Nicholas Buess '04
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- Jarren SantosJarren: Okay. Yeah, so I'll have you start by just saying your name, where you're from, and your class year.
- Nicholas Buess & Jarren SantosNicholas: Alright. My name is Nicholas Buess. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York City, and I am a member of the Grinnell College class of 2004.Jarren: Okay.Nicholas: I'm here for my ten year reunion, and I wanted to talk a little bit about something that used to be on campus that.. isn't quite anymore, and something that was very dear to me. In the basement of Darby gymnasium there was a very musty photography studio, and a very musty ceramics studio, which collectively we called the "craft workshop". And I.. for three of the years that I was here, my sophomore through senior year, I ran the little pottery side of the craft workshop.
- Nicholas BuessNicholas: So, I had, often, little tiny classes of students, kind of like ExCo, but kind of on an ongoing... semester-round basis, and I had open studio hours. And we made little pots, and we fired them in two kilns. And.. we had throwing wheels... and I ended up being a Studio Art major... and kind of falling in love with ceramics because of that exposure to the craft workshop.
- Nicholas BuessNicholas: I had an internship at a studio in Boston after a summer, and a year after I graduated from college, I move to New York City to run a community pottery studio, which I did for a few years, which was really lovely. So I'm really grateful to.. have had that experience, and it was a- it was a little sort of corner, subterranean corner of Grinnell that a lot of people didn't know about. And.... an unusual sort of memory about stepping into Darby every day, which I think was mostly for people who were playing sports or basketball, or people who were.. working at the radio studio, which was also up in... in sort of the roof of Darby.
- Nicholas Buess & Jarren SantosNicholas: So, I... I was the last class to see it standing for four years, and I was in Grinnell shortly after... it started to get torn down. And my grilfriend was living here at the time, she's a Grinnell alum, '04 as well, and she and I were walking to the PEC, which was still around as well, and.. we saw half of- half of Darb.... demolished.Jarren: Oh.Nicholas: And that was prett.... that was pretty real, and pretty rough to see because... I don't think up until that point I realized how really fond I was of the building and the studio, and the time that I spent there.Jarren: Yeah.
- Nicholas Buess & Jarren SantosNicholas: Yeah, so that's the story that I wanted to- to share.Jarren: Cool, very cool.
Alumni oral history interview with Nicholas Buess '04. Recorded May 31, 2014.