If you spend enough time among Brown alumni, one fact is indisputable:
they have very interesting minds. That simple truth hit home when I
called a few of the two dozen alumni who contributed to this year's
annual gift guide.
Joel Benjamin
Upgrade your baby's ride with a carrier cover designed by Rebecca
Schulman '99 and her husband. Scroll down to view the rest of our third
annual gift guide.
I asked them how they came to make the products
you see on these pages, and, while their sensibilities and skills are
different, their stories have a distinctive accent. As they explained
how their years on College Hill led, directly or in hindsight, to their
self-made careers, I felt privileged to listen.
Barbara Ensor '76
arrived at Brown from a highly structured British boarding school, and
she says college felt like running free in a candy shop. She studied
comparative literature and anthropology at Brown and illustration at
RISD. "I loved myths and archetypes," she says. At the time she feared
she was flitting among unrelated interests, but all of those roots are
visible in the art she produces today. Drawing with scissors, she
creates intricate paper-cuts with a primordial power that's sometimes
calming, sometimes creepy. She wrote and illustrated versions of
Cinderella and Thumbelina that go straight to the emotional heart of
those fairy tales.
Dan Goldwater studied electrical engineering at Brown, earning a
bachelor's degree in 1997 and a master's the following year. After
graduation, he joined the high-tech industry, working on the Pentium 3
processor at Intel, and during the dot-com boom he worked for a
start-up that had better technology than management. With friends, he
founded a think-tank (they called it a do-tank), and he's now heading
two spin-offs: the DIY site Instructables
.com and MonkeyLectric, which makes digital art lights for bicycle
wheels. An avid cyclist since junior high, Goldwater created his first
art bike while working at MIT's Media Lab, and he says he got the idea
for MonkeyLectric when people stopped him on the street to ask where
they could get lights like his. He now sells about 1,000 a year, mostly
on the Internet.
In contrast, Shannon Robins Ninburg '92 came to her work in a very
low-tech way. She'd concentrated in visual arts at Brown, and taught
sculpture at the Pratt Institute in New York City before designing for
the toy industry, but as a mother she found it difficult to make time
for art in her own and her family's life. Researching child-safe
materials and organizing her kids to go buy art supplies proved a
challenge. So she and two friends founded Eye Can Art, which makes art
kits for children ages four and up. Their products teach printmaking,
wax art (encaustic), Japanese Sumi-e brush painting, and bookmaking.
The kits won the Oppenheim Parents' Choice Award; while most children's
craft kits produce one-off projects, these are just a starting point,
giving kids the materials and knowledge to create on their own.
Add passion to that knowledge, and you have the real point of
education. As you can see on the following pages, it's a lesson alumni
have taken to heart.
(Scroll down to view all gifts and buying information.)
All photographs by Joel Benjamin.
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