Josephine Johnson ’13 and Lindsay Koso ’15 practice a craft that is most successful when its results are invisible. As art conservators in training, their job is to subtly conserve a piece of art to its original appearance—bringing it back to life without adding to or subtracting from it.

“It’s a funny field that way,” said Koso. “The work that you’re doing is not supposed to be acknowledged. People are not supposed to be able to tell.”

“If someone can tell, you’ve done the wrong thing,” added Johnson.

Continuing conservation efforts that first began in 2011, Johnson and Koso have been working together for months to conserve two Italian blackamoor figures that had stood for years in the Madeleine Clark Wallace Library.

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Norton Middle School eighth grade girls’ basketball team members cheer on Wheaton’s women’s basketball team before a game in Haas Athletic Center.

While winning is the aim in any competitive sport, the Wheaton women’s basketball team has earned a reputation for being just as dedicated to serving the local community as they are to dominating the court. Over the past several years, they have engaged in projects that range from food drives to coaching and mentoring.

“It has always been an integral part of our program,” said head coach Melissa Hodgdon. “I just feel that character is a big part of your growth as a student and a student-athlete. Giving back to the community is a big piece of that.”

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Grant will support new campus programs

In November, Kate Gannon ’16 raised awareness about sexual assault by hanging fact-filled pink shoes from a tree in the Dimple as part of her outrageous acts assignment for her “Introduction to Women’s Studies” class. “I was doing some research and I read a fact, which I put on one of the shoes, that 97 percent of rapists don’t spend a day in jail. That was startling to me and devastating. So I decided to do a piece about victim blaming because women are often blamed for what they are wearing,” she said.

Wheaton has won a three-year, $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to develop programming aimed at combating sexual violence on campus. In partnership with the Norton Police Department and New Hope, a sexual violence crisis center in Attleboro, the college intends to create a comprehensive community-based model that can be shared nationally.

The grant from the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women will support “a continuum of programming that will convey a consistent message that violence against women is not tolerated” at Wheaton, according to the college’s grant proposal. Rather than focusing solely on perpetrators and victims, the program will stress the notion that “every community member has a role to play in combating sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.”

Wheaton was one of 22 institutions awarded a grant from among 110 applicants.

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