Anjali Bose ‘20
Jospehine Buccini ‘21
The Episcopal Academy’s November gallery featured two showings, Lessness and Not in Kansas, Toto. Lessness was a commissioned exhibit by artist Cari Freno, which included collaborative work by EA’s own art and creative writing students and explored parental connections. Not in Kansas, Toto also consisted of work by EA students and was based on The Wizard of Oz. Both exhibits were conceptual and fresh according to Episcopal students and faculty.
Coordinators chose the most recent exhibit theme to match this year’s Middle School Musical, The Wizard of Oz. This steampunk version of Frank L. Baum’s original story featured Sydney Clemmer ‘23 as Dorothy Gale, a character who finds herself “somewhere over the rainbow” before learning that there’s “no place like home” with the help of three new friends. The production was directed by Middle School Theatre Teacher Gina Tomkowich, who found the exhibit “really interesting and different.”
According to Tomkowich, the cast was extraordinarily excited about the exhibit. “We’ve had a lot of talks as a cast about the relationship between moms and daughters and moms and children and how that relationship is so important. There is a lot of exploration [of this] in Carli’s exhibit.” Pieces in the gallery explored these themes conceptually. The middle school cast had tied these themes to their show, and thought about them with both negative and positive connotations. “Glinda and the witch are both mother figures, but they show different sides of moms, ” says Tomkowich.
The second gallery, Lessness, involved Upper School creative writing students. As Christopher McCreary, Chair of Creative Writing, explains, “When I met over the summer with the visiting artist Ms. Freno, she already had this theme in mind of The Wizard of Oz. She and I brainstormed ways that there could be a quick, one class creative writing assignment that could be done with that.” As he says, Freno was interested in The Wizard of Oz as a “coming of age story” that a young adult audience could relate to. He says, “She thought a thing that would be neat was to have individual bricks on the yellow brick road, and that each of those bricks could be something somebody wants, or a piece of advice they’ve been given.”
Together, they edited their initial plan of having individual cardboard bricks to adopting the simpler sketches of yellow bricks. These could be seen hanging up directly across from the glass gallery doors. “She ended up doing those sketches of piles of bricks… After brainstorming a list of advice they [my students] had been given- some good, some bad, some that they had taken, some that they hadn’t- they wrote the advice they’d been given on those bricks and then painted it. It’s a sort of metaphorical yellow brick road.” McCreary’s creative writing elective class, comprised of eighteen upperclassmen, completed the project. Throughout the process, the class had captured an overall theme of chasing after one’s dreams. As McCreary says, “I think what is underneath that is that you’ve got to make your own decisions about how to get there no matter what adults tell you, which I think is what Dorothy has to figure out for herself in The Wizard of Oz.”
Susan Coote, gallery coordinator, also contributed to Freno’s gallery. She says, “The artist Cari Freno and I started talking about doing a piece that had to do with The Wizard of Oz, mostly because of the middle school production. She started thinking about The Wizard of Oz in terms of specific themes. She has a fourteen year old step-daughter who she lives with, so she was thinking about teenagers, like Dorothy, who go through life without parenting.” It reminded Freno of Dorothy having to navigate through Oz all alone having to be her own grown up. Coote goes on to explain the complex and interpretive nature of the exhibit, saying, “Many of those themes may be hard to see because the exhibit is very conceptual. So for instance when looking at some of the prints, there are lots of things you can read into them. For instance, with this one with the legs sticking out, you can see the imagery of the witch under the house, or even the witch melting.” The entire exhibit is based around The Wizard of Oz, but it holds deeper meanings towards themes of “inside and out.” As Coote notes, “The entire exhibit is hugely deeper. She [Cari Freno] didn’t want to give a lot of explanations, but whatever the viewer gets out of it is correct. But the starting point was The Wizard of Oz.”
As Patrick Zhang ‘18 mentions, “This past exhibit was a lot more conceptual than the last few exhibits have been, which I think is really interesting.”