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Junior Paul Germain (Coral Springs, Fla.), a double major in art and English, will give a presentation on “Human Expressions in Graffiti” noon today in Williams Center for the Arts room 108.
Snacks will be provided at the free event, where Germain will discuss preparations for his interdisciplinary honors thesis in both majors next year.
He is working on an independent study advised by Ross Gay, Dean of Humanities Fellow, about the study of desk graffiti as an aesthetic art form. He has been collecting, studying, and analyzing examples of graffiti from Skillman Library.
Germain is social chair/musical director for Hillel Society, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, a news reporter for The Lafayette, and an actor in an improvisational group that performs skits similar to those on the ABC TV program “Whose Line is it Anyway.” He has recently been selected as a McKelvy Scholar.
Earlier this year, Germain was photographed for the American Memory Project by Bill Hayward ’65 (see related story). Hayward visited Lafayette to photograph subjects in the medium of portraiture, inviting them transform their backdrop in any way they wished.
“Bill and I spoke about several different topics, including a most interesting story about my grandmother’s connection to Pearl Harbor,” he says. “After several hours of conversation, we settled on the simplistic joy I received from doing the laundry. It wasn’t about getting it done, but the actual process of doing the laundry that interested me. My quote, which does not appear in the actual piece, was ‘Sometimes, just doing the laundry makes me a happier person.’ I brought my pajamas, not knowing if I was going to use them or not. Bill felt it would be appropriate for me to wear them in the laundry scene I created by constructing a washer, a clothesline, and an outlet to plug the washer into.”
“Bill had a grand presence about him, being an artist and such, but he also had the ability to relate to others on a very personal level,” he adds. “I found myself very comfortable sharing stories with him.”