Laurie Hogin ’81
The Thinking of Art

If Lauretta "Laurie" Hogin’s childhood were a musical composition, it would be a pastorale; if a book, a novel by C.S. Lewis. It would begin in a 600-acre woodland tract where three young friends, Laurie, Ashley and Jack, escaped into a private world lushly vegetated and populated by deer and mallards, snakes and wild turkeys. There they would make prints with mushrooms, draw pictures of varied plant species and collect rocks.

But in real life, the youngsters’ woodland paradise was not in the countryside. It was behind the Hogin home in suburban Cos Cob, Conn., so the trio got glimpses of something else.

"Occasionally, people would drive trucks in and dump things there. We’d see cascades of tires and grimy 55-gallon barrels. For children, we developed a real sense of environmentalism, in a very black-and-white way: Don’t mess with our woods!" Hogin says.

By fourth grade, Hogin was presenting her art teachers with drawings of woodlands oozing with garbage; it was, she says, her way of protesting what she saw.

Today, Hogin is a hot young Chicago artist whose work is shown all over the country. Not surprisingly, her canvases still bemoan the rape of nature. Her paintings are rife with images of snarling bunnies, fanged monkeys and other creatures of outrage. The fact that she works in the pastoral style of 17th- through 19th-century European landscape artists makes the images even more disturbing, since the ugliness emerges from a background of idealistic natural beauty. A curator of her 1997 show "Paradise in Peril," at the Evanston Art Center, described Hogin’s work as "audacious in its stylistic form and provocative in its intent."

To Hogin, it’s all a product of her strong belief that art has meaning.

That notion may seem obvious, but Hogin was schooled during a time when the art world favored "this sort of huge, heroic, conceptually vacuous, narcissistic painting," she says, "reflective of a postmodernist idea that nothing means anything–it’s all a semiotic free-for-all. I found that obnoxious and arrogant."

Following a grounding in visual literacy and design principles at PA, Hogin went to Cornell University to study cultural anthropology and studio art. The school placed a stress on drawing and painting the human figure, and, in her view, "too much emphasis on the craft of art-making and not enough on the thinking of art."

After Cornell, she took a year off and saved money for graduate school by working part-time jobs as a sculptor’s studio assistant, an editorial cartoonist for the Greenwich Gazette, a real estate illustrator and a school bus driver.

Next she earned an M.F.A. degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she continued to do battle for meaning over process.

"The critiques were terribly formalist," she says. "I remember a presentation where a student said, ‘This painting is about my healing process after my mother died,’ and a panelist replied, ‘I like the way you placed that blue dot in the corner.’ They couldn’t have cared less about his mother or what he was trying to say. I completely stopped painting for a time because I just wasn’t interested in what they were doing."

Though she was viewed as somewhat subversive at the school, Hogin’s thesis show was a hit. It attracted Chicago gallerist Peter Miller, who offered to feature her work in an exhibition. From the beginning, her paintings had buyers and won critical praise in The Chicago Tribune, Art in America, Art Forum and Art News. Recently she was interviewed for the hip young magazine Juxtapose.

To date, Hogin has sold about 250 works and has commercial representation in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Though sales have generated enough income to support her comfortably, she has also chosen to teach courses at Valparaiso University, the Univer-sity of Chicago and Northwestern. In November 1999 she was an Edward Elson Visiting Artist at Andover, where she worked with PA students and displayed her paintings at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Through Jan. 6, 2002, her work can be seen in an exhibition called Terrors and Wonders at the DeCordova Art Museum in Lincoln, Mass.

Now a full-time instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hogin teaches as she wishes she had been taught. "During critiques," she says, "I ask students to articulate the meaning they intended to convey in their art, as well as what they meant to refer to in the history of art-making or the history of visual culture."

Besides teaching and painting, Hogin plays hockey and supports environmental causes. Her son, Charlie, was born in August 2000, and she and husband Greg Boozell, a program director for Chicago’s public access TV station, are building a home in the Champaign area.

"Sometimes I miss living in New York, even though I have a studio there that I visit monthly," she says. "However, I stayed in Chicago after graduation because I could afford to. There was a response to my work here that provided me an income that allowed me to produce more work. Also, here I could have all the space I want to paint; it would be hard to find that in New York.

"Besides," she adds, "New York was home–my parents’ home. I needed to find my own city."

Anne Northrup ’82
Shaping the Impressions

If there was one surefire way for a Boston native growing up in Indonesia to keep abreast of U.S. culture, Anne Northrup ’82 found it. As often as possible, she would go to the cinema with her parents and avidly watch American movies.

"Fortunately, there was no dubbing, so if they turned the volume up high enough we could hear the films in English while everyone else was reading the subtitles," recalls Northrup, today a Chicago filmmaker.

Once a member of PA’s Chorus and Cantata and its a cappella ensemble Fidelio, Northrup went on to Oberlin College not because of its reputation in music, but because it had cultural ties to Indonesia. These included an orchestra of Indonesian gamelan instruments playing the distinctive percussion music she had loved as a child.

"My early years in Indonesia were a seminal experience for me; they became part of how I saw myself and what made me unique," she recalls. After considering cultural anthropology, she decided to major in comparative religion, and following graduation she went to Indonesia for two years to teach English and advance her studies in gamelan music. There she noticed that Indonesians’ impressions of America were most often shaped by what they saw on the screen.

"When people heard I was from the United States, they would ask me about Rambo or comment on the highly sexualized or violent content of movies like Nine and a Half Weeks or Blue Velvet," she says. "It was both bizarre and disturbing; I found myself saying, ‘This is what people are thinking of my country?’"

Returning to the United States, Northrup played in a gamelan orchestra in Chicago and worked at Northwestern University’s media center. But she remained intrigued by film’s power to shape impressions. In 1990, she decided to apply to film school.

"I entered the graduate program at Columbia College in Chicago without ever having made a movie. I didn’t have much knowledge of film history or even know the names of directors. Fortunately, they weren’t looking for someone who had been a passionate film buff–they were looking for someone who had a life. The school’s theory was, ‘We can teach you to make a movie, but if you’re not an inherently interesting person you won’t have anything to say.’"

Northrup received the M.F.A. degree in 1998 after screening her thesis film, titled and everything nice. The half-hour narrative, which she wrote, cast, directed and produced with a crew of 15, echoes an incident in Northrup’s own childhood. In it, a mother, upset that her adolescent daughter has had a falling-out with a neighborhood bully, refuses to let her child play with her friends until she has played with the girl she doesn’t like.

"To me and the principal character, Sammi, the issue is about fairness and honesty about one’s feelings. To the mother, it is about being nice and about what girls have to do to be considered nice," she says. The film was aired on public television, where it received positive responses from viewers, and it won the Golden Corn Award at the Iowa Independent Film and Video Festival.

Since then, Northrup has worked on other public television and independent projects on subjects ranging from hospice patients and single motherhood to the treasures of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also borne a daughter, Isabella, now 2.

Northrup’s long-term aspirations include doing either a narrative or documentary film recapturing her days in Indonesia, as well as working on collaborative projects with her husband, filmmaker Dan Andries, who is currently producing a weekly TV program on the arts in Chicago. Both, she says, favor what they call "difficult character pieces"–dramas like Magnolia, Dancer in the Dark, The Ice Storm and Ordinary People, comedies like Annie Hall and Manhattan.

She does not know what the immediate future holds, except that she intends to stay in Chicago rather than knock on Hollywood’s door.

"On the one hand, I am a woman who wants to make films that focus on women, and I know there are a lot of actresses in L.A. dying to undertake good roles for women. On the other hand, I think many people in Hollywood are successful just because they’re assertive and aggressive, and I’m not sure I have that kind of single-minded drive. To me, life is more about making the most of welcome opportunities that cross your path. Whenever there has been something I have wanted or needed to do, somehow the opportunity has presented itself."

Charles Woodbury ’67
Facilitating
Drug Discovery

When Charles "Chuck" Woodbury ’67 reached the secondary grades, it was not a matter of choosing between boarding school and a typical neighborhood high school. Woodbury’s neighborhood was actually a town on a Nez Perce Indian reservation in a sparsely populated area of Eastern Washington State.

"My father worked for the National Park Service, and we moved around the country quite a bit, living in ranger stations in the parks. With those sorts of remote postings, boarding schools are kind of a tradition in Park Service families," he recalls.

"Andover was pretty intimidating for a country boy, plus I thought it was weak that there were no girls. Otherwise, it was a pretty good place for a science nerd whose proudest achievement had been earning a Boy Scout badge in chemistry," says Woodbury, now a chemistry professor in Chicago.

At Andover, Woodbury thrived in biology, and he says his English teacher’s perfectionism taught him to write clearly–a skill that’s constantly called upon today as he pens research reports, journal articles, textbook chapters, lectures and grant proposals.

At the University of Wash-ington, Woodbury declared his major to be marine biology, then oceanography, and finally chemistry. He earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, intending to work in industry, but after doing postdoctoral studies in physical biochemistry at the University of Oregon he began to consider an academic career.

"During my postdoc I had run some recitations in chemistry and found I really liked teaching. It also occurred to me that, although the biotechnology industry might be more financially rewarding, education might be more stable. I was looking for stability at that point, because my wife, Martha, and I already had two kids, one of whom was handicapped. I wanted to find a place with good support services where we could settle down and build a family life."

In 1979, he was offered a position in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry, where he is now an associate professor. Medicinal chemistry is a subdiscipline within the larger field of pharmacy, and UIC houses one of the most respected pharmacy schools anywhere.

Some graduates of UIC’s six-year D. Pharm. program, Woodbury says, go into direct pharmacy practice in drugstores or hospitals. Others specialize in pharmacology, the study of drug action. Some enter the pharmaceuticals industry, joining clinical trials teams, or they run test labs or work for regulatory agencies like the FDA. Yet others deal in the social science side of pharmacy–analyzing economic and political aspects of drug policy and delivery systems, for example.

Woodbury says his own field of medicinal chemistry focuses on "the chemistry of medicinal agent drugs: how they’re made, how they’re discovered, their structure, their purification and their metabolism."

Woodbury teaches two to three undergraduate and graduate courses per semester, some collaboratively. He also performs his own research in an area called macromolecular binding, which considers the ways small molecules recognize and interact with large molecules–for instance, those found in proteins, polymers and biopolymers like DNA. His purpose is to devise equations and techniques that will facilitate the drug development and discovery process.

In that pursuit, he says, he patented a device used for what he calls pulsed ultra filtration.

The invention includes a chamber containing a membrane with very small pores. Researchers load this chamber with a receptor–"the big molecule material," Woodbury translates–then flush in a mixture of either plant-derived or synthesized molecules that represent potential drugs. Since these molecules are smaller, some pass right through the membrane and wash away. Others are strongly attracted to the receptor and bind to it, never reaching the membrane. It is among these clinging molecules that good drug candidates are found. After flushing in a pulse of organic solvent to separate them from the receptor, researchers use a mass spectrometer or other device to identify them.

Woodbury enjoys both teaching and research, but his life in Chicago stretches beyond the classroom and laboratory. On the wider campus, he is active with the local chapter of Sigma Xi, a scientific honorary society that sponsors seminars crossing scientific disciplines. Through them he also helps support and run a graduate student research forum. Off-campus, he has been involved with the National Association for Down Syndrome, the Down Syndrome Research Fund and the Boy Scouts of America, and with his family he often serves meals in a homeless shelter. He is a martial arts practitioner, and he spends what he says is "too darn much time" restoring an old Victorian house in Oak Park.

"If you asked me for one piece of advice to give to other people in my situation," he says (no one did), "it would be this: Buy the professional-quality tools. They’re worth it."