Moravian College Magazine - Summer 2018

SOUTH CAMPUS IS OUR TRUE NORTH

The beginning of Moravian College in Bethlehem, and its compass.

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Here, the Moravian community laid down the school’s guiding tenet that every child, rich or poor, boy or girl, European descendent or native American, should be educated. It is where painting and music were taught and practiced alongside mathematics and botany. It is the source of the Moravian College we know today, where all are welcome, all are equal, and all are educated in the arts and sciences.

Today, South Campus—officially the Priscilla Payne Hurd Campus—is home to art and music. Walk through the connected maze of buildings, and you feel the history that is canvas or clef to the art. And you sense too the energy of creative work. You can hear it, see it, smell it. A piano melody escapes from a closed practice room. Studies of color and form hang on walls. The scent of artists’ oil paint emanates from a studio.

Creativity cannot be still. It demands movement, progression, sometimes even revolution. Artists don’t abandon history, tradition, or precepts; they build on them. They discover new tools and media. They take the clay and transform it. Education, at its best, follows these same trajectories.

Here, we take you on a brief tour of South Campus today. You’ll see new spaces, learn about new initiatives, and read the stories of several alumni, newly and formerly graduated, who stretch boundaries, explore new ways of working, and upend the expected. These are stories spun out of South Campus, out of Moravian College. To borrow a refrain found in their words:

It all started here.