Together Again ... Naturally

Pierce Bounds '71, Kim Banister '74 and Charlie Berger '72 reunite on campus for art's sake.

by Lauren Davidson

July 1, 2009

From left: A. Pierce Bounds '71, Kim Banister '74 and Charlie Berger '72

Three fine-arts graduates from the same tumultuous era. Three distinct paths taken after graduation. Three careers illustrating the versatility of a liberal-arts degree. A. Pierce Bounds ’71, Charlie Berger ’72 and Kim Banister ’74 reunited for an Alumni Weekend exhibit to showcase their talents and to reflect on what brought them together in the first place.

The Freaks and the Fringe

In the ’70s, the back of the Dining Hall was home to the artists and the actors—the freaks and the fringe. They forget the details of how they all met, but from shared studio spaces to Mermaid Players casting calls, from all-night card games to lounging in the art building, they became a surrogate family.

“The group was and still is very tight,” says Bounds, college photographer. Above his work desk is a 3-D photo collage of the more than 25 faces of those friends, and he has a name and story for each one.

“I remember sitting in the Dining Hall and probably had a camera hanging around my neck,” says Bounds, who discovered his flair for photos in high school. “Tom Miller [’69], editor of the Microcosm yearbook, came up and asked if I was interested in photography. I haven’t stopped taking pictures since.”

It was through the yearbook and The Dickinsonian that Bounds learned the techniques that would inform his career.

As for Berger, “I was drawing and painting all through my childhood,” he recalls. “But I lost interest as a teenager—girls became vastly more important. I always leaned toward art, though, and I realized while working on a sculpture in the art building that this was what I wanted to do.”

When Banister was 9, she won an art competition in England for an abstract watercolor. “I didn’t plan on majoring in art in college,” she admits. “I thought I had to major in something more serious. Then somebody told me I could major in something I actually like.” She began creating the powerful paintings that still propel her career as a working artist.

While Bounds, Berger and Banister bonded in the back of that cafeteria, their paths diverged after graduation.

Beyond the Limestone

Bounds, who married Donna Williams ’74, bounced between freelance photography gigs, from shooting luncheons on Capitol Hill to traveling cross-country documenting old firehouses for a book, to selling slides to a stock agency. He also worked on his personal street photography.

In 1976, he started doing production shots for Dickinson’s Mermaid Players, commuting between Carlisle and Washington, D.C. In 1999, after years of punching the clock for Dickinson as a freelancer, he was hired full time as college photographer.

Berger teaches Foundation Drawing at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Before that, he spent 13 years with Northlight Books, a private publishing company, as director of distance education.

“I’m drawing like crazy in order to have examples to demonstrate to my students—the things a teaching artist must produce so that his students can understand what they’re supposed to be doing,” Berger explains. “And I’ve come to realize that this is my artwork too, not just the more personal work I call my own.”

Banister figured out her specialty long ago—after a few wayward hippie years. Like Berger, she earned an MFA from the Univer-sity of Cincinnati, then taught at community colleges while perfecting her painting.

“I work with linseed oil on rice paper,” she explains. Her muse is the human figure, and recently she’s taken that to a new level in her depictions of “figures intertwined.” She shows her provocative work frequently around the state.

In 2000, Banister built a studio above the garage at the Boiling Springs, Pa., home she shares with husband Paul Heishman ’71. She also is a full-time education specialist/ gallery curator at Harrisburg Area Community College.

Bringing it Back Home

For Banister’s 35-year reunion, a classmate on the planning committee asked her to do an exhibit. She invited Bounds to join her (since they showed work together for his reunion a few years earlier), and, through Facebook, they recruited Berger.

“This show is one of the greatest gifts I could receive,” Berger says. “To see my friends, to be inspired and motivated to do work, to come and have my work hanging with their work—it’s really special. We’re so pleased with how it turned out, and I hope we don’t wait 30 years to do it again.”

Their exhibit, Together Again, enabled the trio to reunite and re-energize around their work. What started as a gang of misfits in college turned into three successful professional artists bringing it all back home.

View more photos of the exhibit.