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This past semester, 15 students had the opportunity to design, install, and write the catalogue for a major display in the Sigal Building located on Northampton Street in Easton.
Through the First-Year Seminar course “Fact or Fiction: Authenticity and the Artifact,” taught by Alastair Noble, assistant professor of art, Lafayette students developed an exhibit featuring artifacts from the Toraku people, a lost tribe from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The students fabricated artifacts and details about the fictitious tribe for the show to demonstrate the large role perception plays in how people determine what does and does not constitute fact.
For Daniel Stefan ’10 (Havertown, Pa.), the exercise of creating artifacts and portraying them as real was a fun challenge that taught the class about the importance of perception and reality. Stefan recalls many passers-by stopping to learn more about the artifacts while the students were working.
“Aside from hard work and a constant strive to finish all our artifacts to our satisfaction, the fun of it was coming up with and making the objects and convincing people that they were real,” he says. “I observed countless people walk by and then retrace their steps back to the exhibit, surprised by what they saw. They began to examine the artifacts and inquire further about them. It was necessary to allow people to believe the authenticity of the artifacts themselves with their own analyses, yet also keep their attention, interest, and belief while they read our descriptions and catalogue.”
In preparation for their work, Noble took his students to museums and galleries throughout the semester, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chelsea Art Galleries, Allentown Art Museum, projectBLUE Art Gallery & Workshop, and Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society. The Sigal Building will be the future home of the historical society.
“Through observation and examination of these galleries, the students developed an understanding of how to present artifacts for exhibition in a cohesive and convincing manner,” says Noble. “It was an excellent hands-on experience for the students to work on this unique display.”
All of the students contributed to the catalogue, which includes a brief history of the Toraku people. The students carefully constructed a historical account of the fictitious lost tribe of Australia and its rediscovery in the 1980s.
“Captain James Cook noted in one of his travel logs kept during a voyage through the South Pacific that there was a race of individuals that inhabited the Cape York region of northern Australia around the mid-1750s,” states the catalogue. “However these journal entries were the only evidence that the tribe had even existed, and the tribe had been almost completely forgotten about, until recently. In 1986, an Australian hiker stumbled upon a clearing while hiking through the remote wilderness of northern Australia. Upon examination of the site, it showed beyond doubt that the site was in fact an old, abandoned village.”
Stefan notes that one of the assigned class readings – Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – helped the students create a back-story for the Toraku people.
“I thought it would be interesting to learn about, one can call it, the art of deception,” he says. “The book provides analysis into the experience between what may be perceived as real or authentic, in contrast to what actually is. One of the main ideas is that it is difficult for a patron to identify whether something is authentic or counterfeit. Throughout the novel, Wilson shows the reader the importance of the vivid description and analysis of artifacts because such seemingly detailed knowledge will allow anyone to deceive an audience effectively. Following Wilson’s stress on detail, it was easier to write convincingly about the Toraku people.”
In addition to Stefan, students who participated in the installation include Britt Crouss ’10 (Friday Harbor, Wash.), Hillary Feller ’10 (Tenafly, N.J.), economics and business major James Fisher ’09 (Clarksburg, N.J.), Christina Giambrone ’10 (Blairstown, N.J.), Rose Kennedy ’10 (North Massapequa, N.Y.), Trustee Scholar William Kingston ’10 (Dover Plains, N.Y.), Trustee Scholar Lauren Longnecker ’10 (Whitehall, Pa.), Christiana Marullo ’10 (Saint James, N.Y.), Caitlyn Myles ’10 (Bethlehem, Pa.), Allison O’Brien ’10 (Northport, N.Y.), Alex Osipower ’10 (Quakertown, Pa.), Jacqueline Parodi ’10 (Bethlehem, Pa.), Hanna Pingry ’10 (Huntingdon, Pa.), and Alejandro Sandoval ’10 (Brussels, Belgium).
Noble often mentors students by involving them in his own work and leading on-campus cooperative activities. Last school year, he installed Zang Tumb Tumb II during his residency at the University of Arizona with the help of civil engineering major Jessica Haase ’07 (Glenn Rock, Pa.). He also led his Concepts in Sculpture class last fall in constructing a large-scale collaborative book sculpture in front of Skillman Library that consisted of nearly 1,000 stacked books donated by Quadrant Book Mart in downtown Easton.
Last spring, Noble constructed a sculpture in the form of the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, for an architectural community in Chile called Open City. Noble was the first artist to be invited to stay on site at Open City and collaborated with its architecture students and faculty on creating a full-size bamboo prototype.
Noble’s art has been exhibited nationally and internationally for more than 25 years, including at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. His works are part of many private, corporate, and public collections. He is the organizer of several symposia and exhibitions on public art and poetry, contributes regularly as a reviewer for Sculpture magazine, and has published other articles, including a piece in Journal of Architecture.
The First-Year Seminar is offered during the first semester of college and is designed to introduce incoming students to the intellectual life of the college community. Limited to 16 students, each class focuses on a special topic and includes significant reading, writing, discussion, and presentation, and provides an introduction to library research. Each course is affiliated with the College Writing Program, which supports students throughout their college careers. Classes also incorporate a variety of co-curricular events, such as attending live performances or visiting museums and exhibits related to course topics.