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Issue date: 11/5/09 Section: Opinion

Potter

This column has not been in print for two weeks because it took me that long to recover from fall break. In actual fact I was helping my wife, Dr. Dorothy Potter, print and pack her manuscript for shipment to Lehigh University Press. However fall break actually has a very interesting history. Dr. James Price was responsible for the development of "Discovery Weekend," an opportunity for students and faculty to explore sometime outside the classroom halfway through the first semester. Dean James Huston endorsed the concept and the faculty approved the idea. Unfortunately "Discovery Weekend" quickly became "Fall Break" when we all discover how late we are able to sleep each morning. It is also a chance to go home and discover that your mother's casseroles were not so bad after all, and that your siblings have improved ever so slightly since August.

Luckily the idea of Discovery Weekend is alive and well and living in the Art Department. Last Friday morning at half past six we boarded the bus that deposited us four hours later at the main entrance of the Washington Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue. We have worshiped at the cathedral a number of times, but my wife and I had never taken the excellent tour provided the corps of docents. After we left the cathedral we headed to the Mall where many of Washington's premier museums are located.

We headed to the National Museum of the American Indian where we joined Betsy and Ben Smith [both members of the class of '67] for lunch in the best museum cafeteria on the Mall. Each time we dine at this restaurant we enjoy the cuisine of a different group of Native Americans-this time we chose the Northwest. After enjoying a meal of bison steak and planked salmon we headed for the galleries which are on the upper levels.

I am not fond of "modern art," but on Friday I discovered the work of Brian Jurgen, a Canadian artist who creates art with a sense of humor from ordinary objects. Thus white lawn chairs are transformed into the skeleton of a whale, while golf bags are piled upon each other to create a series of totem poles. Athletic shoes become masks, and green recycling bins a tortoise through which one may walk. The afternoon passed all too quickly, and soon it was time to cross the Mall and meet the bus in front of the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

We stopped in Warrenton for supper, and the bus pulled into the parking lot behind Turner Gym at half past nine. Professors Delane Karalow and Richard Pumphrey deserve a special thank you for arranging the trip and for allowing members of the college family to join their students on this "Discovery Weekend" adventure. This is not the first time we have joined one of their trips, nor will it, I trust, be the last. It was for me an opportunity to discover a new artist and his work.

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