homegrown harmonies / andy heck ('70): the thing he carried / remembering maya angelou

132 Pages·2014·16.6 MB·English

HOMEGROWN HARMONIES / ANDY HECK (’70): THE THING HE CARRIED / REMEMBERING MAYA ANGELOU
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THE MAGAZINE OF WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
S 28
E HOMEGROWN HARMONIES
R
By Tommy Tomlinson | Photography by Ken Bennett
U
T Once a month they put down their potluck plates and pick up their instruments.
A And The Unbroken Circle’s circle is unbroken by and by.
E
F
2 72
OUT OF THIS (ART) WORLD TEACHER TRIUMPHANT
By Maria Henson (’82)
She warned us, challenged us and inspired us:
Jenny Moore (’95) left the frenetic New York faculty, friends and former students remember
art scene to oversee an extraordinary museum Dr. Maya Angelou.
in the middle of nowhere.
18 84
TED GELLAR-GOAD AND CHOW DOWN
THE SECRET OF THE SPHINX
Alumni chefs run up the score with tasty
By Cherin C. Poovey (P ’08)
tailgate menus and recipes.
Don’t gasp if you hear Ted Gellar-Goad
teaches “naked.” The young Latin scholar
is always appropriately clothed; it’s his
teaching style that bares all.
128
44
CONSTANT & TRUE
By Nate French (’93)
LEADERS BY DESIGN
By Lisa Kline Mowry (’82) Wake Forest is growing and changing.
For an alumnus, that can be both painful
Here’s a stylish combination: alumni with an
and exciting.
aptitude for business and home décor — and
connections to furniture capital North Carolina.
58 DEPARTMENTS
THE THING HE CARRIED 82 Philanthropy 98 Around the Quad
By Kerry M. King (’85)
83 Remember When? 100 Class Notes
Andy Heck (’70, P ’98) takes the rolls of
butcher paper from a plastic bag and unrolls
them on his kitchen countertop. Fifty-year-
old memories come flooding back.
WAKEFOREST
FROM tehh PRESIDENT
MAGAZINE
all first-year students possess an orientation book to read and
FALL 2014 | VOLUME 62 | NUMBER 1
contemplate: “Choosing Civility” by P.M. Forni. Along with myriad topics, this
edition of Wake Forest Magazine discusses civility and its role in argument.
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Maria Henson (’82)
There can be no more important message for students than civility. In the
MANAGING EDITOR wonderful, media-rich era in which we live, you can be in an echo chamber where
Cherin C. Poovey (P ’08)
you never really get away from people who essentially agree with you and reinforce
SENIOR EDITOR your worldview. Part of being civil is to take seriously the person with whom you
Kerry M. King (’85)
disagree and to listen so that you are empathetically in the other person’s shoes.
DEPUTY EDITOR And that does take a kind of leap if you’re not used to it. Civility is deeper than
Janet Williamson (P ’00, ’03)
politics. It has to do with who we are and what our communities are like.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Hayes Henderson
Life is fundamentally rela-
DESIGNERS tional. For Wake Forest
Jill Carson
that is at the core. This is a
Julie Helsabeck
place of ideas, but it has
Kris Hendershott
never been just a place of
PHOTOGRAPHER
ideas or just a place of
Ken Bennett
achievement. It is ideas
PRINTING
and achievement in com-
The Lane Press, Inc.
munity, where people take
each other seriously. That
winsome quality I think is
Wake Forest University Magazine (ISSN 0279- why students are attracted to this campus — and why they stay attached to it.
3946) is published three times a year in the Spring, Not that we are not interested in learning, achievement and excellence, often
Summer and Fall by Wake Forest University, P.O.
considered the tougher virtues. But if the pursuit doesn’t occur in a community
Box 7227, Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7227. It is sent
to alumni, donors and friends of the University. where people are taken seriously, then, as in the biblical phrase, without love or
charity it becomes a clanging cymbal. There is an emptiness to it. In a world
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magazine.wfu.edu increasingly fragmented and increasingly achievement-oriented, we need to pre-
twitter.com/wfumagazine serve an oasis of civility because it has great power. That is one of the gifts we
facebook.com/wakeforestmagazine
instagram.com/wakeforestmagazine can give students.
Send address changes or cancellation requests to:
You also will read about Maya Angelou and her role in mentoring and inspiring
Wake Forest Magazine Alumni Records
P.O. Box 7227 students. For me, the most striking thing about the memorial service in Wait
Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7227 Chapel was her power in the development of people. She was a mentor to Oprah
[email protected]
1.800.752.8567 Winfrey and so many others. She had a particular calling for African-American
women and how they could become leaders. She has been described as a
© 2014
supernova — writer, poet, dramatist, filmmaker, public intellectual, civil rights
leader. In some ways she embodied American history in the second half of the
20th century. To have someone like that at Wake Forest who was able to teach
several generations of students was a great privilege for this institution. I give
enormous credit to Wake Forest employees for their hospitality in hosting the
family’s private memorial service, one with a global audience online.
Warm regards,
ON THE COVER
Jenny Moore (’95), executive director of the
Chinati Foundation, finds her center in the desert
of Marfa, Texas.
Photo by Mary Lou Saxon
ART
Jenny Moore (’95) left the frenetic New York
art scene to oversee an extraordinary museum
in the middle of nowhere.
by maria henson (’82)
photography by mary lou saxon
2 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES
FALL 2014 3
One of two former artillery sheds at Chinati containing Donald Judd’s mill aluminum boxes.
4 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES
Follow
me to
You can’t miss this campground with its
El Cosmico.
Christmas lights, refurbished vintage trailers,
Sioux-style tepees and safari tents worthy of
the Serengeti. It sits on the outskirts of funky Marfa, Texas, and
unless you are driving with your eyes closed and your spirit on
empty, you can’t miss much of anything in this speck of a town,
certainly not the El Cosmico vibe that urges visitors to drop the
stress and be here now, under a vast blanket of stars, whipped
by winds that sound like the ocean. Only 2,007 people lived in
Marfa last year, according to the state’s estimate for 2013. Among
them by way of Brooklyn were newcomers Jenny Moore (’95),
her husband, installation artist Larry Bamburg, and their two
daughters, 5-year-old Mae and 3-year-old Willa.
Why would a Wake Forest graduate, original- Moore’s domain encompasses the China-
ly from Maryland’s Eastern Shore with brief ti Foundation’s 34 buildings on 340 acres,
stops in Venice and a long stretch in New its staff of 28, its $2.3 million budget and
York, wind up in a high plains desert town its community and global mission. Part of
three hours’ drive from the nearest airport the acreage once was home to U.S. cavalry
— take your pick — Midland/Odessa or El troops, dispatched in 1911 to stop Pancho
Paso? Turn right just before you arrive at the Villa’s cattle rustling and protect citizens
campground, and you’ll know why. “People from raids during the Mexican Revolution.
move to New York to be part of New York. Through the years the military garrison
People move to Marfa to be part of Chinati,” changed names and expanded, eventually
says Moore. becoming Fort D.A. Russell, bustling with
troops during World War II and housing
Since August 2013 Moore has been executive prisoners of war. It closed in 1946. But the
director of the Chinati Foundation, a world- buildings remain, and in them and alongside
class museum in the middle of nowhere. It them you find Chinati’s treasures — and
is a global treasure, having won a place with Moore’s office in a former barracks. The heart
the St. Louis Arch and Frank Lloyd Wright’s of the museum comprises two brick and con-
Taliesin home in Wisconsin, among myriad crete sheds that once held munitions but now
sites, on the 2014 World Monuments Fund display 100 mill aluminum boxes designed
Watch List of architectural and cultural heri- by Donald Judd, the contemporary artist who
tage sites worthy of preservation. Every year founded Chinati. The boxes look at first to be
about 14,000 people visit Chinati, named for uniform and standard, but they are not. Light
the nearby mountain range. They come from from huge windows bounces off the boxes,
New York, Los Angeles, Japan, Germany, and from the sheds’ interior the view of the
France — even Midland. desert with its scrub and cacti ever changes,
FALL 2014 5
It’s simply art. I want the work I
have to remain that way. It is not on
the market, not for sale, not subject
to the ignorance of the public, not
open to perversion.”
— Donald Judd
The freestanding works in concrete took four years to construct. Judd called space around his work “crucial.”
as it does for the 15 massive outdoor concrete works artists have had full control over the conditions in which
designed by Judd. their art was installed, permanently. “Something that is
permanent and consistent — every time I experience it, I
One March day in her office at Chinati, Moore’s eyes fill am changed by it,” Moore says. “It’s a pretty extraordinary
with tears: “I still get emotional about this,” she says. “I thing to be able to say you’ve found in life and to commit
guess I should — I moved here. The power of an extraordi- to in life.” That’s a revelation from a woman comfortable in
nary art experience, it’s so inspiring. It’s overwhelming. It all manner of art venues and whose last job was associate
makes you see the world in a different way. … Walking into curator at the aptly named New Museum in New York City,
those artillery sheds — every single time I walk into those a temple of what’s next.
buildings — I see something I’ve never seen before because
light is different, or the sky is different, or there are other -----
things on my mind, or I’m with different people, so the
conversation is different.” In 1973, the year Moore was born, Judd decided to buy
two former airplane hangars in Marfa. On holiday from
Against the backdrop of American culture fixated on the New York, he and his young family had spent the previous
next and the new, Chinati offers the opposite — a meld- two summers in Marfa. Judd was captivated by the land-
ing of art, architecture and the environment in which scape of West Texas as a young soldier passing through in
6 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES
The family decamped from Brooklyn: Larry Bamburg, Mae, Willa and Jenny Moore.
the 1950s. To this day the ethereal quality of light is un- His was a radical notion — a breakaway juggernaut from
forgettable. By 1979 his vision for a new kind of museum traditional museum practices of exhibiting singular works
was coming to life — with support from the Dia Art Foun- temporarily and a shrug to the vicissitudes of the art market.
dation — at the old military base and in other buildings He wanted permanence. He wanted the space surrounding
around town. Chinati opened in 1986 and, despite Dia’s the art to be just as crucial and well thought out as the art
and Judd’s parting of ways, remains one of the largest itself. Above all, he wanted harmony of art, architecture and
installations of permanent contemporary art in the world, land. Moore calls Chinati “the recognition of one person’s
with sculptures by John Chamberlain, a light installation vision of something greater than himself, a vision of a place
by Dan Flavin and works by such artists as Carl Andre, without precedence which became a reality.”
Claes Oldenburg and Roni Horn, among others, and,
through Moore’s guidance, more to come. -----
“My work and that of my contemporaries that I acquired Moore did not have a vision of herself in the desert when
was not made to be property,” Judd has written. “It’s simply she was growing up in Berlin, Maryland, population less
art. I want the work I have to remain that way. It is not on than 3,000 then. For a Berliner the vast environment for
the market, not for sale, not subject to the ignorance of the contemplation was the sea. Moore liked drawing and sing-
public, not open to perversion.” ing but didn’t know what she might do with her life.
FALL 2014 7
Scenes from Marfa, described as “Tough to get to.
Tougher to explain. But once you get here, you get it.”
8 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES