January 2009 Stories

Art Prof Curates Exhibition of ‘Modernist with a Message’

When Art History Professor Roger Hull and his wife, Bonnie, bought their house, the appraiser told them it was from the 1940s. Turns out he was off by 100 years. The Hulls took off the aluminum siding, stripped the paneling, did some scouting around, and discovered the house was actually built by Willamette University leader Alvan Waller in the 1840s, during the school’s first decade.

The house is a good fit for a man who spends his days reconstructing the past. When Hull arrived at Willamette in 1970, he taught the entire sweep of world art history, from cave paintings to contemporary work. He now has the freedom to concentrate much of his energy on Pacific Northwest artists and this winter, in particular, on Portland painter Harry Widman.

Hull is curating “Harry Widman: Image, Myth and Modernism,” an exhibition at the University’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art. The show runs Jan. 31 to March 29.

Widman’s wild colors and search for abstract forms that convey meaning have given him a strong following, but the Northwest artist is more than a colorful abstract painter. “He’s a modernist with a message,” Hull says. “His art has taken on a strong tone of social commentary in recent years and is now outspoken about U.S. policy, the Iraq war and social injustice.” A recent show was titled “Greed, War and Deception.”

Hull, who is writing a book to accompany the exhibition, says mid-century modernism has not typically been about politics. “It’s about paint, brush stroke, the self, the use of paint to express inner feelings. It’s about art-making, not global issues. Widman takes traditional painting and works it to his own purposes.

“There is a strong literary bent in Widman’s painting,” Hull says. “He is a voracious reader of philosophy, novels and poetry, and uses oil and watercolor to explore the interplay between the physical strength of the athlete and the intellectual delicacy of the poet or philosopher.”

Hull has curated five exhibitions of major Oregon painters: Carl Hall, a Willamette art professor (2002); Jan Zach (2003); Charles Heaney (2005); George Johanson (2007) and Widman.

“Oregon art, from the 1920s on, is more modernist and cutting edge than other regions and states,” Hull says. “It transcends the typical ‘regional’ art. Artists here combined traditional subjects — abandoned mining towns, logging operations, the natural beauty of the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast — with modern technique.”

Hull’s exhibitions, which have helped give the museum regional recognition for its attention to Northwest artists, are not his only legacy. The museum itself may not have been born without his vision.

In 1990 collector and sculptor Mark Sponenburgh approached Hull, wanting to donate 250 art objects to Willamette. At the time, the University had no way to properly care for them, but made do with a small climate-controlled room on the top floor of the art building. Meanwhile, a valuable collection of Native American baskets languished in storage in the attic of Eaton Hall.

Hull began to proselytize for an art museum, approaching University trustees with a presentation and art from the collections, and by the mid-1990s the idea had captured people’s imaginations.

When the nearby telephone company building came on the market, Hull toured the rooms with a keen eye, perhaps remembering the transformation of his own house. “The 1960s building was all used up,” he says. Orange carpet, blue paneling, stray macramé hangings and “some of the world’s oldest computers” huddled under a low ceiling.

After philanthropist Hallie Ford presented a $2 million gift, Hull and others began planning the new galleries. Maribeth Collins, Melvin Henderson-Rubio, David and Bruce Roberts and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde also gave financial support. The museum opened in 1998 and celebrated its 10th anniversary in October.

The opening reception for the Harry Widman exhibition will be Jan. 30 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Hallie Ford Museum. For information visit www.willamette.edu/museum_of_art.

‘The Way the Spirit Moved Me’

Law Professor Susan Smith’s career as an activist started at age three, when she accompanied her mother on Meals on Wheels runs. “From an early age, it was clear to me that what my parents valued was the ability to care for people,” she says. She marched in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War as a teen, and served as senior editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review as a law student.

But it was stint in Australia during the Rio Summit that really solidified her convictions. The Fulbright Senior Scholar had swapped out an all-consuming career overseeing nearly 1,000 court cases with the Lands Division of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., for a job teaching environmental law at Willamette — when she met colleagues involved with the international summit on environment and development. “They transformed my view,” she says. She threw herself into volunteer legal work for conservation causes and wrote a stack of articles and books, one with the title, Crimes Against the Environment. “That’s the way I think of them,” she says.

“We need to have a complete transformation of way we do business in order to protect Earth. I became convinced that nothing but fairly radical changes in our lifestyles and policies would be sufficient.

“We need to enact enforceable laws that reorient corporations away from a single bottom line toward sustainability, to meet the constraints of social justice and ecological sustainability as pre-conditions, before we worry about maximizing economic wealth. We can rely on self-interest to drive our economic machine, but not to assure a longer-term perspective about people or the planet.”

Smith’s vision is global, and much of her focus is on water. “Two billion people don’t have clean drinking water, and in less than 20 years water scarcity will affect two out of three individuals worldwide,” says the law professor, who provides pro bono legal expertise to the World Council of Churches about water as an inalienable right. “If we want democracy and political stability around the world, the first thing we need to ensure is that people are not thirsty.”

Three years ago Smith asked members of her church congregation to give up soda and lattes during Lent, drink water instead, and send the savings overseas to an adopted village to help provide water. “I thought the only way we can begin to deal with the global water crisis is one village at a time. We all belong to communities — academic, religious, social — and so I started with my village, my church, and we reached out to another village.”

Children listened while Smith explained the idea to her congregation, and after they left for Sunday school classes, she said, “Every 15 seconds a child dies from a disease that would have been preventable with clean drinking water. If we lived elsewhere, in the time I’ve been speaking all these children would have died.

The first year of donations financed a well in Kenya. The next year’s Lenten offerings funded a system to channel water from wells to homes in Honduras. The year after, thousands of dollars went to Haiti.

Her Drink Water for Life movement is now spreading to other congregations in the Willamette Valley, who are adopting their own villages — and building rainwater catchments and storage systems around the globe.

Meanwhile, Smith co-founded Willamette’s Certificate Program in Sustainable Environmental, Energy and Resources Law; established the Environmental Law Prof Blog, which receives visitors from around the world; and embarked on a master of divinity degree. She plans to push water justice as part of her ministry.

Smith’s enthusiasm is infectious, and she issues a call to action on her office door. A flyer asks her students:

In May, will you be able to say:

Lawmaking in the real world — it’s worth the hard work!

“Willamette has given me this privilege,” Smith says. “Intellectually, I thought teaching would be the right place. It allows an opportunity to reflect and look at things in more depth.” But teaching and writing — her words — have never been sufficient. Smith is a visionary and activist, linked by deeds to a growing number of villages — and neighbors — across the globe. “This is the way the spirit moved me,” she says.

When Good People Do Bad Things

When war paranoia struck the West Coast in 1941, it did so with a vengeance. Suddenly one’s Japanese neighbors — farmers with cherry orchards, children who shared the neighborhood playground, their doting mothers — were viewed as potentially dangerous.

Fear built on racism and led to tragedy, says history Professor Ellen Eisenberg. After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, every person of Japanese ancestry was removed from the West Coast. Whole families, most of them American citizens, were hauled away to camps where they were incarcerated behind barbed wire, some for as long as four years. No charges were filed, so no defense was possible.

Eisenberg’s new book, The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal During WWII — recently named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award — looks at how West Coast Jews reacted to the wartime policy of incarceration.

“People get scared during war,” says the Dwight and Margaret Lear Chair of American History. “In 1941 people really thought there would be an attack on the West Coast, and for all they knew, their next door neighbor was the enemy. The policy of removal was wildly popular in the West, and very few individuals or organizations spoke out against it — even Jews, whose long history of oppression had led them to champion civil rights and protest discrimination.”

U.S. Jews had begun to fight for the rights of blacks, Jews and Mexicans, but on the West Coast most remained tensely silent as their Japanese American neighbors were railroaded to incarceration camps. Because of the brutal treatment of Jews in Germany, American Jews wanted to support the war effort against the Nazis; many held uneasy, conflicted feelings about Japanese incarceration, and their reactions were mixed.

A Jewish organization in Los Angeles reported on Japanese Americans, contributing to the propaganda that led to their incarceration, while some in Seattle and San Francisco spoke out against the policy of removal. Many who didn’t later regretted their silence, including Gus Solomon, a young Portland lawyer who eventually became a federal judge. “Given the overwhelming public support for the government policy, the silence of the majority of Jews suggests some level of disagreement,” Eisenberg says.

Just as today’s war paranoia can easily become aligned with racism, it did so during World War II. “There was a fundamental difference in the way Americans reacted to German and Italian Americans, as opposed to Asian Americans,” Eisenberg says. “They assumed that citizens of Japanese descent had loyalty to the Japanese emperor in their blood. Playing American baseball didn’t make them American.”

Eisenberg’s finding that a Jewish organization contributed to the propaganda against Japanese Americans has created surprise and discomfort, but serves as a “cautionary tale of how bad things can be done by good people,” according to Brandeis University history Professor Jonathan Sarna. “The facts might upset some people because they want to think Jews would have supported oppressed groups,” Eisenberg says, “but the evidence is crystal clear. This is what happens when people become paranoid.

“By the summer of 1942, all people of Japanese descent had been incarcerated and the hysteria had abated,” Eisenberg says. “More people, including those in the Jewish community, were willing to speak out against the practice. The West Coast Jewish community also quickly shifted gears toward promoting civil rights in Mexican and black communities, and after the war they focused on Japanese rehabilitation. Their silence was short-lived.”

The First to Cry Down Injustice was published in September, and Eisenberg is now co-authoring a broad history of Jews in the Pacific West, to be released in fall 2009. “Most Jewish American histories have an East Coast bias, with a focus on New York City,” Eisenberg says. “But now regional Jewish history has a growing audience.”

History itself may have a growing audience. “I think some people imagine that historians sit at their desks memorizing lists of names and dates,” Eisenberg says, “but the study of history is far from a desk job. When you’re looking at history, you can never get bored.”

Success Beyond the Field

Head Football Coach Mark Speckman just led the Bearcats to their best season in a decade, but the hardest part is yet to come: recruiting for next year.

“Recruitment during the off-season is much more difficult and time consuming than coaching during the season,” he says. “We travel far in search of people who can really play and who are talented academically.”

Willamette’s emphasis on good athletes who are equally strong scholars makes recruiting a bit different than at a Division I sports program, but it’s also what makes the University’s athletes special, Speckman says. “Our athletes have a lot less of a sense of entitlement. They give a lot of time to football, but there is no slack when it comes to doing well in school. There’s nowhere to hide in the Willamette curriculum. Their excellence has to reach to the classroom as well as the field.”

Anyone wondering what defines a scholar athlete needed only to listen to the national anthem at the Bearcats’ final game in November against the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in the NCAA Division III playoffs. Tight end Josh Lee, who majored in music and hopes to become a teacher, stood tall on the sidelines in his football uniform and pads as he wowed the crowd with his vocal rendition of the song.

“Our starting tight end stood up there and sang the national anthem — and not only sang it, but knocked it out of the ballpark — and then got out there and scored a touchdown against the defending national champions,” Speckman says. “Only at Willamette. That’s the kind of student we have here. Kids get the full deal.”

Speckman has coached Willamette’s team for 14 years, first as an offensive coordinator, and as head coach since 1998. He was here in 1997 when the Bearcats were undefeated until losing a heartbreaking national championship game, 14–7. He has watched the team go through ups and downs since then, culminating this fall in an undefeated regular season and a trip through the second round of the playoffs.

What worked so well for the Bearcats this year? “If I knew, I’d write a book and be a millionaire,” Speckman says. “I do know we had guys who could make plays, especially on offense. We could strike from anywhere on the field.”

The team’s success brought more fans to the games, and Speckman says the support did not go unnoticed. “It was really neat seeing a lot of the alumni, professors and administrators coming out to the games. People were getting really excited about Willamette, and the kids appreciated it.”

The students also appreciate their coach, who was named 2008 Northwest Conference Coach of the Year and was a finalist for Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year. In addition to working hard with the players on the field, Speckman takes time to run summer football camps for the community and has so many motivational speaking engagements that he had to hire someone to manage his speaking schedule.

Speckman’s care for his athletes is obvious in the way he describes them, and it’s also evident from a peek into his office — it’s filled with photos of teams and players.

“We work with quality young men that really have their priorities in order,” he says. “They’re scholar athletes, they play because they love to play, they’re low ego and everybody does well in class. They’ve got everything you want in a football player.”