Today we celebrate the arts, and I would like to take a personal moment to reflect on that tradition at Iowa State. I have been a member of the Focus Committee for more than 25 years. As an undergraduate here at Iowa State in the late 1950s, I remember FOCUS being a special week of activities sponsored by the Lectures Committee. A week when Lectures brought to the campus a number of arts-related experiences, artists, film critics, musicians, sculptors and the like.

But Professor of English James Lowrie had a better idea. He proposed a different expression of the arts for Iowa State: an opportunity for all students, whether they be art majors or engineers, to express themselves via the arts. The GSB in its wisdom agreed to fund these arts opportunities for ISU students rather than visiting artists.

When I returned to Iowa State as a staff member in the early 1970s, I was thrilled to find FOCUS a vibrant program for students to do their thing in the arts. The faculty and student committee enjoyed debating the annual student proposals and challenging them to compete in the spring Focus Festival Competition. Life was good, and the Iowa State campus and community enjoyed the wonderfully diverse, creative and admittedly cooky mix of stuff that Focus funded and presented to this campus each spring. Then, as now, Iowa State was more about agriculture and engineering than about the arts.

When I joined the Focus Committee, faculty and students from art, film, television, photography, music, dance and creative writing, among others, participated in our activities. Students from many disciplines participated in the annual juried competition. The two annual grants competitions for funded projects received way more proposals than the GSB could possibly fund. The committee debated long and hard to whom these grants should be awarded.

Over the years some truly inspired projects were funded. Some of them remain today as important works on our campus. For example, the blue metal sculpture you see in front of the College of Design is in fact a Focus Funded Grant Project.

Perhaps, for me, the most memorable Focus Grant project is the piece done by Ken Smith, a landscape architecture student in the early 1980s. Ken proposed a thing he dubbed “The Glove Box.” A scientific university like ISU knows that a glove box is a device typically located in a research lab which allows the researcher to plunge his/her hands into large rubber gloves which protrude inside a sterile environment in order to conduct an experiment.

Well, Ken Smith’s glove box was something completely different: a tall, black, monolithic slab, from which hung scores of white rubber gloves in even rows. As one approached this slab, a light sensor turned on an air compressor and a tape recorder. The tape began to play Ravel’s Bolero as the pump filled the scores of rubber gloves with air. They began to grow and pulse as air filled them. The gloves seemed to reach out and tremble with life. As Bolero reached its dramatic conclusion, and the gloves filled to near breaking; a valve opened. We heard the deep sigh of escaping air, the gloves lost their life support and gracefully settled to their original limp position. The cycle was over. I felt the need to light a cigarette.

Perhaps more interesting than the glove box’s action itself was to watch those who stood transfixed in front of it with each cycle. It drew large, though quiet crowds throughout Focus Week that year. I will never forget its impact on the campus community.

Unfortunately, over the past several years, the concept of Focus has diminished. No longer do the music, media or writing faculty or their students participate. The GSB Finance Committee continues to support Focus although its criteria no longer allows us to fund the stipend and travel expenses the committee used to provide off-campus judges who evaluated and critiqued the student competition. Thanks go to the Student Union Board for funding this year’s visual arts critic, John Andrews.

Even the grants division of Focus has diminished. Over the past several years, fewer and fewer students have chosen to compete for the available grants.

Several months ago, our committee seriously debated ending Focus. But the few and loyal faculty and student members, who continue to support and value the Focus concept, agreed finally to give Focus one more year. Its future depends on you and on them. If Focus does not find a new way to stimulate interest in the arts on this campus, to stimulate both students and faculty to participate, the demise of Focus is inevitable.

But for today, let’s again congratulate those who have shared with us their art and inspiration and made our lives and this university a better place. Be sure to view the Focus artwork up in the Gallery and Pioneer Rooms of the Union. Remember this spring’s deadline for Focus grant submissions is Wednesday April 23, 1997. Thanks for coming to our Awards program; we hope to see you all next year, at a newly revitalized Focus Celebration.

Robert B. Lindemeyer

Chairman of the ISU FOCUS

Committee