By Lauren Katz

Kenyon students want to showcase many forms of art on campus, but it can be difficult to find a space — and the money — to do so. Luckily for these students, the Horn Gallery has a solution. Once a year, the Horn Gallery Board gives four students a grant of $250 each to showcase their work in the Horn Gallery.

In early October, the Horn Gallery sent an email offering students the opportunity to apply for one of four available grants:two for fine arts and two for theater.

The decision were released last week, and this year’s recipients are Gus Riley ’16 and Alice Stites ’17 for theater and Tim Jurney ’15 and Sarah Gold ’15 for art.

Riley will produce a series of Harold Pinter plays, while Stites will put on playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone.

“[Dead Man’s Cell Phone is] a dark comedy about what happens when a dead man’s cell phone ends up in the possession of a young woman who then takes it upon herself to tie up the loose ends of this man’s life,” Stites said. “What happens is a fascinating play that questions the meaning that people invest in cell phones and other objects.”

The Horn Grant art exhibitions have proved to be just as varied. Gold plans to create an art exhibition using work by children from the West Bank, while Jurney will expand upon an art project he began last year.

“I made three labor-intensive, finely detailed dioramas last year, each of which enacts — in its own strange way — a tweet that gets history somehow ‘wrong,’” Jurney said. “This semester, I’m photographing, finalizing and displaying the three dioramas and then putting them up in a show.”

The Horn stresses that one does not have to be an art or drama major to apply. The grants were created to provide an opportunity to those with a passion for art they wish to share with the Kenyon community.

“I think it really speaks a lot to what the Horn is about, the idea that it’s just a communal space,” Lewis Turley ’17, one of the Horn Gallery managers, said. “It’s the same way that we have ECO [Kenyon’s student environmental organization] meetings in there, or auditions for plays. It’s the idea that it’s a space there for everyone, and it’s a really great way we get to give back to the community and give opportunities.”

The application requires the students to detail how they plan to use the grant, be it for art supplies or some of the major expenses of a theatrical production.

While the play descriptions were a little more straightforward than art descriptions, the Horn Gallery staff wanted to ensure that those voting gave each art description the time it deserved.

“The theater grants we voted for in the actual [Horn members] meeting,” Horn Gallery Manager Rebecca Saltzman ’15 said. “We just, really middle school-like, had everyone put their heads down and vote. But because the art grants were more descriptive, we wanted to give everyone a chance to read them through.”

For the art project applications, the managers created a Google Doc and allowed each student to submit his or her vote anonymously. Even though there were only four grants, the staff wanted to afford an equal opportunity to each application. “Even if you don’t get the money, you can still put art on in our gallery space,” Turley said.

“There are so many students interested in art but who aren’t majors or even minors and really need an outlet to put their work up or get materials,” Saltzman said. “We just love supporting the arts. We get a large budget and wanted to see what we could do. I mean, why not?”