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Pitzer senior Siobhan O'Hara awoke early the morning the names of this year's Thomas J. Watson Fellowship winners were to be posted on the Web at www.watsonfellowship.org.
The phone rang while she was waiting for her computer to download the list of winners. It was one of her professors, Paul Faulstich, calling to tell her she'd won. "I was thrilled," exclaimed O'Hara, who is double-majoring in art and environmental studies at Pitzer.
"This is exciting news for Siobhan and for Pitzer," says Jim Lehman, professor of economics and a member of Pitzer's Watson Nominations Committee. "Siobhan is a terrific candidate: a fine artist, an accomplished rugby player, a committed environmentalist, an outstanding student."
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O'Hara's project, "Masking the Moon: Worldview, Aesthetics and Creation," will take her to Africa to study the carving and use of wooden masks. She came up with the name of her project "because we empathize with non-human elements in our universe by putting faces on them - like the man in the moon - or by making masks from them. A mask is a way of thinking presented in a visual form. Masks represent a human viewpoint of the world filtered through a cultural and historical context."
During her Watson year, O'Hara will study four mask-making traditions: the Kom and Fang of Cameroon, and the Dogon and Bambara of Mali. She will live in and around major cities like Foumban, Yaounde, Timbuktu and Bamako.
"I want to immerse myself in settings where masks express a culture's history, knowledge and worldview," she says. "I want to see how the relationship between people and art differs across cultures."
"The Watson year will allow Siobhan to grow as an artist, to stretch her understanding of the craft and context of mask-carving in a number of cultures," Professor Lehman noted. "It's a wonderful opportunity for her -- and one we deeply value."
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