Month: December 2018

Alumni, staff, and students team up to turn basketball courts into public art

By Vicki-Ann Downing

Basketball courts at a Providence park have been transformed into a public art installation thanks to a team of alumni, staff, and students from Providence College.

Bold and vibrant patterns of color — the design of Providence mixed-media artist Jim Drain — now decorate the surface of adjacent basketball courts at Fargnoli Park on Smith Street, a short walk from PC’s campus. The project was accomplished with $45,000 in contributions from Friends of Friars Basketball, $15,000 from Providence College Galleries, and the labor of 130 volunteers, including PC students.

“The basketball court is a great bridge between the College and the community,” said Chris Carter ’11 & ’14G, president of Friends of Friars Basketball. “It makes a big statement. It’s a rare concept to be able to renovate a court in artistic fashion. And if it’s unique enough to get kids to go outside and play more often, that alone is a worthwhile endeavor on our part.”…Click to Read More

Marcoux and colleagues receive Patty Jo Watson Award

Dr. Jon Marcoux, associate professor and coordinator of the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program, has received the Southwestern Archaeological Conference’s Patty Jo Watson Award for best article or book chapter on southeastern archaeology.

“A Seventeenth-Century Trade Gun and Associated Collections From Pine Island, Alabama” was published in the 2017 issue of Southeastern Archaeology. Co-authored by Marvin Smith from Valdosta State University, Erin Grendell from Yale Peabody Museum and Gregory Waselkov from the University of South Alabama, the article was selected from a pool of 22 nominations.

“My colleagues and I are honored to receive this award,” Marcoux said. “The goal of this project was to work with the Yale Peabody Museum and Native American groups to help repatriate burial goods. It is particularly satisfying to know that our research helped return these sacred objects to their rightful place.”…Click to Read More

Inside the Construction Operating Theater at SECCM Labs

BRISTOL, R.I. – With wide-ranging access to Roger Williams University’s SECCM Labs construction project as a real-world teaching resource, construction management and engineering students have their own “operating theater” to observe and learn the construction process directly from industry professionals.

Much like medical students witnessing open-heart surgery, Roger Williams students don the trade gear of hard hats, yellow reflective vests, protective eyewear and steel-toe boots to wade into the middle of the active construction site. As part of the partnership between RWU and Shawmut Design & Construction, the SECCM Labs project is a “living laboratory” where students in the School of Engineering, Computing, and Construction Management (SECCM) are getting behind-the-scenes lessons on the intricate confluence of the excavation, construction, and systems work that goes into erecting the campus’s new three-story, state-of-the-art building.

“There’s been a lot of synergy between the project and the classroom,” according to Bill Seymour, RWU’s Director of Capital Projects who also teaches construction engineering courses. “In my course, students are using actual plans and specs, real-time schedules and change orders, as they observe this project. They’re taking away an understanding that what they’re learning in the classroom mirrors industry practice, demonstrating that the techniques and tools they’re employing from lessons are identical to those that are being practiced on the job.”…Click to Read More

Nottage Knows the World’s a Stage

When she visited campus in early November as part of RISD’s Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative, playwright, screenwriter, producer and director Lynn Nottage took time to answer a question that she’s been fielding a lot lately: Why be a theater artist in a time of crisis?

It’s striking that a writer whose honors include two Pulitzer prizes (Nottage is the only woman to have received the award twice) and a MacArthur “genius” grant grapples with an existential question as basic as this one, but such is our current political climate. Creative professionals are taking stock of whether or not their work is bettering the world around them, and whether or not they feel it should.

During her visit, Nottage joined Professor Mark Sherman in an informal discussion with students.

Throughout her career, Nottage has used her art to reveal and elevate instances of social and economic inequity. She won her first Pulitzer Prize for Ruined, a play about the wave of sexual violence that accompanied the Congolese Civil War, and has also written plays dramatizing the garment industry, the illegal ivory trade and domestic service. For Nottage, a major call to action came in 2008 at the beginning of the financial crisis when a close friend admitted to being in economic dire straits. For catharsis and clarity, she and her friend spent some time in NYC’s Zuccotti Park talking with Occupy Wall Street protestors. The experience “forced [her] to realize that we all live within shouting distance of someone in crisis.”…Click to Read More