Yet last weekend was a sweet repeat of the Pacific Northwest College of Art annual thesis exhibition. Bunny is their perennial flower designer, and we brought the whole family down for a big dose of cultural inspiration created by the last batch of my former students.
It's been a decade since I started teaching ecology to PNCA art majors. Back then, concepts like sustainability, biophilia and community networks were still fresh to most student vocabularies. Fast forward 10 years...this graduating class is ecoliterate and humanity's inextricable connection to nature is the common thread of their 2010 theses. Coincidentally, one student's mixed-media project fondly referenced the remote wilderness where Bunny and I were married a decade ago, just weeks before becoming a professor.
My tour of PNCA duty was finished in Fall 2007 mentoring a stellar class of interested and engaged students - with the exception of one Beth Nix who repelled all things related to ecological sustainability. I was surprised to find that, much like society, she turned a corner and embraced our civilization's greatest challenge of the 21st Century. Full Circle.
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