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Thursday, September 20, 2001
Making sense of chaos
A&M-CC visual, performing artists capture anger, sadness brought by terrorist attacks
By Brendan Walsh
Caller-Times

Contributed Photo

Photography student Scott Miller took this photo in Corpus Christi the day after last week's terrorist attacks. His Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi professor decided the photography class should go outside and capture images that reflected their feelings after the events.
Professor Barbra Riley knew that teaching her Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Photography I class the morning after last Tuesday's terrorist attacks was going to be a challenge. She knew her students' minds would be focused not on lenses, apertures and shutter speeds, but on the events in New York and Washington, D.C.
   But instead of trying to redirect her students' thoughts from current events to art, she told them to combine the two. She took her class on a fieldtrip to downtown Corpus Christi and told everyone to capture images that reflected their feelings.
   Members of the class spent about two hours walking around the city. Students took photos of everything from the "God Bless America" sign posted at a restaurant to a dead bird a student found on a sidewalk.
   Artists "don't just make things to hang over your sofa, we respond, and that's what this is about," Riley explained.
   Capturing emotions
   A&M-CC art instructor Gary Reuter was also thinking about how he and his sculpture students could best capture the emotions that engulfed the campus. They decided to assemble and whitewash two cardboard boxes - forms vaguely reminiscent of the World Trade Center towers - and allow students and the public to express themselves by drawing or writing on the boxes.

Contributed Photo

'Urban Cross' by student Scott Miller will be part of a multi-media presentation by Texas A&M-CC photography, sculpture and theater students in response to last week's terrorist attacks.

   "Over a period of time, the surfaces will take on the complexion of people's memories, thoughts and ideas," Reuter said.
   Capturing emotions was also the goal of A&M-CC Theater Club students. Beginning Sept. 13, students in the 20-member club took handheld audio tape recorders and walked around campus, interviewing other students about their reactions to the terrorist attacks.
   Fernando Albiar, a student and co-coordinator of the project, said following the tragedy he and his fellow club members were searching for something they could do to help. They decided that what they could contribute was simple: ask people how they felt. "I know that after people talked to us, it was real cathartic and they feel better. Everyone we've talked to has got something off (his or her) chest," he said.
   In what has turned out to be a campus-wide arts effort, the photography of Riley's students and the expressive monoliths created by Reuter and his students will be used as part of a play that the Theater Club students plan on writing, using the recorded reactions as base material.
   Artist response
   It's not yet clear when everything will come together for the first performance, but theater professor Don Luna says he hopes it will happen before the semester ends.
   Throughout history, artists have always responded to tragedy. In the 20th century, Picasso painted the epic "Guernica" as a response to the death of innocents in war; photographer Huynh Cong Ut's picture of a girl burned by napalm became one of the most memorable and tragic images from the Vietnam War; and, in a play similar in concept to Theater Club's project, Anna Deavere Smith used people's reactions to the 1992 Los Angeles riots as the basis for "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992." That play went on to appear on Broadway and was nominated for two Tony awards.
   "Art, at its core, is the expression of feelings," said Scott Miller, one of Riley's photography students. "That afternoon was an opportunity to express emotions in a photo medium."
   Ben Philipp, the president of the Theater Club, put it another way: "It's not so much that we're contributing to history, but that we're preserving it."

   Contact Brendan Walsh at 886-3763 or walshb@caller.com

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