – animators, puppet arts students, lighting design students. This show really wouldn’t have been possible without their creativity and insights. I wouldn’t have been able to do this completely on my own.”

With support from Alison Paul, an associate professor of illustration/animation in the art and art history department, and Anna Lindemann, an assistant professor of motion design and animation in digital media & design, Baird’s show marries the varied departments in the School of Fine Arts.

“Animation has the power to transform time and space,” she says. “You can be miniature or giant. You can go into outer space. You can be one thing that suddenly becomes something else. But puppets breathe and they have life, and that life essence that relates to human movement is what makes them incredible storytellers.”

The convergence of animation and puppetry has been the focus of her UConn studies the last three years under Bart Roccoberton Jr., professor and director of the dramatic arts department’s puppet arts program, and John Bell, associate professor and director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry.

‘I can still remember hearing the applause’

But before that, in 2008, Baird started the company Aerial Animation pairing her physical skills with animations from a cartoonist friend who together came into their own as artists, she says, starting with simple line drawings and basic aerial acrobatics skills and progressing to what audiences saw in 2014 on “America’s Got Talent” and in 2017 on “The Incredible Talent of France.”

She made it to the semifinals – the next-to-last round – in both programs. With each performance, she and a growing group of animators created a piece of the full “Nothing Really Matters,” building on what had been previously done and, in the end, giving her large sections of the full show.

“I can still remember hearing the applause and rush of what it sounds like to hear 6,000 people clapping all at the same time,” Baird says. “I am so grateful for those experiences. They propelled my career and solidified my artistic voice. That was the first real maturity of my work. I toured the world afterward with those organizations and performed in Dubai, London, and Las Vegas.”

But she wanted to refocus on her art instead of entertainment.

“I’ve always wanted to be able to create my own stories and my own drawings,” she explains. “But animation is very expensive, and in order to be able to tell all the stories I want to tell, I knew I needed to have some of those skillsets of my own. So, by coming back to school, studying puppetry, and dipping my toe in the DMD and art departments here at UConn, I was able to access the resources I needed.”

Her equipment has overtaken the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre – in the back of the main Jorgensen stage – since mid-August, while she’s worked on the animations and shadow box and toy theater puppets for the show, which will be performed Jan. 26 and 27.

Ironically, the physically demanding “Nothing Really Matters,” funded with a Puppeteers of America Margo and Rufus Rose Endowment Grant, centers on sleep and rest, the body’s reliance for it, and one woman’s self-shaming need for it, Baird says.

“In our society, most of us have an internal struggle with our need for rest. People will say, ‘what are you up to,’ ‘what are you doing next,’ ‘what’s happening for you,’ and no one ever admits, ‘Oh, I just watched Netflix all day and it was great. I feel so much better today.’

“It’s an internal conflict we all have,” she continues. “Admitting that rest is part of our hero journey is hard for us even though it’s part of our ability to thrive. Success comes with moments of pause and reflection, and in that stillness new information comes that wouldn’t otherwise.”

She says it’s a topic adults can relate to and a show that’s exhilarating for children, making it ideal for any mix of audience members. After all, who wouldn’t want to see a bed do double-duty as a monster?

Perhaps some of the most beautiful and serene parts of the show are Baird walking through a stop-motion animation forest. It’s created using a technique that gives one-dimensional paper trees and leaves the illusion of depth.

Laser cut in a variety of colors, the trees change from season to season as she walks along. It’s an example, she says, of the synthesis of puppets and animation – the inanimate paper being manipulated to give it life as it scrolls across a screen.

She also has included in the show live-cued animation, just like sound effects or light changes layered into a narrative. Another area downstage near the audience shows off a smaller, second set of projections, these seemingly two-dimensional, or what she calls 2.5-dimensional.

“I would really like to see moving images and animation become part of university theater experiences alongside lights and sounds. It’s happening more and more on Broadway, and I think UConn is ready for it,” Baird says.

She is too.

“I always knew this is what I was going to do, but it’s been an evolution and I really believe that theater is a collaborative art form,” she says. “Allowing myself to be influenced by the opportunities that have been presented to me over the last two decades is what got me to where I am.”

“Nothing Really Matters” will be performed Friday, Jan. 26, at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 27, at 2 p.m. at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre. Tickets are free and can be obtained online. It’s one of eight shows in “RojoFest: The Jerry Rojo Festival of Original Student Work,” co-sponsored by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and Connecticut Repertory Theatre. The festival runs Jan. 25-28 in multiple locations around campus. A list of shows and free tickets to performances are available online.

“What do you mean by ‘quality,’” they query. “In the band world and in music in general, when we talk about new compositions, specifically those by people of color, people always ask the question, ‘Is it quality?’ And I always respond, ‘What do you mean by that?’ It feels like an incomplete question.”

In the last four decades of the 20th century, during the booming years of band music, works from majority population composers, comprising mostly white and mostly male musicians, became the gold-standard for so-called “quality” music, explains Kim, an assistant music professor and director of UConn’s wind bands.

“The concept of quality is changeable just by nature,” Kim says. “What is the quality of your skin? What is the quality of this fabric? What is the quality of this color white – and if it fades into a different color, when does it stop being white and how do you qualify it as being not white anymore? This philosophical conversation about quality and about what constitutes quality music is an interesting one.”

So, when asked about the new music they’re purchasing this year for UConn’s music department Ensemble Library, they might take the opportunity to probe what’s really been asked.

“If we’re choosing this music, it’s because we believe in the merits of it,” Kim says.

With a School of Fine Arts anti-racism grant, Kim has added to the library works from Black composer Henry Dorn, Japanese Canadian composer Cait Nishimura, and Mexican American composer Salvador Jacobo, among other living music makers.

In late November, the Symphonic Band titled its concert Lovely Day, performing composer Kevin Day’s pieces “River Memoria” and “Ecstatic Samba.” The concert came thanks to a partnership between Day and UConn’s Ricardo Brown, an associate professor-in-residence who directs the Symphonic Band.

About two weeks prior, Kim’s Wind Ensemble featured in its concert DANCE, music by composer Giovanni Santos, who was in the audience when the group performed his piece “3 Latin American Dances.” He later joined the group for a second performance in East Hartford Public Schools.

“We’re not just diversifying our library, but we’re also using the grant to bring in these composers to work with our students and then taking them to schools in places like East Hartford and New London,” Kim says. “For young students who don’t have access to this kind of performance, this is a great experience. Failing to expose them to live music just adds to the educational divide in this country.”

In higher education, the push is on at music schools to diversify libraries and introduce composers of different races, ethnicities, and gender, closing a similar divide that’s existed in the music world for generations. It’s something that Kim says would have made a difference for them as a young musician.

“I remember growing up and not ever seeing any composers’ names that looked like my own,” they say. “It’s important for all students to see it’s possible for them to succeed and to see themselves in places of power and success, to see there are composers who look like them.”

After that November concert featuring Santos, Kim says a UConn student approached them with tears in their eyes, saying they’d never seen someone of the same heritage achieve such musical success and hoped they, too, could be an inspiration for Latino musicians.

“Playing music by living composers is really impactful for our students because ensembles are so used to playing music by people we can’t meet,” Kim says. “We meet any composer through the act of music making but meeting them in person, too, is just a magical thing. It’s working with art in real time.”

‘Less famous, no less meaningful’

Pianist JingCi Liu ’24 DMA says there are times when she’s playing a piece and can just tell it was written by a female composer – not always, she says, but sometimes.

“Clara Schumann, for example, wrote her Opus 6 around 16 years old,” Liu explains. “It’s full of different ideas and, frankly, some daring and challenging thoughts in music. With female composers, the style and the way they express musical ideas through different techniques, tonalities, and modulations sometimes deviate from their male contemporaries and you can just feel the beauty in their works.”

Liu says she started playing piano at 4 years old, studying the standard repertoire from Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and others. Now a professional musician with a long list of awards and accolades, she says it’s important for her to step outside tradition and explore what else was happening around the time Haydn wrote his sonatas and Chopin wrote his nocturnes.

As a female musician, if not her then who?

“Portrait of Beauty,” Liu’s debut piano album from KNS Classical, pays tribute to seven female composers, including Schumann, from the classical, romantic, early 20th century, and contemporary styles. Liu says she specifically sought piano works from some who are well-known in music catalogs and some who are rarely played.

It’s a project that started when Liu was studying at the Mannes School of Music at The New School’s College of Performing Arts in New York City and a professor suggested that all artists should seek to explore, study, and honor those who are lesser known.

With that kernel of an idea and in the midst of the pandemic, Liu says she consulted with her two piano teachers – Angelina Gadeliya from UConn and Pavlina Dokovska from Mannes – for advice on how to get started and who best to feature.

She then spent a year meeting virtually with Gadeliya to learn the repertoire, later performing the pieces in various festivals and masterclasses with many renowned artists.

“There’s an online catalog of female composers, and as I looked through it, I started to regret that I hadn’t performed and hadn’t heard of many of these works in a public performance,” Liu says.

Much of the music by female composers even from 200 years ago was preserved, she says – the question is whether it was recognized in the first place. The earliest female composer that Liu found in her research lived during the 9th century.

“Just as Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn deserve to be performed, music from lesser-known composers, especially female composers, also deserves to be performed,” Liu says. “Their music might be less famous but no less meaningful. In some ways, it shows the historical environment and how the time periods in which they lived affected their ability as musicians and performers.”

Throughout her schooling, Liu says she wasn’t exposed to many of the underperformed composers she’s discovered over the last few years and now that she has, she wants student musicians to learn about them, their body of work, their influences, how they differ from their more famous contemporaries, and the new techniques they used.

People like Marianne von Martinez, Cecile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, and Caroline Shaw, all featured on “Portrait of Beauty,” have something to offer, Liu says.

And that’s just what Kim aims to do with a better-rounded Ensemble Library at UConn.

“Making music is about reflecting life,” Kim says. “If we only represent one side of humanity, we’re being dishonest about the experience that is human because it comes in so many varieties. If we’re going to share human experiences, we should be including all voices, including compositional ones.”

In a windowless hallway, situated on top of a bookcase and propped against the wall, it sat in darkness most of the time, save the few instances each year when he’d carefully pack it to bring to class and use as an example of literacy, calligraphy, and literature from the Middle Ages.

Long, a professor emeritus who taught writing in UConn’s School of Nursing, says he’d pass around his framed medieval folio, telling students to admire both sides of the 700-plus-year-old page through the glass that encapsulates it.

“From the first time I saw this beauty, I knew it was a genuine manuscript page because it’s dual-sided,” Long says. “There are irregularities on the surface that indicate it’s lambskin vellum, and the precision of the lettering, the fine decorative marginalia, and the capital letters all tell us this was part of a high-status book.”

He could read enough Latin and had enough life experience to deduce it was part of a Catholic service book. But until just over a year ago, he had no idea he’d been keeper of a page from the Beauvais Missal and inadvertently become part of its storied history that now also includes UConn’s Archives & Special Collections.

In Europe for centuries, brought to America in the 1920s

The story of the Beauvais Missal starts around 1290 when scribes began handwriting its three volumes, one for each of the liturgical seasons of the year, says Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. Upon their completion and the death of the Frenchman who commissioned their writing, they were given to the Beauvais Cathedral in Beauvais, France, in 1356.

For the next 450 years, Catholic priests flipped their pages as they led services from the Octave of Epiphany in January to the Feast of Saint Anne in July and All Saints Day in November. Missals are still used today and essentially provide the order of service.

When the French Revolution upended France, Huguenots stole the Beauvais Missal from the cathedral, Fagin Davis says, and it disappeared from all historical records. A single volume, though, resurfaced in a personal collection in France many decades later.

It changed hands several times before winding up at auction in the United States in 1926.

American businessman William Randolph Hearst – credited with founding the largest newspaper chain in the country, which still operates today – bought the bound volume and kept it until October 1942 when he sold it for $1,000 to New Yorker Philip Duschnes, Fagin Davis says.

Together, Duschnes and friend Otto Ege of Cleveland, Ohio, separated the pages from the book, selling them individually for $25 to $40 and earning a 10-fold higher profit margin with 300 transactions than a single sale.

“There are hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts that exist in the world and many of them are much more elaborate and valuable than the leaves of the Beauvais Missal – but the Beauvais Missal is important because of its story,” Fagin Davis says. “It has become one of the most well-known examples of a manuscript that was cut up and scattered to the winds.”

Over the last decade, Fagin Davis has tracked down 122 of 300 pages of the Beauvais Missal to digitally restore the book. She says that while she’s found just shy of half the full volume, that’s still a fair number of pages.

“Every time we find another, we get more information about liturgical practices, musical practices, book history, and art history of the time,” she says. “Once we can start putting all of these leaves together and study them as a unit, we can draw some conclusions about the original object and its story.”

‘There are manuscripts that are splendid’

The story of Long’s part in all this starts about 50 years ago, when at the Catholic University of America he developed an interest in medieval studies that continued through his undergraduate years and into his graduate time at the University of Illinois.

Even after he returned to the Catholic University of America’s seminary school and was ordained in 1980, he says, “Part of my heart was still in medieval studies, which is not a romantic idea but the notion that in many ways our modern world is grounded in cultural and intellectual ideas that emerged or were formed between 500 and 1500 of the Common Era.”

During his eight years in the priesthood, Long was involved in LGBTQ ministry and worked with people suffering and dying from AIDS, the disease that became a household word in the 1980s. He left church leadership in 1988 and returned to academia in pursuit of his Ph.D., which looked at AIDS and American apocalypticism.

“Over the years, I continued reading and studying the medieval period and every once in a while, when I had an opportunity to buy a manuscript folia relief, I would do so,” he says. “And one day, in the late 1990s, at an antiques show in Virginia Beach, I came across the stall of an antiques dealer where I saw this beauty, what we now know is a page from the Beauvais Missal.

“There are manuscripts that are just kind of serviceable, and then there are manuscripts that are splendid,” Long continues, gesturing to the gold leaf, black scrollwork, and deep blue markings– likely from powdered lapis lazuli – decorating his Beauvais Missal page.

For about 20 years until his retirement, he used the page to help teach.

In late summer 2022, just after he retired, Long saw a news story that circulated around the country telling the tale of a Colby College student who discovered a page from the Beauvais Missal at an estate sale in Maine. He says he chuckled and thought that’s every scholar’s dream, how wonderful for a young person.

“Then something nudged me to look at mine again, and I thought, wait a minute. The lettering. The decoration. The coloring. The fact that this was clearly a ritual service book. I wonder if this is another leaf of the Beauvais Missal,” he says.

Before drawing the conclusion, Long first contacted the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which has two authenticated pages, to make sure his was the right size. It was – 290 by 240 mm, or roughly 11.42 by 9.45 inches.

Then he contacted Fagin Davis for confirmation. She gave it.

“I knew I had something that was not only unusual, but also extremely valuable. One leaf at auction can fetch $4,000 to $6,000,” he says, adding that he’d purchased his for less than $150. “I knew I needed to put this somewhere safe. Beautiful and rare things should be in public collections, not in private hands.”

UConn in rare company; 1 of 9 in New England

The story of UConn’s Archives & Special Collections’ involvement starts here, with Long’s donation about a year ago of the now authenticated Beauvais Missal folio along with numerous other historical artifacts he’s collected along the way.

“As an agricultural college, the University in its early years didn’t collect rare objects like this for teaching, but students today need to be exposed to original works,” Melissa Batt, an archivist at the library, explains. “We use specimens like this in our instruction, programming, and exhibitions. This donation allows us to expose students to original materials even if they come with this story of being disbound.”

Fagin Davis says UConn’s acquisition puts the University in good company, as one of only nine schools in New England to have pages in their collections: UMass Amherst, the Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard and Yale universities, and Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth, and Colby colleges. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Boston Public Library also have pages.

Without an endowment to purchase such items and with restrictions on how things can be bought, Batt says donations like the one from Long are key to helping UConn’s Archives meet its mission.

And in this case, students studying the history of print, the interplay of image and text, among so many other broader subjects, can benefit from seeing the page – due to its fragility, access to the leaf requires special handling by an archivist.

UConn’s Beauvais Missal folio features service entries for the feasts of St. Callixtus and St. Lucian and looks pristine despite its age, with its black ink still dark as night, because, Long says, their pages would have been opened only once a year and only at an altar, through the filtered light of stained glass and away from damaging direct sunlight.

Both the words and musical prompts – black notes on red staffs – would have been for the priest as leader of the service; the choir would have offered its response from an antiphonal, a much larger book shared between several people, Long says.

The 122 pages that have been found are from the same volume, Fagin Davis says, because they’re service pages for the summer feasts, Easter through Advent.

But the Beauvais Missal’s author is anonymous.

“They believed the word of God was literally translated through their hands and onto the page, although the scrolls, the ornamentation, even how the capitals are formed serve as a sort of signature,” Batt says. “Still, the writer was meant to be anonymous because scribes weren’t allowed to be vain in any sense. They were a vessel through which God speaks.”

The Beauvais Missal is written in an abbreviated Latin that, Long says, was developed by monks to conserve expensive parchment. Reading it in gothic script might be a challenge, especially for words with a string of similar letters – like the u, m, and n in communium- but individual words can be discerned.

Hallelujah. God. Lord. Holy. Sacrifice. Almighty.

“If you are interested in the European Middle Ages and you live on our side of the Atlantic, you can’t study that time period by looking at the things around you,” Fagin Davis says. “People in Europe walk by medieval buildings every day. For us, being able to see a medieval manuscript like the Beauvais Missal is a magical entryway to thinking about the Middle Ages.”