Mollie Denhard curates "Collecting in the Peace Corps: Tangible Memories of the Toughest Job You'll Ever Love," which she curated for Wheaton's Beard Gallery
These three investments have done anything but fail
By Kristen Schoenebeck / Correspondent
Marblehead Reporter
Posted Mar 10, 2010 @ 09:04 PM
Marblehead -
Caption: Mollie Denhard, center, is shown with her grandparents Bill and Barbara Denhard, left, and her parents, Flory and George Denhard, at the exhibit on the Peace Corps she curated for Wheaton's Beard Gallery.
In this weak economy, three deserving Marblehead students have already delivered an incredible return on the community's investment. The future looks bright for the three former Citizens' Scholarship Foundation award winners, all now seniors in college. The students - Mollie Denhard at Wheaton College, James Baker at Boston College and Anna Webster at Boston University - each has his or her own perspective on what receiving the scholarship has meant.
[Excerpt]
Name: Mollie Denhard
School: Wheaton College
Major: Studio art, minor in art history and French studies
Post-graduate plans: Master's degree in public humanities, possibly at Brown
Mollie Denhard, a studio art major minoring in art history and French studies at Wheaton College, has studied abroad in Glasgow, and done volunteer work in India.
Denhard is currently preparing for her senior project, which involves preparing for the art majors' gallery show in April. Her work focuses on painting and drawing, but she is currently incorporating fabric, its color and pattern.
The gallery intern for the Beard and Weil galleries on campus, she assists with installations, lighting and basic maintenance. As an intern, she also supervises class visits to the college's Permanent Collections study room.
As an artist, Denhard's 2009 exhibit became one of social, cultural and personal merit as well. She describes the exhibit, entitled, "Collecting in the Peace Corps: Tangible Memories of the Toughest Job You'll Ever Love," which she curated for Wheaton's Beard Gallery: "It was the culmination of more than a year's work and aimed to explore the relationship between Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) and collecting. In my opinion and based on my research, every RPCV brought back items from their Peace Corps service - be it memories, photos, artwork, and more. Physical items serve as ‘tangible memories' in the sense that their mere presence provokes thought and reflection of that time as a volunteer. For RPCVs who did not return with objects, their memories are nonetheless collections of a specific time and place."
The project began with her father - an RPCV who volunteered in Burkina Faso in West Africa - as her first case study and eventually evolved to include five other RPCVs, each of whom also volunteered in Burkina Faso.
In addition to creating an overall design space for the exhibit, Denhard organized items that were shipped from around the country, catalogued them and interviewed each participating Peace Corps volunteer. The exhibit won great reviews from the college during its two-month tenure, and a Peace Corps recruiter was sent to its opening on Oct. 18.
Denhard said, "It was a wonderful experience, best of all being the catalyst for RPCVs to rekindle old friendships, begin new ones and reawaken interest in their Peace Corps service."
The link to a review of the exhibit, which also won rave reviews from fellow scholarship winner Webster, is wheatoncollege.edu/news/2009/10/26/student-curates -exhibition-of-treasured-memories.
Denhard has applied to Brown University with the hope of pursuing a master of arts in the public humanities, and hopes to eventually pursue a career in exhibition planning or collections management within a museum environment. Her interest in the Peace Corps collections continues as well, and she plans to continue that research.
She expressed her appreciation for the scholarship, saying, "I am extremely grateful for the support I've received from Citizens'. They have helped me to complete an undergraduate degree at a college I love, which in turn has allowed me to explore a wide range of interests and push myself to realize my full potential. Their support means a lot to many, many Marblehead scholars, and I am sure that we all hope we have made them proud."
She added, "Anna and I still find it amusing that Citizens' selected both of us, as we've known each other since third grade at Glover School. She is a very talented writer and I am sure she will be a wonderful journalist."
