From the Archives: The Love Song of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale

T. S. Eliot hated California. In a series of private letters written in early 1933, he called it “a horrible place,” “a nightmare,” and one of America’s “two great mistakes” (the other being New York). Eliot’s correspondents were, not surprisingly, British—and the missives may be partly indicative of the poet’s longing for England, after nearly a year abroad, rather than of full-hearted contempt for California. At the very least, there was one thing about California that he was sincerely devoted to.

Scripps Magazine: Art Forms

Alison Saar ’78 Weight, at first glance, appears to be a young girl playing on a swing, until one realizes that the child is stripped bare. Her swing is attached to a broken branch that hangs from a vintage cotton scale. Her weight is counterbalanced with a coal scuttle “cornucopia” of tools of domestic labor—a […]

Scripps Magazine: Revolution & Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero

“If there is an occupation suitable for women, it is photography.” So declared the Mexico City newspaper El Mundo in 1899. It went on: “They have the aptitude and an extraordinary manual dexterity and, above all, they serve better than a man to make portraits of women, arranging their headdresses and getting them in positions with a confidence and a thoroughness that would be impossible for persons of the opposite sex.”

Scripps Magazine: Focus on the Faculty: Susan Rankaitis, Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art

“I don’t call it retirement, I call it downsizing from two careers to one,” says Susan Rankaitis. This past July, Rankaitis, who joined Scripps’ Art Department in fall 1990 as the Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art, began two years of phased retirement. She will no longer teach classes but will continue to write letters of recommendation for her advisees and colleagues. She will also be devoting significantly more time to her own art practice.

Scripps Magazine: The State of the Art Major

Students in Professor T. Kim-Trang Tran’s video art class find creative inspiration and expression in an unexpected source: drones. They learn how artists are using the technology and how to make drone videos themselves. But Tran pushes students to go well beyond capturing footage.