English professor Lise Kildegaard has fostered a celebration of great art in small packages through her Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities. Two of the projects engaged students in creating their own works of art in partnership with poet and video artist Todd Boss and with printmaker and book artist David Esslemont.
Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin and now lives in Minneapolis. He has been publishing poetry since 2008, and he also expresses his poems through films called Motionpoems. Kildegaard says Boss writes beautiful, interesting, rich poems that are short lyrics. “Then he wears a different hat as the executive artistic director of what he calls the world’s only film poetry company. He is part of an artistic endeavor that is making films that are connected to contemporary poems,” she told Chips, the Luther student newspaper.
The films—each two or three minutes long—have been screened at festivals, cinemas, libraries, museums, bookstores, and schools worldwide. How they turn out is influenced not only by the poet, but by animators, filmmakers, and composers. Motionpoems.org, which Boss cofounded with filmmaker Angella Kassube, regularly releases new videos.
Kildegaard arranged for Boss to teach a 2016 January Term class about Motionpoems, the poet’s first collaboration with college students, she says. “They’re recording the videos, they’re developing original scores, they’re putting that all together in a month’s time,” Boss says in a video about the class created by Luther’s Video Bureau. The students learned firsthand from poets in addition to Boss, and he brought in professionals working in music composition and production, voice over, sound design, filming, editing, and more.
A Motionpoem by sophomore Isaiah Cammon, junior Elizabeth Daly, and senior Nick Arnold, based on the poem “The Plastic Saint” by Athena Kildegaard, was shown at the March 4 launch party for Athena’s book of poems and prose poems, Ventriloquy. Students from the J-term class drove up to St. Paul for the event.
Another visiting artist, British printmaker, designer, bookbinder, and publisher David Esslemont, spent several days in residence during spring semester. Esslemont, who lives north of Decorah, worked with six students to create a chapbook based on six of the Square Stories of Danish author Louis Jensen.
Five students created linoleum-cut prints to illustrate the Square Stories: seniors Tessa Kraus and Lars Johnson, and juniors Maxwell Green, Savannah Horn, and Jake Porter. Riley Samuelson, a senior, assisted Esslemont in binding the book.
The pages were printed on a cylinder press designed by Orville Running, who headed Luther’s Art Department for 30 years, beginning in 1946. Not all of the student illustrators had made a print before, and Esslemont taught each step along the way. He demonstrated how to roll the ink—listening to the roller’s sh-sh-sh to determine when the ink was spread thinly enough. Then he showed how to apply just the right amount of pressure through the press—not so much that the print block dented the paper.
Esslemont and his team of students aimed to create 30 copies of the approximately 8½-by-5½-inch books. One copy may find a home in the Rare Book Room of Preus Library.
Every two years, the Jones Professorship is awarded to a Luther faculty member who honors the values and traditions of the humanities, enriches the intellectual life of students, and provides academic leadership in the humanities. The Jones Professor devotes time to a project that will enhance humanities education.
