36 ABOVE: The Teaching Gallery, featuring American artist Grace Hartigan’s painting (on long wall, right-hand side), Bride and Owl, 1954 TRYON PRIZES 2018 Each year at SCMA, a jury awards Tryon Prizes for Art to Smith College students for excellent work in writing, as well as installation, performance, video, sound, digital, internet or interactive art. Here are the 2018 Tryon Prize winners and honorable mentions: Tryon Prize for Writing / Sarah White ‘20 (essay) Border Looking: Politics of Space in Park Chan-Kyong’s Three Cemeteries, 2009 (see installation image, no.5) and Clarissa Tossin’s Streamlined Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan, 2013 Three Cemeteries was on view in the exhibition, 体 Modern Images of the Body from East Asia , SCMA (2018). Tryon Prize for Art / Julia Xu ‘19 (audio installation) To You Recordings of voices describing what they would say to a person who is no longer present in their lives. Xu juxtaposed these with a silhouette of hanging leaves— meant to evoke the presence of people no longer here. The combination of these recordings with the fragile and detailed sculptural element creates a powerful piece that, as Julia writes, “deals with memories and digs into our deepest secrets.” Honorable Mention, Tryon Prize for Art / Clare Altman ‘20 (animation) Jimmy “Jimmy ...is based on the theme of loss—a universal human experience—as told through my own story about the death of my friend Jimmy. I think that often when people are confronted with loss, they try to alleviate their pain and grief by repressing feelings of sadness; however, in this piece I wanted to show the more pos- itive aspects of loss: how being able to feel hopeless- ness and anguish actually allows us to come to a better understanding of ourselves.” Honorable Mention, Tryon Prize for Art / Ratidzo Vushe ‘21 (video) Yours Truly “This time-based video talks about moving to a new place and having the longing of returning home. I am from Zimbabwe and I have been away from home since fall 2017; and I will be returning in the Winter of 2019. The video seeks to show how being away from our safe spaces and the ones we love brings about feelings of frustration and fear. I, the subject, crave to return home and find comfort in the counting of days and counting of time. The longing to return comes with the fear of change and coming to a realization that it is inevitable that this safe place one calls home will change; and perhaps so will I.” even the best book reproductions, the images of these paintings are 8 inches by 11 inches. In the Teaching Gallery, students could stand up close and be over- whelmed by the almost life-size figure of Hartigan’s bride, by the size and apparent mass of the owl that shares space with her, by the broad color field that Hartigan interrupts with energetic gestures. I have focused here on the value to students of our meetings in the museum, but it was just as im- portant for me—as both teacher and scholar—to have these opportunities to see works in person. O’Hara and Schuyler and Guest—along with John Ashbery—all write wonderfully about Abstract Expressionist painting as well as collage and sculpture. Analyzing artworks themselves rather than reproductions, I could more clearly see something like what these writers saw. I could test their descriptions against my own observations, and I could much more vividly witness the spark of verbal imagination these works (or ones like them) had set off for the poets. My writing about these poets, as well as my teaching of their poems, has been enriched by the hours spent alongside my students in the presence of the art that inspired them. Michael Thurston is the Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature