This winter, local resident and artist Liz Mersky burned hundreds of her own art works.
She had considered doing it several years ago, after looking at stacks and stacks of pastel drawings and paintings and resolving that there wasn’t much sense in keeping it all just for the sake of keeping it.
“I don’t like a lot of stuff,” Mersky told the News this month. “It seemed stupid that they were in drawers and nobody was seeing them.”
Mersky compiled a stack of work intended for burning, but friends — as did, admittedly, this reporter upon hearing the tale — reacted with shock, and Mersky relented, allowing the work to continue to sit in boxes.
When the notion came around again this winter, Mersky went ahead and lit the bonfire before telling anyone.
“That was the only way it was going to happen,” she said with a chuckle.
From what remains of Mersky’s works — around 250 pieces, she estimated — came the selected pieces that make up “Into the Light,” a small retrospective exhibition opening Thursday, July 2, in the YS Senior Center Fireplace Room. Landscapes, florals and other works will be on display, with proceeds from every piece set to be donated to a local nonprofit of the buyer’s choosing.
“I want them to be as much benefit as they can be,” Mersky said, and said suggested nonprofits include the Senior Center, Tecumseh Land Trust, World House Choir, The 365 Project and “Who’s Hungry?”, though buyers may make their own selection outside of that list.
The impulse to let the art leave her hands, and for the departure itself to be useful, is a fitting frame for a retrospective by an artist whose creative life has been marked by movement: from photography to documentary video, from pastels and paint to wood.
Mersky, a photographer from around the age of 6, came to Yellow Springs from Michigan as an Antioch College student, drawn to the school’s work-study program; she graduated in 1973, amid the Antioch strike. She left the village for a short stay in California, returning after about six months, and has lived here since then. After her return, she worked in Antioch’s video department with Bob Devine, and later transitioned into filmmaking.
For about 14 years, Mersky made documentaries focused on environmental issues and community life. Her films include “Sweetwater,” about the Little Miami River; “Room 19,” filmed in a Springfield classroom serving children with significant disabilities; and 1983’s acclaimed “Labor More than Once,” which chronicled a local mother’s struggle to regain her parental rights after coming out as a lesbian.
“I thought I was gonna change the world with my documentaries back then,” she said, adding that, at the time, she worked with reel-to-reel tape and heavy editing equipment.
“I’m sitting there cranking dials and splicing,” she said. “Everything was by hand — and I love that I learned that way.”
Around 1990, Mersky said, local resident and painter Julie Carlson asked to come to Mersky’s home outside Yellow Springs to draw the surrounding landscape. As Carlson painted the wide vista, Mersky filmed her — but as she watched her friend work, she found herself wanting to step out from behind the camera.
“I thought, ‘I want to do that — I don’t want to carry around this big, heavy camera anymore,’” she said.
Mersky had never taken an art class before, but she said Carlson gave her simple advice on how to get started: “You can just draw what you see.”
“And I took off, and I just loved it,” Mersky said.
Mersky said she took Carlson’s advice very much to heart, and learned by looking — really looking, sometimes closing one eye to study how a line might move from the three-dimensional world onto a flat surface.
“I’m not trained,” she said. “I just kind of wing it.”
Within months of beginning, she said, a friend encouraged her to mount a show; her first one adorned the walls of the Winds Cafe, where she would exhibit nearly every year for a decade or so, and other shows followed elsewhere in the village and state.
In the months and years that followed her first foray into drawing and painting, Mersky experimented with landscapes, then moved into flowers, buildings, imagined scenes and abstracts. At one point, she created a series of horses, standing over the canvas with a stirring stick dipped in house paint, letting it fall in looping tendrils to outline the equine form.
“You can’t stop it,” she said. “You’re just dribbling, and whatever happens, happens.”
She was drawn to considering light in her work — at sunset, just before nightfall or in the early morning. When she woke at 3 a.m. and couldn’t sleep, she lit candles and drew the rooms around her, producing a series of half-dark interior spaces warmed by small pools of light.
The tone and shape of Mersky’s work has shifted over the years, sometimes wildly — “I like change a lot; I like to bring in the new,” she said — with her most recent venture being woodworking. She turned to shaping fallen wood into handrails for both the inside and outside of her home, as well as tables and other furniture, letting natural curves and textures dictate how the pieces end up. One favorite piece is a kind of leafless tree she formed and placed in her bathroom, the gnarled limbs of which extend over her clawfoot bathtub.
“I like the outdoors to be inside, because I want to be outdoors all the time,” she said.
These days, Mersky said, the urge to produce physical work has slowed; she put away her woodworking tools about two years ago after her beloved horse died.
“I just put everything down, and I haven’t gone back,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going.”
She writes and journals, and said she’s continually looking for what she called a “nonaccumulative art form” that won’t leave anything behind. To that end, she’s sung with the World House Choir — what could be more nonaccumulative than making a joyful noise? — and fans of the beloved “Missa Gaia,” which the choir initially performed in 2015 and reprised in 2019, may remember that Mersky created a series of works to accompany its second performance.
“I’m a happy person when I’m creating and not so happy when I’m not,” she said. “I just really feel like I’m in service to beauty.”
The search for a creative practice that doesn’t produce more things, Mersky said, helps explain the desire this year to set some of her older work ablaze. The works she burned were not all favorites, and she didn’t think they all needed to survive into a future where they’d most likely be neither displayed nor seen.
Still, she said, though the desire to burn her work arose naturally, it didn’t come easily. Mersky said she lovingly bestows names on cars, tractors, even her chainsaw, as she imbues them with personality and tinges of her own memory.
“I have trouble letting go of things; things are not inanimate,” she said. “Objects are also alive to me.”
She said creating art has always been meditative — “The process is what seems really important, rather than the product,” she said — and when it’s time to hang pieces for a show, she no longer thinks of them, fundamentally, as hers. In that way, creating art has offered her a way to try her hand at surrender — a skill that she said, at this point in her life, has taken on a different weight.
“Believe me when I tell you, I don’t let go easily — but it’s a lesson in life, so I’m practicing,” she said. “And now that I’m 75, I feel like I really want to practice, because there’s a different outlook now for me.”
Through “Into the Light,” Mersky said, she’s also taken the opportunity to practice in another way. Unlike earlier shows, for which she often created new work after securing an exhibition date, this one looks backward. She said she’s chosen “a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything.”
The exhibition will feature some landscapes, some flowers, at least one horse. Within the small collection, she’ll present some of the flavors of the stylistic turns she’s made over the years — a tasting menu of the movement that has run through her work.
And with any luck, folks will be inspired by that movement to choose a piece — and a local nonprofit — and the piece will keep on moving.
“Into the Light” will be on display July 2–Aug. 31 in the Senior Center Fireplace Room Gallery. The exhibition may be viewed Monday–Friday, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m., when the Fireplace Room is not in use for a class.
At its June 15 regular meeting, the Miami Township Board of Trustees approved a resolution of necessity to place a permanent 0.8-mill levy before voters in November.
The Trustees first discussed the levy publicly at their June 1 regular meeting, during which Chair Marilan Moir said the levy would generate revenue intended to establish a plan for replacing Miami Township Fire-Rescue equipment, including a new fire truck, rather than relying on the department’s current “break-fix” model.
In a press release submitted to the News last week, Trustees wrote that the levy is intended to “provide a stable, restricted funding source for fire and EMS equipment and vehicles.”
“This levy is intended to address long-term capital needs in a measured and disciplined way, separate from operating expenses,” the press release reads. “By Board resolution, funds will be limited to capital uses only, including apparatus, vehicles, equipment and related assets — with a maintenance plan to protect the public investment.”
The 0.8-mill property tax levy is expected to generate $204,136 annually; the annual cost of the levy for homeowners, if approved, will be $28 per $100,000 of a home’s appraised value.
Trustees report that their initial plans, if the levy is approved, will include financing a $1.35 million fire engine over 18 years, with estimated annual debt service of $114,497. Remaining funds of about $89,639 per year would be reserved for scheduled equipment replacement and capital needs over time.
“The [levy] proposal is not centered on a single purchase, but on establishing a predictable, transparent system to replace equipment on schedule and avoid larger, unplanned costs in the future,” the press release reads. “[MTFR] has historically received strong community support for its operations … [and] this request is narrowly focused, financially conservative and designed with accountability in mind, including restricted use and annual public reporting.”
The Board of Trustees will hold its next regular meeting Monday, July 6, beginning at 5 p.m. in the MTFR community meeting room.
Antiochiana Archivist Scott Sanders presents a monthly series of one-hour talks exploring the history of Antioch College on the second Wednesday of each month, 12:30–1:30 p.m., in the Olive Kettering Library.
The next talk is July 8 and titled “Antioch and the Civil War.”
Sanders has been with Antioch since 1994 and has stewarded the college’s historical collections for more than three decades.
The series is free and open to the public. Those who cannot attend in person may view each session live via Zoom; the meeting ID for the events is 820 8896 1530, and the passcode is 405208.
Each session will include time for audience questions and will be recorded and later posted to Antioch’s YouTube channel.
Local free-meal nonprofit “Who’s Hungry?” received a $2,500 grant from Hall Hunger Initiative on Wednesday, June 24, during the group’s biweekly community meal at MAZU restaurant.
Hall Hunger Initiative Development Director Alex Klug presented the funds to “Who’s Hungry?” co-founder Jim Zehner and longtime volunteer Robert Bolen as local residents — including one News reporter — dined on linguine with meat sauce, vegan pasta salad and rolls.
The grant will help repair electrical service in the garage of the home Zehner shared with “Who’s Hungry?” co-founder and his longtime partner, Carl Moore, who died unexpectedly in May. The nonprofit cooks meals in Zehner’s home — about 5,500 meals were served last year, according to Zehner — and stores food for the meals in refrigerators and freezers in the garage. Zehner said the appliances had previously been powered using extension cords before an electrical fault caused the garage to lose power and “Who’s Hungry?” to lose some stored food intended for regular diners. Zehner said local electrical outfit Regulator Watts quoted the cost of the repairs at nearly $4,000, but offered to complete the job for the $2,500 grant amount.
Bolen also recently raised more than $900 for “Who’s Hungry?” by creating a vegan “crunch wrap supreme” that was prepared and sold through MAZU.
Hall Hunger Initiative is a regional food-system advocacy nonprofit that works to address the root causes of hunger while supporting organizations that feed their communities. According to Klug, HHI is in the process of developing a local food aggregation program that would purchase food from Antioch College and other area farms, combine and store it centrally and redistribute it to participating restaurants, schools and other buyers.
The News will provide additional coverage on the program in a future issue.
“Who’s Hungry?” operates most Mondays and Wednesdays, from 3 p.m. until food runs out. All are welcome. To support “Who’s Hungry?” drop by during open hours or donate online at http://www.bit.ly/WhosHungryYS
Three days before Antioch College’s June 20 commencement, graduating student Lark Orbe and first-year student Zion Villines entered President Jane Fernandes’ office hoping to persuade her to reconsider a decision.
Suspended professor Michael Casselli had been told he could attend the upcoming July reunion, where he was set to receive the J.D. Dawson Award presented by alumni, but was barred from events where students he had taught and mentored would present their work and graduate.
Orbe had helped circulate a petition asking college administration to allow him to attend, gathering 181 signatures from students, alumni, current and former staff and other community members.
Orbe and Villines went into the June 17 meeting with another student — a small delegation that, as they told the News this week, they believed reflected Antioch’s tradition of community governance: students bringing a concern to institutional leadership and trying, together, to find a solution.
By that evening, the students believed they had reached a framework with Fernandes that limited Casselli’s presence to specific events, buildings and times. It would have allowed Casselli to attend the senior Colloquia, commencement, Grawlix creative showcases and the already-approved reunion events, while leaving the rest of his campus ban in place and acknowledging that the College would respond within the bounds of its policies if he exceeded the agreed-upon limits.
Orbe and Villines said Fernandes verbally agreed to the framework and told them written terms would be sent to Casselli the following day. Later that night, however, they said they learned that Fernandes had reversed course.
Casselli provided the News with an email, sent the following morning, in which Fernandes cited “fear and anxiety that has emerged on campus” and said Casselli would not be allowed to participate in any upcoming college events, including commencement and reunion.
Orbe and Villines said some students were disappointed that Casselli ultimately wouldn’t be present as they presented projects and crossed the stage at the Foundry Theater to graduate. But moreover, they said, they had counted on the shared governance that’s part of Antioch’s institutional character to illuminate a path forward for addressing a student concern.
“We don’t have to protest,” Orbe told the News. “We just need to sit at the table with [Fernandes] and talk to her.”
“It’s not my goal to see anybody lose at the end of the day,” Villines added. “If [Fernandes] were to get along with that, if we were able to get along with it, and also the community was aware of what was taking place, I felt like that would have been a win across the board for everybody.”
The News reached out to Fernandes this week with questions about the conversation she had with the student delegation; though she declined to respond to the students’ account point-by-point or comment on whether an agreement had been reached and reversed, or why, she provided a written statement:
“I respect and value students’ perspectives and contributions in all decisions that impact their education and overall experience at Antioch College. Student voices and inclusion are the foundation of Antioch College. As President I have to balance student input with the safety of campus and all community members.”
The statement continues: “We understand the community’s interest and concern, but we must reiterate that we will not publicly share specific details related to a personnel matter.”
As the News reported earlier this month, Casselli — a member of Antioch’s arts faculty since 2011 who earned tenure in 2021 — has been barred from campus since February after he was initially terminated that month following an argument with another faculty member. The Board of Trustees later suspended the termination and restored his pay and benefits pending review of the incident. On May 20, Fernandes placed Casselli on indefinite suspension without pay with conditions for a possible return.
In the weeks since his suspension, Casselli has acknowledged in the pages of the News and online that the argument became heated and said he apologized for his behavior, but has disputed the College’s characterization of the incident and argued that he was denied the process owed to a tenured faculty member. The American Association of University Professors has also raised concerns that the College subjected Casselli to what they called a “major sanction, second in severity only to dismissal,” without a hearing before an elected faculty committee.
Orbe, who graduated last weekend, said the visit with Fernandes grew out of student discussions and wasn’t initiated by Casselli. Villines said he joined the student delegation because he believed the campus restrictions were disproportionate and the dispute had escalated unnecessarily.
“We didn’t have to get here,” he said.
The student body wasn’t unanimously energized with regard to Casselli’s campus ban, Orbe said, as some students were overwhelmed by the final weeks of the term, and others didn’t take an active role. But Orbe said the proposal came out of student meetings and did reflect a broad student concern, particularly among those who had worked closely with Casselli. Those students, and others, protested Casselli’s initial firing in February, carrying signs that read: “Be ashamed to die until you rectify.”
Villines, who transferred to Antioch during the winter term, said he had expected Casselli to teach some of the courses in which he’d enrolled, but the professor “disappeared” from campus not long after Villines arrived. Though Villines is up to speed on the circumstances of Casselli’s suspension, he said the College hasn’t yet clearly explained to students how it intends to fill the educational gap left by his absence.
“I understood Casselli would be my professor for a lot of the classes that I would be involved in,” Villines said, adding that he had hoped Casselli would teach him about how to use CAD, a 2-D and 3-D modeling software. “Are you gonna hire somebody else to fill that gap? Are you consolidating the program into a different program? What is your strategy moving forward in this?”
Orbe said they first emailed Fernandes about the petition and asked to meet; when no meeting had been scheduled by the final week of classes, Orbe raised the request during a campus community meeting. Fernandes agreed to meet, and the students gathered the next morning.
A member of Antioch’s human resources staff expressed concern before the meeting that what was initially understood as a one-on-one meeting had expanded to include several students, writing that the College did not want “a group against one.” Orbe responded that the delegation’s attendance was not intended to overwhelm Fernandes, writing: “I invited other students because, though I have spearheaded the initiative of the petition, it is not just me, but a community effort.” They also told the News that they had asked Fernandes in advance if they could invite other students to the meeting, and Fernandes had responded affirmatively.
Orbe said they appreciated that Fernandes agreed to the meeting at all, particularly during a crowded final week that included commencement preparations and a Board of Trustees meeting. They said they entered the conversation believing that an in-person exchange — even if it ended in disagreement — could still build trust.
“It’s important that we meet face-to-face on something that’s really important to me and the community,” Orbe said.
Orbe and Villines said the June 17 meeting began with the students asking Fernandes to reconsider Casselli’s exclusion from the senior Colloquia and commencement. They said Fernandes agreed within a few minutes of discussion, and those gathered in the room moved swiftly on to discussing guardrails.
“[The meeting] wasn’t centered around whether he could or couldn’t be present,” Villines said. “It was how his presence was going to be governed.”
During the meeting, the students said they began drafting a document to outline the course of the discussion, titled “Official Terms of Institutional Permittance,” which identified the specific events and spaces where Casselli would be allowed. It was drafted by the students, though Villines and Orbe noted that it was not signed by Fernandes.
Orbe said that, in a second meeting with Fernandes later the same day to review a final draft of the “Official Terms” document, they asked whether anyone else on campus needed to be notified or consulted because of concerns about Casselli’s presence, and that Fernandes indicated she would handle those conversations. Orbe said they left expecting the terms to be finalized and sent to Casselli the following day.
Instead, Orbe received a text message from Fernandes that evening indicating that the decision had changed. The next morning, Casselli received an email from Fernandes that read: “Given the fear and anxiety that has emerged on campus, I will not allow you to participate in any of the upcoming events at Antioch College including Commencement, visiting [Olive Kettering Library], Reunion and others. As is currently the case, you are not allowed on campus and you are not allowed to teach students. Failure to comply may result in termination.”
Villines said that he and other students were confused by the apparent about-face in the decision, and that they weren’t given an answer on what constituted the “fear and anxiety” that had apparently caused it. He said he would have respected a clear refusal from the outset, particularly if the College had clearly explained that safety or personnel considerations made the request impossible.
“Sometimes we have to make hard decisions and give reasoning towards those hard decisions,” Villines said.
In a public statement released June 19, Villines wrote that the administration should have said “no” from the beginning if it was unwilling or unable to approve the students’ request. Students spent part of their final week working toward a solution they believed had been accepted, he argued, only for it to be reversed in “whiplash decision-making.”
Orbe said they felt similarly: “We would have been like, ‘Well, we’re disappointed that this is still the case, but we appreciate that she met with us and could say ‘no’ to our faces,” they said.
Addressing the commencement audience at the Foundry last weekend, Orbe spoke to the responsibilities that come with living in a community and participating in its governance: “Antioch is special because we have community governance. Students, staff, faculty, administrators and alumni serve on committees and make decisions collectively — which is unheard of at many other institutions.”
Orbe went on to urge students to commit to institutional work at Antioch, saying: “When you have an issue, don’t just chat with each other about it. Document it, send that email, go to Community Meeting, join a committee. Commit to the long term process. Be heard!”
Their advice resembles what Orbe and Villines said they attempted in Casselli’s case: discussing the issue among students, circulating a petition, asking for a meeting, negotiating terms and putting those terms in writing.
Orbe said that, in their view, shared governance doesn’t mean every student demand must be granted, nor does it remove the difficulty of making decisions when people have competing needs, access requirements or fears. They acknowledged in their speech that governance can be “messy and riddled with missed communication,” and told the News that students also bear responsibility for how they enter difficult conversations.
“We might be responding to something that we don’t have enough context around, but then help us understand,” Orbe said, adding that students can’t function as meaningful participants if decisions are made or reversed without a clear explanation of what changed.
“An agreement was made, and then that was broken. What happened in between, we don’t understand,” they said.
Orbe said they still hope to speak with Fernandes again directly; the president had proposed another in-person conversation during commencement weekend, Orbe said, but the timing didn’t allow enough space for the discussion they wanted to have.
“I hope to still meet with her; I hope to actually genuinely be curious about some of these things,” Orbe said. “As long as she’s in this position, we should be trying to work with her. I want her to see students and community members as people who want to work with her.”
Villines said that, as a new student, he came to Antioch expecting shared governance to mean difficult conversations among people with different perspectives, not the absence of conflict.
“I understood that there was probably going to be a lot of points of conflict,” he said. “But I also understood that there is a more beautiful way to move.”
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