Art & Study Retreats in Italy
Faculty: Robert Proctor & Martha Wakeman
Robert Proctor and Martha Wakeman
[click image to enlarge]Robert E. Proctor is Joanne Toor Cummings ‘50 Professor of Italian at Connecticut College, where he has also served as Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and as Founding Director of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, Connecticut, and was Visiting Professor in 1999 - 2000, and fall 2001 with the goal of helping to integrate the humanities and fine arts curricula. He is also a member of the board of the Williams School, an independent 7 - 12 day school in New London, Connecticut.
Robert E. Proctor grew up in Los Angeles, California, and is a graduate of the University of San Francisco and of The Johns Hopkins University. He has been a fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and of The National Humanities Institute at Yale University. He is the author of Education’s Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, with a Curriculum for Today’s Students (Indiana University Press, 1988), for which he won the Association of American Colleges’ Frederic W. Ness Book Award in 1990, given annually to the author of the book that contributes most to the understanding of liberal learning. A second paperback edition of the book appeared in 1998 with the new title Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools. He is now writing a book on the Roman origins of the liberal arts tradition.
Martha Wakeman
[click image to enlarge]Martha Wakeman grew up in Darien, Connecticut. She graduated from Skidmore College in 1970 with a B.S. in Art Education, having spent one semester of her junior year at Tyler School of Art in Rome. She returned to Florence, Italy in the fall of 1970 to begin graduate work at Villa Schifanoia, Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Art. Thus began a ten-year period of life alone in a small rustic apartment in the hills outside of Florence. During this time she earned an MA and an MFA in painting, taught drawing and painting for Gonzaga University in Florence, and had numerous one-woman exhibits of her painting in Florence and Milan. 1979 brought her the opportunity to exhibit in New York.
In 1980, she came back to Connecticut and married Robert E. Proctor, professor of Italian language and literature at Connecticut College. Over the past 23 years, they have continued to return to Florence and Venice during the summer. These trips have provided a wealth of inspiration for Martha’s paintings. In Fall 2000, Martha and Robert traveled to Rome where Robert is creating an undergraduate program for Connecticut College on The Roman Origins of the Liberal Arts Tradition. They took Connecticut College students back to Rome again in the spring of 2002. The idea for a pastel course at Casa Ciotti was born when they first took their undergraduate students to Etruria under Mary Jane Cryan’s guidance.
Her life and many trips to Italy have provided a wealth of inspiration for Martha’s paintings. For many years she has been working on pastel landscapes inspired by Tuscany. She has now completed a series of cityscapes inspired by her recent stay in the charming Trastevere district of Rome.
Martha has exhibited in solo and group shows in Connecticut. Since 1984, she has taught drawing, painting, and pastel courses to Return to College Students at Connecticut College. During the summers of 2002 and 2003, she taught painting and pastel at The Umbra Institute in Perugia to college students from across the United States. Her work is in many private collections, in Europe, the United States, and Canada.
Martha Wakeman and Robert Proctor live in New London, Connecticut. They have two children, Rebecca and Andrew, ages 24 and 21.