Feature

Photos by Will Kirk
Text by Angela Paik Schaeffer          See the slide show >

On a pretty spring day in 2001, the Hopkins community gathered to celebrate the birth of a “creative chrysalis” for students. With the opening of the Mattin Center at Homewood, named for benefactor Christina Mattin ’75, student artists, musicians, dancers, and thespians suddenly had a permanent home for the fine arts, a place where they were encouraged to do something other than study. Today, that chrysalis, as President William R. Brody called it, has matured into a busy hub of diverse activity, its music practice rooms, dance, art, and photography studios, theater space, and digital media center alive with the sights and sounds of creative students. Current undergraduates, of course, have no memory of the campus without the Mattin Center. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the campus before it—for the Mattin Center’s imprint was almost immediately indelible, its impact permeating student life, as these photos, shot over the course of a single week in February, convey.