Forty-eight music students, three professors and one staff member recently returned from Central America, where Westmont choirs sang and served with locals in Guatemala and Costa Rica. The choirs tour each summer, traveling internationally every third year. Westmont students emceed concerts entirely in Spanish and sang in both English and Spanish.
The Westmont Foundation welcomes four prominent Santa Barbara residents to its board. Brad Frohling, Andria Kahmann, Bill Loomis and Alice Van de Water join the 26-member board whose mission is to cultivate ties between the community and Westmont.
Rick Pointer, Westmont professor of history, has been selected as the first recipient of the newly established Fletcher Jones Foundation Endowed Chair in Social Science. The Fletcher Jones Foundation created the chair to rotate among deserving faculty within the social science division. Pointer will occupy the chair for the next four years, beginning in fall 2008.
The Montecito Board of Architectural Review (MBAR) granted preliminary approval for all of Phase I of the Westmont College Master Plan. The first part of the project will add a new art center, science building, chapel, observatory and residence hall while reconfiguring the campus road and athletic fields.
“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Exhibition” opened at a VIP event June 5 at the Arizona Science Center in downtown Phoenix, kicking off a five-year world-wide tour that includes Westmont’s famed C.S. Lewis-owned wardrobe. The wardrobe, usually housed in Reynolds Hall on Westmont’s campus, is prominently featured at the beginning of the exhibition, which includes other items that Lewis used when he penned the seven-book series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
Judy L. Larson begins work this week as the new director of the Reynolds Gallery and the first holder of the R. Anthony Askew Chair in Art. Larson, most recently the director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts [NMWA] in Washington, D.C., will also teach art history courses. The founding director of Reynolds, Tony Askew, has retired after 26 years at Westmont.