Calvin News

During Commencement week, an unusual photo display appeared overnight at Calvin College.

“So Far From Cheesecake: The History of Women at Calvin College,” is a semi-serious exhibition of 17 photos of Calvin women faculty and staff from across the disciplines.

“It really was a celebration of the number of senior women faculty across campus,” says Janel Curry, Calvin’s dean for research and scholarship. The display serves as a counterpoint to the predominately male faculty found in historical photos on Calvin’s walls, showing the increasing presence in recent years of women on the faculty (currently, almost 30 percent of the Calvin faculty is female).

"We couldn’t have done this exhibition 10 years ago,” Curry adds.

The inspiration for the display arose during a 50th birthday party for a Calvin professor.

“All of these women faculty were at this birthday party, and we started talking about all the men’s pictures up on the wall at Calvin and how fun it would be to have women’s pictures with them,” Curry says. “From there the idea grew.”

It grew into a display featuring women faculty and staff — garbed in academic gowns (with a few authentic touches) — from Calvin’s sociology, English, philosophy, Germanic Languages, geography, physical education, theatre, business, music, art, science and communication arts and sciences departments as well as from the college’s H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and provost’s office.

The display hangs on a wall of a second floor corridor in Spoelhof Center, directly across from a men’s restroom.

“I love that detail,” says Helen Sterk, chair of Calvin’s communication arts and sciences (CAS) department, who is featured in the display.

Though the subjects pose straight-faced (to mimic historical photos), they are caught in settings and costumes that provide a deeper commentary.

Chemistry Professor Karen Muyskens, for example is pictured in a lab that is billowing smoke in a picture titled “Concocting Chaos,” a title, said Curry, that references women’s affect on the academy. Curry’s portrait replicates Vermeer’s “The Geographer,” with Curry in the pensive pose of the original. Its title? “Where in the World is Vermeer’s Geographer?”

Sterk singled out music professor Charsie Sawyer’s portrait for being disruptive on more than one level. Sawyer, an African American woman, is in full Wagnerian headdress-horns and all-singing opera.

“Wagner has been used by propagandists to support white supremacy,” says Sterk. “And Charsie Sawyer chose that image to transform it, to say that great art is not owned by anyone but belongs to everyone.”

Sprinkled throughout the photos are images of frosted buns, a reference to the movie Calendar Girls.

Dawn Crook, an administrative assistant at Calvin, was responsible for making the buns and for orchestrating the production of the pictures and calendar.

“I had never seen Calendar Girls,” Crook insists, “so I had to go online to find a picture to make the buns. My job,” she adds chuckling, “was to keep it light when all of these women were having their deep, meaningful pictures taken.”

All of the images in the display were photographed by Curry’s daughter, Marie Roper.

“My daughter wants to be a photojournalist and this gave her a great opportunity to take a lot of pictures and to meet an incredible group of women, and that makes her want to attend Calvin,” Curry says. “But she did say if she saw anymore senior women leg, she’d be damaged for life.”

Interestingly the photo representing the provost’s office includes the only male pictured in the display, former provost Joel Carpenter, who left the post this summer to take up the directorship of Calvin’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity.

“In his role as provost, he has been extremely supportive of women in faculty positions,” Curry says about the inclusion of Carpenter (in fact Carpenter's successor, Claudia Beversluis, became the first female provost in Calvin's history when she stepped into the job this summer).