Kate Fishman – The Oberlin Review

Poet Alyesha Wise Performs at Cat in the Cream

March 15, 2019

Students jumped to their feet at the end of Alyesha Wise’s performance last Sunday night at the Cat in the Cream. Wise’s work as a poet and teaching artist has taken her from her hometown of Camden, NJ, to Philadelphia, and now to Los Angeles, where she currently resides. She is the cofounder of two slam poetry organizations, the Spoken Literature Art Movement (known as S.L.A.M.) and The Pigeon Presents: The Philadelphia Poetry Slam. She is also the winner of the 2013 Philadelphia Knight Arts...

Kat Burdine, Visual Artist

March 1, 2019

Artist Kat Burdine uses objects and prints to negotiate ideas about physicality and the body. A graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently based in Cleveland, she is the founder of Wondershop Studio and teaches at both the Cleveland Institute of Art and Cuyahoga Community College. She has collaborated with many artists on a variety of projects, including Talking Dolls in Detroit. Her recent lecture at Oberlin, “A Matter of Hapticstance — One Queer’s Feeling on Feeling(s),” di...

Art Rental: A Photo Essay

Kate Fishman and Katherine MacPhail

February 22, 2019

Filed under ARTS, Arts, Visual Art

Art Rental is a distinctive program beloved by the Oberlin community. It gives students the opportunity to hang works of art from the likes of Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali in their college rooms for a semester, for only $5 per work. Oberlin’s Art Rental program was originally founded in 1940 by art historian Ellen Johnson, OC ’33. Since then, other colleges have initiated art rental programs of their own. Harvard College started a program in 1972 which allows students to rent art for $30 an academic year, and in 2016 Kenyon College started a program allowing students to rent art for $10 a semester. Oberlin’s Art Rental program is a major draw for some prospective students who are deciding where to go...

’Sco Seniors Reminisce, Appreciate Campus Community Space

February 15, 2019

The Dionysus Disco — or as it is best known, the ’Sco — is one of the most notorious and beloved spaces on Oberlin’s campus. Dionysus was the Greek god of the grape harvest, fertility, theater, wine, ritual chaos, and religious ecstasy. I don’t know about harvesting grapes or fertility, but anyone who has turned out for a Wednesday night Splitchers has participated in a kind of ritual chaos and can attest to the religious ecstasy of this hallowed ground. It follows, then, that the energy behind the ...

College Mentors Work with Elementary, Middle School Students

December 7, 2018

Rarely have I smiled so hard as I did at the Cat in the Cream this past week at not one but two fantastic performances by students from local Oberlin schools. Kids from Prospect Elementary School and Langston Middle School wowed packed houses on Monday and Wednesday — Monday night’s offering was a poetry reading by the middle school students, and Wednesday’s was a dance performance by students from both schools as a culmination of the afterschool program Girls and Boys in Motion. Both of ...

“A Man In the House” Celebrates Family Ties

November 30, 2018

This weekend will mark the opening of A Man In the House, an Oberlin Student Theater Association production. Written by Elinore Siminovitch, the play takes place in 1937 Montreal and chronicles the lives of Lily, a progressive trade unionist, her daughter Jenny, who rejects her mother’s aspirations for her to attend medical school, and Lily’s mother, who cares deeply about her family but resists progress. A boarder comes to live with them as the first man in their house and the strikes up a romance...

Blas Falconer, Poet

November 16, 2018

Blas Falconer is a queer Latinx poet and editor who came to Oberlin to read from his new book, Forgive the Body This Failure, on Thursday, Nov. 15. Falconer teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. His other published works are The Foundling Wheel, A Question of Gravity and Light, and The Perfect Hour. Falconer received a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the Barthelme Fellowship, among others. He i...

Editorial: Museum Symposium Presents Opportunity to Evaluate Western Canon at Oberlin, Broader Academia

November 2, 2018

A popular misconception in the art world is the belief that classical Greek and Roman sculptures in museums across the world look the way they’re supposed to. Unpainted, bare, and unmistakably white, these sculptures propagate the false notion that ancient artists meant to showcase the ideal human form in swaths of pale marble. However, classical sculptures that are white today were originally meant to be seen in color — scientific evidence suggests they were once painted in bright, blazing...

Pottery Co-Op Provides Welcoming Space to New Members

October 12, 2018

Watching potters work with clay is an almost hypnotic experience. They make the form look so easy, yet, they are creating a physical artifact that will exist in the world to be touched and used. Although clay seems to move effortlessly beneath expert fingers, for a novice, a piece can collapse into nothing but wet lumps. Learning to work with ceramics can be intimidating. The skill is both artful and quite complicated, with different pottery styles and techniques requiring many unfamiliar tools...

One Last Time: Spice Lo Performs at Oberlin

October 12, 2018

Last Saturday marked the final “Lo at the ’Sco” concert, and although College sophomore Derek Mahone — or as he is perhaps better known, Spice Lo — has been at Oberlin for just over a year, it feels like the end of an era. Described on his website as an independent “recording artist, engineer and producer,” Mahone has tremendous ambition. He’s released two albums as Spice Lo — I Can’t Relate: A Love Story and The Cabernet Facade — as well as an EP, Growth. Most recently, Mahone’s...

Chanda Feldman, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing

October 12, 2018

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Chanda Feldman read her original poetry during the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s Tuesday Tea series this week. Some of her poems were directly inspired by a multimedia exhibit currently on display in the Ripin Gallery, Radically Ordinary: Scenes from Black Life in America since 1968. Feldman has been teaching at Oberlin since the fall of 2017. This year, she was one of two professors in the department to be offered a coveted tenure-track position (alongside As...

“What I Didn’t Say” Showcases Marginalized Voices in STEAM

Kate Fishman, Arts & Culture Editor

October 12, 2018

Filed under ARTS, Music

It’s no secret that cisgender men outnumber women and nonbinary people in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and design, and mathematics) fields. The disproportionate dominance of cis male thoughts and ideas within those spaces is often less emphasized. “While lack of gender diversity is a significant problem in many STEAM fields, equally troubling is the extent to which the voices of nonbinary individuals and women are underrepresented in proportion to their relative representation in these fields,” wrote TIMARA Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty in an email to the Review. Over the summer, Aresty envisioned the upcoming sound art installation “What I Didn’t Say,” which will run Saturday,...