This spring, five Scripps students were awarded a Student Creativity Grant from the The Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, also known as the Hive. The Hive is a 5C resource housed at Pomona College that provides learning experiences focused on a collaborative approach to solving real-world problems, using the liberal arts as a jumping-off point. During remote learning, the grant program was designed to support students who no longer have access to 5C resources or have significant barriers to curricular work or important creative endeavors.
“The Hive Student Creativity Grants were initiated early fall semester as a way to provide students who would normally use the physical Hive space to create to continue their creative growth away from the Hive,” says Linda Shimoda, operations empress and Hive historian (the official title bestowed on Shimoda by Rick Sontag himself). “We also wanted to help facilitate collaboration at a distance by encouraging students to join as teams and across disciplines and passions to develop and remotely work on creative projects together.”
Sarah Meadows ’22 and Coraya Danu-Asmara ’21 are using their grant to experiment with the creation of silicone molds to construct resin figures. Tsion Mamo ’23, Sophia Frye ’23, and Ruth Alemu Mekonnen (HMC) are recreating popular trends from social media with knitting and crocheting. And Ishta Nabakka ’23 and Wren Cilimburg (CMC) will create block print stamps that depict themes of social activism, collectiveness, harmony, and mindfulness to use on T-shirts.
On May 5, 2021, the Hive will celebrate creativity grant awardees at a Student Creativity Grant Expo. Students will virtually share, show, and wear what they’ve created, describing their creative process and the project’s highlights and challenges. “The spring-awarded projects are incredibly inspiring and creative, and we’re excited to have the students share their creations with us and others,” Shimoda says.