New Americans Will Power Chicago’s Future, Tonantzin Carmona ’08
In midmorning, the light reflecting off North LaSalle Street’s towering buildings pours into Tonantzin Carmona’s small office in Chicago’s City Hall. Poised and welcoming, Tonantzin clears the Starbucks cup to one side and ignores the steady ping of incoming emails. She looks every bit her age — 24 years. Last April, Mayor Rahm Emanuel named Tonantzin director of his Office of New Americans. While rancorous debate about immigrants surges across the United States, Mayor Emanuel has declared that Chicago “will be the most immigrant-friendly city in the country.” Some view...
Read MoreLanding the Viewer Inside the Story, Llewellyn Smith ’72
“I’m attracted to the consequences of big ideas shaping people’s lives,” says Llew Smith, summing up what drives his filmmaking. His film legacy over nearly 35 years shows a diligent historian, a fearless visual artist, a sensitive and ambitious chronicler of identity and experience in the United States. Llew is alternately, or sometimes simultaneously, a writer, director, producer, series editor and “especially rainmaker, if you know what I mean.” Llew “backed into filmmaking,” by seizing a number of serendipitous opportunities that cropped up in Minnesota, in the late...
Read MoreAt the Console, Nick Makes Productions Sing
At the Console, Nick Makes Productions Sing: Ambitious performances push Milton’s sound guru. Nick Mehlman ’16 folds his long body into a seat behind an analog sound board and puts on a headset. It’s Wednesday night at the dress rehearsal of For Colored Girls. In the black box studio down the hall, a student band is warming up. For the first time in a Milton production, the musicians are not seated in the orchestra pit; in King Theatre, the play’s staging and set extends to the far corners of the room, bisecting the audience. How can live musicians accompany actors several rooms away?...
Read MoreWorth a Thousand Words: Nick Clark ’65 blurs the lines between fine art and your childhood favorites.
Four wide, welcoming murals — eight feet by 16 — warm the airy central hall of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. The textured swaths of red, green, blue, yellow, are stunning tone setters — contemporary collages, you think. But then each painting tugs at a deep-seated visual memory — something familiar, nostalgic — stemming from hundreds of turns with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The murals showcase Eric Carle’s signature tissue-paper technique writ large. Blurring the lines between fine art and illustration art is the goal of The Carle Museum....
Read MoreIn Sight, Fall 2014
Zion, March 2014 Images by Matt Magann ’17, render views of Zion National Park during Milton’s Outdoor Program trip in March 2014. Milton’s H. Adams Carter Outdoor Program was founded to honor the Milton graduate (’32), teacher and world-renowned mountaineer, who, in 1947, established the Program’s precursor, the Ski and Mountaineering Club. Through the Program, Milton students learn about the back-country for sport, beauty, contemplation and camaraderie. These outdoor experiences teach students to take responsibility, meet challenges, take intelligent risks, and to trust...
Read MoreGrade 8 Talks: What Should We Know About You?
It’s Monday morning, and 145 middle schoolers gather in Ware 500. The faithful assembly space buzzes with 8 a.m. energy. Left of stage, an eighth grader flips through a collection of notecards a final time. She takes two deep breaths and steps onto the stage, where four weeks of preparation will culminate in her Grade 8 Talk. On Mondays and Fridays for nine years now, eighth graders have shared themselves with their classmates, and prepared through this experience for the traditional Class IV Talks that lie ahead. Grade 8 Talks, the brainchild of Middle School director Will Crissman,...
Read More