Weeks ’11 staying composed

Alumni in the arts: Piper Grosswendt ’11 thrives in D.C. art scene

Piper Grosswendt ’11 graduated from Bowdoin three years ago, but her busy schedule working as an artist in Washington, D.C. makes her feel like she never left.
“I’m always doing something, like when you’re in college,” said Grosswendt. “I still feel that motivation and pressure.”
Grosswendt is a creative assistant at Honfleur Gallery, Vivid Solutions Gallery and Anacostia Arts Center, where her day-to-day responsibilities include working with artists and managing art exhibitions. She also curated a show of contemporary art titled “Primary Urges” at Honfleur Gallery.
“[My job] is basically doing everything it takes to put on art exhibitions six times per year,” said Grosswendt.
“At the art center, I do some exhibition coordinating, but also a lot of work with people who rent the space for music and theater or dance performances. That has given me more art management skills,” she added.
In her free time, she rents a studio so she can work on her own art.
Grosswendt was editor-in-chief of the Orient during her senior year and anticipated that she would go into journalism upon graduation.
“I had no intentions of being as active in art as I am now,” she said.
She spent a brief period working as a communications intern at the Phillips Collection, a modern art museum in Washington, D.C., where she realized that journalism just was not her true passion.
Though she ended up taking a different route, she said that her work as a journalist prepared her for her career.
“The skills that are most directly transferred [to the real world]...I gained at the Orient, not in the classroom,” said Grosswendt. “I found it very helpful to be in contact with people who were not immersed in academia—calling the police station in Brunswick, or going door-to-door talking to neighbors.”
At Bowdoin, Grosswendt was a double major in English and visual arts, although she didn’t take her first visual arts class until the spring of her first year.
“Professors [at Bowdoin] make the art classes really vigorous, intellectual and cohesive. The learning environment really got me excited about the department,” she said.
Grosswendt felt that skills she learned in visual arts classes prepared her for life after graduation without being too career-focused.
“[The classes] helped with professional development: photographing your work, figuring out how to explain your work to someone [unfamiliar with it] in an efficient way,” said Grosswendt. “But I think appropriately the focus, or at least how I took it, was to make and develop artwork.”
Grosswendt took the Senior Studio class, taught by A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art Mark Wethli in the fall and Associate Professor of Photography Michael Kolster in the spring, which brought in local gallery owners and artists.
“That [was] really valuable, just to be taken seriously by people who weren’t professors, as an artist,” she said.
In the spring after her junior year, Grosswendt received a McKee Photography Grant which she used to fund a project that transferred her photographs of buildings around Brunswick onto printmaking plates.
Grosswendt plans on going to graduate school to get a Masters of Fine Arts in either painting or art therapy.
“I kind of graduated thinking I would have some office administrative job and I’m really glad I don’t,” she said.

Alumni in the arts: Katie Kinkel ’13 pursues poetry at Iowa Writers' Workshop

Katie Kinkel ’13 has a constantly evolving relationship with the study of English. While she originally planned on getting a Ph.D. in English after graduation, she is now at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she will receive a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in English after two years.
“I ended up becoming increasingly interested in creative writing when I was [at Bowdoin],” Kinkel said.
Kinkel said she felt that the program would offer her the structure she needs to write best.“I’ve been aware of Iowa as a program for a while, and it just looked really great,” said Kinkel. “There are readings all the time, and I came [to Iowa] to visit and it seemed like a really lively literature-loving community. When I got in, it was a pretty easy decision to make.”
Kinkel said that the English department provided her with considerable support during her years at Bowdoin.
“I think it’s a really awesome department and there are people who have a variety of different specialties and skills but they’re all great as people and I feel lucky to have known them and worked with them,” said Kinkel. “It’s hard not to be there anymore.”
However, Kinkel said that the writing program at Bowdoin was fairly small in her time, and she worked exclusively with Writer-in-Residence Anthony Walton on her poetry.
Additionally, Kinkel worked with Professor of English Peter Coviello on a summer research fellowship before her senior year.
“I wrote on Frank Bidart, who is a poet that I really love who is really well known for his dramatic monologues, but he writes in the voices of other speakers—some of whom are characters that he created and some of them are real people,” said Kinkel.
During her senior year, Kinkel worked on an honors project with Walton, a book of poetry, titled “Sleep of Reason.” Walton began helping Kinkel with poetry her freshman year after her then-advisor suggested she contact him.
“I very sheepishly sent him some of my poems; he was really nice about it. I took a couple of classes with him, and I did an independent study for the last two years of my time at Bowdoin,” said Kinkel.
She added, “I don’t know that many people who had the chance to have that close and prolonged working experience, and I’m infinitely grateful for that.”
Outside of academics, Kinkel wrote regularly for The Quill. She also participated in Glascock-Mount Holyoke’s intercollegiate poetry competition in her junior year.
Looking back, Kinkel said she wishes she was more involved in the writing community.
“I would have encouraged myself to be more social as a poet,” she said. “There were a lot of other poets at Bowdoin who were really smart and really talented, but we never really got the chance to sit down and talk about it.”
At Iowa, Kinkel is able to interact and exchange ideas with her peers.
“It’s a small group of people, but the people here are so talented and they have so much to offer and they really want to talk about your work all the time and help you,” she said.
Kinkel is currently working on a new book based on great works of art, historical and philosophical texts, and the ways in which women have been depicted as objects or fascinations. In the future, Kinkel is hoping to publish and possibly get into teaching. She has been teaching undergraduate poetry classes at Iowa.
“I think that has been an unexpected but awesome thing that has come out of this—that I love to teach creative writing. It is definitely something that I am considering doing,” said Kinkel. Kinkel is also toying with the idea of writing for TV or film. Ultimately, she is trying to make the most out of her current experience.
“It’s all up to you—you could learn nothing at an MFA program or you could dramatically change your work, and it is all up to the amount of work that you’re willing to put in and the time you want to spend with your professors and your work and your peers,” she said.

Alumni in the arts

April 17, 2014

The musical experiences Louis Weeks ’11 had at Bowdoin have helped him navigate a dual career as a singer-songwriter and commercial music composer in Washington, D.C.

Weeks writes music for television shows, films and video games while simultaneously producing two of his own records.

Weeks, who majored in music, had a relatively smooth transition from Bowdoin to the professional music world.

“I am lucky...that my previous portfolio and body of work made me qualified,” said Weeks in a phone interview with the Orient. “I found out pretty quickly that I needed to learn a lot of new skills, but for the most part I transitioned seamlessly from Bowdoin.”

Weeks said that the academic music experiences he had at Bowdoin have helped him with his current work, and gave him a solid education that has aided with his client interactions.

“The music department gave me an extremely practical and valuable education in not only writing music, but talking about music, listening to music and communicating music to other people,” said Weeks.

In his work, this education has become so important because Weeks has to talk to clients every day about what they want out of his music.

“I have to have a really good sense of what they are hearing and my education at Bowdoin particularly got me ready for composing music as a means of communication,” said Weeks.

Weeks was also a part of the Meddiebempsters while at Bowdoin.

“Being in the Meddies made me a much better singer and arranger and solidified my love of vocal music, which is what I do when I am not composing,” said Weeks.

He debuted a full-length record in January called "shift/away" and is currently working on his second album, “haha."

Weeks uses most of his free time to work on new recordings and compositions.

“I basically live in the studio,” said Weeks. “Any free time I get, I am working on either new recordings or new pieces.”

Thus far, Weeks has really tried to take on projects that interest him, and he said it is difficult for him to pick a favorite. In all his projects, he works to combine the various skills he’s honed in previous musical roles.

“I want my work to mix composed music that I learned how to write at Bowdoin with the recordings and songwriting that I have done over the past few years,” he said. “I want to create a conversation between those two things.”

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