Art student finds meaning in both printmaking and social activism

Melinda "Mindy" Watts is a printmaking major in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning from Scarsdale, N.Y. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Freshman year at Cornell was rough for Mindy Watts. Following her arrival, she began to experience unexplained headaches. The cause was finally determined by a hometown internist: a nonmalignant but fast-growing pituitary tumor that needed immediate removal. Fortunately the surgery was noninvasive, and she missed only two weeks of school. "Within less than a month, I was diagnosed, operated on and recuperated," she said.

But the disruption was unsettling enough to contribute to her indecision about what to concentrate in. "I flopped around, first as a sculpture major and then as a photography major," she said.

Then during her junior year, she took part in her college's program in Rome and discovered the art of making woodcuts, under the guidance of Roberto Mannino, an internationally known woodcut artist. She also was inspired by the ancient Roman, Renaissance and contemporary art and architecture around her. "The program was great. And Rome, the way ancient meets modern, was wonderful," she said.

Watts returned to Cornell with renewed confidence in her abilities as an artist and a portfolio of prints that she added to during her senior year, working under Greg Page, associate professor of art, who said: "Her work has grown tremendously in both scale and concept." Her development so impressed faculty that she was the only undergraduate invited to take part in a national printmaking portfolio curated by visiting assistant professor Joel Peck, and she won the art department's Distinguished Achievement Award.

For Watts, making art is interior and personal, something she does solely for herself. While friends have suggested she combine it with her other pressing interest, urban social concerns, she prefers keeping the two separate.

Nevertheless, "The connection to the world I live in is important and interesting to me," Watts said. In high school, she got involved with a project called Midnight Run, spending time with New York City's homeless, not just to deliver food and clothing but to hear their life stories.

At Cornell she took Problems of Contemporary Society, a sociology course that examined the root causes of urban social ills. "We looked at real problems relevant to our lives, inner cities, joblessness, youth homelessness," she said. And in Ithaca, she volunteered with Big Brother-Big Sister of Tompkins County.

The dichotomy of interests led to much soul searching about which direction to pursue after graduation. This May, Watts accepted an offer to enroll in a master's program in city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, rather than an MFA program in printmaking elsewhere.

But Watts also made a mental commitment to keep creating art: "I want to continue to make prints that people think are beautiful," she said.