June 19, 2006
More than 240 students participated in 14 May Term courses this year. These courses included: Film History, Earthworks: Art and Other Crop Circles, The Civil War—Walking the Ground, Fraud Examination, The Rise and Fall of Practically Everything, Japanese Amine: It's Not Just For Kids Anymore!, How to Get the Job You Want, Field and Studio Music Recording, Gardening: From Hosta to Zucchini, Film Writing Workshop, Trip to London, Issues in Electronic Gaming, Desert Ecology, and Haiti in New York City and Montreal. The summer issues of On the Move, Morningside's e-newsletter, will feature a series of stories on the students' May Term experiences. Here's the first one!
Humanhenge and Butterflies
Story and "Humanhenge" photo by Jan Dehner; "Butterfly" photo by Amanda Cades
 Stonehenge, that famous megalithic monument with surrounding earthworks located in England, has an imitator here in the Midwest. Carhenge, located near Alliance, Neb., is a collection of 38 automobiles, all covered with gray paint and buried in the ground or mounted on top of each other in the same proportions as Stonehenge.
 John Bowitz, professor and chair of Morningside’s Art Department, took the concept of Stonehenge one step further when he created his own “Humanhenge” during the final days of his May Term course “Earthworks: Art and Other Crop Circles.” Bowitz, with help from some of the 25 students taking the class, buried six students up to their knees in the empty lot across Garretson Avenue from Eppley Auditorium. The remainder of the class then walked through the grass in circles around the buried students until they created their own version of Stonehenge.
“It was very itchy,” said Madison Davis about the experience of being planted in the ground, and then viewed as art. Davis is a junior from Sioux City who is majoring in elementary and special education.
Bowitz offered the class focusing on earthworks—a form of art created in nature using natural materials such as stones, leaves, or soil—because he thought it would be an enjoyable way to combine creativity with some investigative work.
“There’s an art history component to the class,” he said, adding that, in addition to Stonehenge, the class studied other famous earthworks by artists such as Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy.
Davis, who spent one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, discovered a new facet of art with which she was previously unfamiliar.
“Of course I knew about Stonehenge, but I had never heard of earthworks before, or knew how they were created,” she said.
 Students were asked to construct their own earthworks during the class, which ran from May 15 through June 2. Some artworks were temporal in nature, lasting only a short time, as in the case of “Butterfly,” pictured to the left, by Kim Jessen, a junior from Everly, Iowa. Jessen, who is majoring in photography and studio art, created “Butterfly” using only flower petals. The delicate and colorful work of art was later released into the environment where it was swiftly deconstructed by the forces of nature.
“A group of nursing students who took the class did interesting things with mirrors and created illusions, and that got them interested in optics,” Bowitz said. Other student examples of earthworks included depiction of a large question mark constructed of loose dirt, an earthen bench dug into the hillside, and a clock consisting of a mud basin filled with water with floating flower petals as the dial, to name a few.
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