The co-founder of this class, Dan Callis, retired last spring after nearly 40 years of teaching. This fall, Biola's Art Department hosted a celebration of Dan's work as a teacher and a symposium examining his work as an artist. As part of the festivities, the art department commissioned a short documentary, which you can watch below. As you watch it, you can see how Dan's sensibility shaped the content and form of Vision, Voice, and Practice.
https://vimeo.com/1128014263?share=copy
This semester, instead of beginning each class with a song of the day, shared by each respective class participant, we're sharing a "culture of the day"—an artifact (songs are still welcome!) drawn from the world of the creative arts, broadly understood. Those who share on a particular day basically share with us something they love.
1/20/26: A mug made by former VVPer Jonathan James
1/15/26 [a writer talking about Ruth Asawa]:
A new semester begins. This time out, some changes have been made. For one thing, Dan Callis, who co-founded this course back in 2009, has retired, so Chris is teaching the course on his own. For another, we only have writing students in VVP, since the English department wasn't able to coordinate with the art department to make it a true interdisciplinary class. This is nobody's fault! :) And it has happened before, back in 2023.
But some things have stayed the same, like the first week's spot collaboration. Small groups of students are given words on a sheet of paper (excerpts from poems, songs, articles, Wikipedia pages, history books, recipes, etc.) and then have forty minutes or so to make something out of them.
Students were asked to make something in collaboration that (ideally) combined visual material and language and install it in a site-specific location somewhere on campus. On our last day together, we all walked around and looked at, and interacted with, the things the students made. These photographs do not capture just how amazing each of these installations were, almost every single one inviting us to tangibly engage with the work, from ringing the bells attached to pine-cone weighted fishing line, to the poems tied into red thread and woven around a tree, to the "Station of the Trees" installation that asked us to decode sentences written in symbols. The students made amazing, enchanting work that reminded us to look more closely at the everyday wonders right under our noses.
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Ashley Brown, Jonathan James, Grant Freiling – folded paper, yarn, handwriting, found flowers:
