On April 24, 2026, the Kenyon community gathered to celebrate the life of visionary architect Graham Gund ’63 H’81. The following remarks were given by Kenyon College Provost Jeffrey Bowman.
Good morning.
I'd like to start this morning by just sharing some experiences that I've had on our campus just over the past year. I know most of us are all very familiar with the campus and when I refer to different places, they will spring to mind. But I invite you to do a little visualization.
So this will be just a bunch of things that have happened at different moments over the course of the year. I'm going to start with one that requires very little visualization because it's actually in this room, things that have happened in the Archon Auditorium of Oden Hall, and I'll just mention two of them.
One was a visit by a former U.S Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who gave a presentation basically on causes of political polarization in the United States and things we might do about it. The second was the talk given by two scholars Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder, who are experts on free speech and its contours and challenges on college campuses.
These are both under the auspices of the Center for the Study of American Democracy. Both of them had very large audiences with good turnout by students and community members, all of whom embarked in spirited conversation about important topics. I'll move from those talks next door to Horvitz Hall, where this December, as most Decembers, they hosted an open studio night. The art majors invite the community, their fellow students, in to see the work in progress that they’re doing.
The building is thronged with admirers, and artists have the chance to describe their artistic practice, and we collectively get to see the work of studio art majors in process, and it’ fun to see it. A few months later, it comes to full fruition in the major senior show.
I’ll also note that the Venmo instructions that are attached to many of the works of art suggest that commerce and art are not entirely divorced.
If we navigate the West Quad, circumnavigating “Pivot,” we make our way to The Gund. And, of course, under Daisy’s leadership, The Gund brings exceptional exhibitions. Anytime you go there, you’re sure to see something exciting. Several times, I've been there for an exhibit, I've seen something else that you’re likely to see, and that is a class in process. Jodi Kovach, the deputy director of curatorial affairs and education, is a champion of curricular engagement.
She collaborates constantly with faculty members to tailor experiences related to specific courses. In the current year, there have been 107 of these course engagements with 75 unique classes totaling close to 1,100 unique students with 52 faculty members and 26 departments.
My next example comes from January and from Brandi Recital Hall. There’s an annual music recital, students who have done exceptional work during their juries are asked to present to a general audience. This January there were 10 students who represented every class and the performances ranged from a Bach suite in D minor transcribed for viola to “Blue Midnight” on mandolin.
You'll remember this is an incredible space where the performers are surrounded by oak matched birch paneling, whereas the audience is surrounded by windows looking out over mature trees and some reminders to enjoy the music, because the headstones of the Gambier graveyard remind us that life is short.
My last stop on this tour is Chalmers Library, and I’m going to kind of start toward the top of the building and wander down with you. I’m going to start with an event that took place in March, in the Brackett Denniston Reading Room on the third floor. Every year the staff of special collections and archives organizes an event that is a celebration of Kenyon authors, Eve is the architect of this event.
It celebrates everyone, faculty or staff, who has written a book, published a book in the preceding year. This year, we celebrated 21 faculty and staff who wrote monographs, edited volumes, poetry, science fiction, translations covering subjects like ancient objects, baseball, early modern European drug culture.
One of the things I like about this is that it represents many, many different departments and disciplines, and it also represents a very, very wide range of people who have contributed to the college at different moments. So, this year, we included somebody who had joined the faculty last year in the celebration and one of the other people who was honored in the celebration joined Kenyon’s faculty the year I turned five.
You’ll also note about this room, and of course, you'll know since the building was designed by Graham, that this was no accident, that while you’re in the midst of the celebration, you’re looking east over the gorgeous rolling hills of Knox County and the Kokosing River Valley.
The viewshed is a thing that sustains our celebrations, too.
If you descend from the third floor to the main floor, you go to a place that isn’t a kind of single event but an experience I have pretty much daily, and that is walking through the Winkler lobby of the library.
The Winkler lobby has the vibe of being, like the main plaza of a thriving Spanish or Portuguese city that has, for some unspecified reason, just been temporarily deprived of wine and cured meats.
This extends not just to the lively social atmosphere, but even to there being sort of eagle-eyed neighbors perched on balconies, watching what’s going on down the world. There’s a lot of social energy here, but there's also work getting done by students who are clearly collaborating, and they work in the middle of the lobby.
A number of days, the skylight that was a work that was a collaboration of Graham and the glass artist David Wilson, scatters colored light around the atrium, offers a sort of visual echo of the bubbling conversation.
This is a building where students can shape their own experiences, where they can be the architects of their own social and academic lives. Because on the one hand it can be this bustling atrium where there’s a lot of energy and if you descend to L2 the environment is a little bit different. There’s a kind of sepulcher quiet on L2, lots of little cubby holes and cubes and spaces that can become intensely, quiet cubes of scholarly focus on the part of students.
I will say that one of my fondest personal moments with Graham was walking through this building the first time it was actually animated by all this student life and seeing the pleasure and delight that he took.
This is a very, very partial list of experiences, I could add more from this current year. And I know that most of you are saying to yourselves, wow being provost sounds like a lot of fun.
It is. But that's not my point this morning
There are two other through lines that characterize these experiences and others I could list, the first is that they all reflect the intellectual and artistic vitality of the College. The second, of course, is that all these experiences took place in spaces designed by Graham. The luminous and elegant spaces Graham imagined not only support the academic program, they actively celebrate our collected enterprise. Those of us, students and employees, who are fortunate enough to work on such a beautiful campus are the daily beneficiaries of the imagination and vision of an alumnus and architect and a friend keenly, imaginatively attuned to place and to purpose.
Kenyon’s program is stronger because Graham so steadily, so quietly and so brilliantly brought together the seriousness of purpose with a playfulness of spirit. Thank you