Forging Skidmore’s second century

About a year ago, our Scope magazine team started searching for images to represent Skidmore College’s Centennial, which would be celebrated during the 2022-23 academic year.

With some help from Scribner Library’s Special Collections, we located a striking black-and-white photo that we thought poignantly captured the spirit of creative thought that has permeated Skidmore’s history since its early years.

The photo showed the hands of fine arts major Virginia “Ginny” Vought Walters ’36 — her left hand clinching a ball of clay and her right doing detail work on a terra cotta representation of the Skidmore College seal sitting on an easel. The dates 1911 — the year the Skidmore School of Arts was founded — and 1922 — when the New York State Board of Regents officially recognized its collegiate status and Skidmore College came into being — stood out immediately.

In late 1922 or early 1923, just months after it officially became a four-year college, Skidmore officially adopted the seal as a symbol. And to me, the photograph of Ginny went to the heart of what our Centennial is all about: How we — each generation of the Skidmore community — have continued to craft our history as we embark on our second century. The details on Ginny’s Skidmore seal — even the text on the seal — were all clearly formed. It was also clear that some elements were still a bit rough around the edges as Ginny continued to shape and fine-tune the project: The seal, the very symbol of our College, remained a work in progress.

After finding the photo of Ginny, I had no inkling of the amazing journey that would follow. It started with the almost accidental discovery of the mold that Ginny and the late Professor of Art Emeritus Robert Davidson presumably used to create Ginny’s seal. The rest, as they say, is history.

Skidmore students in the Foundry Club, led by their faculty advisor, Associate Professor of Art John Galt, used the antique seal along with scanning equipment, a 3D printer, and other state-of-the-art equipment to offer their own 21st-century tribute to the College Centennial: a casting in bronze of the seal — an on-campus experience Davidson once dreamed of for his students.

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Last summer, we published the photograph of Ginny working on her seal in Scope magazine, along with an announcement about the Skidmore community’s yearlong celebrations to mark the Centennial. A few weeks after Scope went to press, colleagues and I attended a summer get-together at the carriage house of Scribner House, the stately residence of Skidmore presidents that once belonged to College founder Lucy Scribner.

On a wall decorated with many historic photos, colleagues and I noticed a photo caption — but no photo — that described an image that had once hung on the wall but that had been taken down for some recent renovations. It traced Skidmore’s seal to the 1323 seal of Peter Scudamor and explained how its Latin inscription “Scuto amoris divini” (“by the shield of God’s love”) was a play on that name. Intrigued, I contacted Wendy Anthony, head of Special Collections in Scribner Library.

Wendy confirmed that a reprint of the same photograph of Ginny that we had published in Scope had once hung in the carriage house. But she was also taken aback by my inquiry.

“This is such weird timing, as I was just contacted yesterday by a faculty member who learned of what I believe is a mold for
this exact piece that someone found in a consignment shop,” she told me. Wendy shared a photo and an accompanying
text message exchange between Professor of American Studies Dan Nathan and Cheryl Clark, who was then working in Skidmore’s Surrey-Williamson Inn.

“Hi, Dan. I found this mold in a local consignment store and wondered if it is perhaps some treasure that needs to find its
way back to where it came?” read the message, which had been forwarded to Wendy and then to me.

Sure enough, the accompanying image showed a whitish, reversed-image version of the Skidmore seal, cast in what looked like plaster, lying on a shop table. Could it really be the mold that Ginny used to form her seal?

With support from President Conner, our creative director, Mike Sylvia, and I went to inspect the object in the consignment shop.
There lay the antique in plain view, wearing a few inconsequential chips and covered with bits of dry clay and dust from decades tucked away in someone’s basement or attic.

Otherwise, it remained in remarkably good condition. On the reverse side was the clearest indication of the object’s provenance: in large, bold letters, the year 1936 — the year Ginny had graduated, the year the photo was first published in Skidmore’s Eromdiks yearbook, and the year she and Professor Davidson had created the seal depicted in the photograph. The dimensions were the same.

We still don’t really know how the mold ended up in the shop. Its owner, Bonnie Grolley, said she had purchased it from
another dealer at an antique fair at the Washington County Fairgrounds, about 15 miles away. She immediately thought it was an interesting piece but didn’t know much else about it.

Our collective best guess is that Skidmore, or even Professor Davidson, unloaded it at some point. The Art Department only has so much shelf space after all, and the piece was never intended as an object for display. Maybe a student took it home or it was among objects left behind when Skidmore moved from its former downtown campus or when the Art Department moved into the state-of-the-art Saisselin Art Center in 1978.

The shopkeeper carefully wrapped the seal in paper, and Mike and I brought it home — to Skidmore’s “new” campus.

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The recovery of this unique remnant of Skidmore’s history was a story in itself, but it was only the first chapter. We contacted the Art Department for some ideas on how the mold might be put on display.

Associate Professor of Art John Galt — like Robert Davidson, a sculptor — had grander ideas. He noted that a bunch of enthusiastic students had recently relaunched Foundry Club, which had been on pause due to the pandemic, and they were looking for interesting projects.

 

John recognized the object as an important artifact from Skidmore’s past that would need to be handled with care. But given its good condition, John also saw the mold’s potential to provide a unique learning experience — which had also been Professor Davidson’s goal eight decades before.

“The mold is like an artifact that you might find on an archaeological dig,” John later explained. “There’s a lot of knowledge that you can get from the object, but you might have to bring it back to life, and that’s what our students did.”

John took us to the sculpture studio, where he spends his days teaching and mentoring students. The space, cluttered as one might expect with half-finished student projects and an eclectic array of art materials, is as much a science laboratory as it is a studio.

The first step, John informed us, should be to preserve the object for posterity, and students should be a part of that process. One evening last fall, students in the Foundry Club took turns holding a hand-held scanner above the antique seal as a nearby screen showed a 3D rendering of all its carvings, cracks, and markings in blue and green.

“The idea behind getting a 3D scan was that we could have a digital model and save this mold forever. Using the 3D modeling software is really essential: It’s immortalizing the mold and making a permanent fixture of the Skidmore archive,” explained Cory Derzon-Supplee ’25, the Foundry Club’s vice president and an American studies major. “We’re now able to build on the student’s (Ginny’s) work and keep it going.”

With a 3D scan of the mold now saved, John explained that the digital file could be manipulated in myriad ways to create new projects, and he led the students in the use of the Art Department’s 3D printer to print out a 21st-century plastic reproduction of the seal that Ginny created by hand in 1936.

Students then took these reproductions and pressed them into tightly packed sand, creating a new mold for casting bronze. After the molds were allowed to cool and were broken, tiny bronze seals — the continuation of an art project from more than eight decades before— emerged.

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For me, one of the most inspiring aspects of Skidmore — and especially the Foundry Club’s efforts to create a fitting tribute to mark the Centennial — has always been the way the College has continued to encourage students to challenge disciplinary boundaries, to discover, to think beyond their majors, and to pursue creativity. It’s a sentiment that goes back to Skidmore’s early days — including the tenure of Robert Davidson — and that continues to uniquely define Skidmore and the Foundry Club.

Foundry Club members, such as club treasurer Powell Pricejones ’25, come from many majors, ranging from biology to American
studies. Powell, a management and business major and history minor, worked to bring the club back to life following the pandemic.

“You can’t really do foundry over Zoom,” he said with a chuckle. “I approach Foundry Club from a holistic perspective. I just think
it’s a really awesome opportunity where I can do something outside my trajectory as a business major.”

“The sculpture studio is full of all types of tools that I didn’t even know about before this year,” he continued. “We’ve really been able to take these resources, the foundry, and this awesome sculpture studio and bring the art of casting and pouring metal to the entire student body.”

Powell probably didn’t realize how closely he had articulated the late Robert Davidson’s vision for the future of sculpture and his understanding of the liberal arts at Skidmore decades before. Appointing the acclaimed sculptor to a permanent faculty position in 1934 was then a bold step for Skidmore, since Davidson was perhaps the first sculptor-in-residence at a liberal arts college in the entire country. He saw his role as helping students to develop as well-rounded and creative thinkers regardless of their major.

“The purpose of the work here is not to make students sculptors, but to help them develop as persons,” he said, according to a Skidmore Alumnae Quarterly profile published in March 1958. “Working in three dimensions helps them to think in three dimensions. In addition, I always try to bring out the individuality of the student.”

The ways in which a Skidmore faculty member such as Robert Davidson can continue to shape students’ experiences and impact our history, in big ways and small, is impossible to underestimate: His teaching so inspired Jean-Ellen Burns Ash ’37 that she and her husband, William J. Ash, endowed the Robert Davidson Chair in Art (most recently held by Deb Hall) in his honor.

Davidson retired in 1972, a year after the College began admitting men and the same year Skidmore announced the sale of its downtown campus to the now defunct Verrazzano College, finalizing the move from downtown to its “new” Jonsson Campus.

The year also marked Skidmore’s 50th anniversary, and a retrospective exhibition of Davidson’s work was the first event in the College’s anniversary celebrations that year.

The unexpected discovery of the mold he created with Ginny was not the only way Robert Davidson has shaped the trajectory of the Foundry Club at Skidmore: In 1958, he conveyed his “hope that, eventually, there will be a small experimental foundry at the Sculpture Studio.”

It wasn’t until around the turn of the century that his wish would finally come true. That’s when the Art Department, including John Cunningham, then the Robert Davidson Chair, and a young John Galt finally helped Skidmore obtain a foundry furnace with a 2,000-pound capacity.

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Students in Skidmore’s Foundry Club wanted to continue Ginny’s project and create a lasting gift for Skidmore’s Centennial.

Given the excellent condition of the mold, John decided it was safe — provided a few extra precautions were taken — to use the mold created in Professor Davidson’s class to create a bronze casting for the Centennial.

“If I were really adventurous, we might have poured this directly into the original mold,” John explained. “But this is an artifact that we also needed to protect.”

It was a long and complicated process involving a series of molds. First, students gently poured soft rubber into Ginny’s mold. The result was a flexible beige casting that looked just like Ginny’s seal but couldn’t be used for casting since using it would yield a reversed image. Club members then poured rubber into the rubber mold to create a reverse image of the Skidmore seal — a duplicate in rubber of the antique mold. Students poured resin into that mold to create a new plastic seal that could be pressed firmly into sand, where a bronze of the seal could be cast.

What I love the most is at the end of each step, there was always a big reveal. As soon as we were done making this little rubber mold here, we’d all get together, pull it off, and we’d all be in awe of what we had been able to create together.”

Allison Conwell ’25

Biology and studio art double major

Donning full protective equipment, members of the Foundry Club gathered on a blustery fall evening for the final reveal in the months-long project.

Under the watchful eye of Professor Galt, club members poured molten bronze into the mold they had crafted, and they waited.

At last, there stood the final project — a Skidmore seal cast in bronze derived from a student project from the past century and
ready to endure the next.

“I think it’s really cool that we’re taking this plaster mold that was originally made to celebrate the beginning of Skidmore as a
college in 1922. And here we are, a hundred years later, and we’re commemorating it once more,” Cory, the club’s vice president,
said. “That’s really what this is — a student art project that was created in the past to celebrate 1922. And here we are once again
creating a student art project, in the same sort of manner, but now with all this technology for our Centennial.”

For those able to participate in the project — and also those of us fortunate to witness it from the sidelines — the entire process represented a humbling experience that allowed us all to connect with our College’s history as we also imagine Skidmore’s future.

“This project has been a kind of a micro version of what happens broadly here at Skidmore. The antique mold is really very similar to what continues to be the case in the Art Department, where professors and students work together on projects. It’s terrific to see that same spirit then as now,” John explained. “I think this gets down to what Skidmore is at its core: We’re a liberal arts college.”

“The seal project, in particular, has allowed students to do something big that’s going to live at the College and binds them together in a common experience.”

As I draft this story, it occurs to me how each of us, in our own individual ways, continues to create our own Skidmore seals for posterity — we’re each making our history and forging Skidmore’s next century. Along the way, we together make new discoveries — sometimes accidental discoveries. And sometimes, we find ourselves.

“I think one of the most meaningful things about this project to me is seeing the individual marks on the seal and connecting with an artisan from the past,” said Foundry Club President Jack Denham ’25, an art major. “I also think it’s amazing to see the intersection of new technology and old techniques. And it’s obviously super cool to be a part of Skidmore’s history and our future.”

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Editor's note: This story first appeared in the spring 2023 issue of Skidmore College's Scope magazine.