Astrid Ketcham: Season 2, Episode 6

Whitman College students tell their stories—about their unique experiences in choosing Whitman and being part of the Whitman community and what they love most. This is Astrid’s story.

Astrid Ketcham is a senior Art major from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Hear how her family inspired her to come across the country for college and what she discovered at Whitman—including a love of painting, mixed media and Walla Walla.  She's making the most of her time at Whitman, including making fake cakes and living at "The Circus." 

The “Our Whitman, My Story” podcast is a collaboration between the Whitman College Office of Communication and author and podcaster John Moe ’90. To meet more of our talented students follow Whitman on social media.

Transcript

Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell, how they got here and what happened once they did, and every story is different. This is Our Whitman, My Story.

My name is Astrid Ketcham and I am an Art major. I come from Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere in the United States. And my parents are so amazing. They have a rule for my siblings and I that we could not go to a college in Arkansas or in the surrounding states. So my brother went to a college in Maine. My sister is at college in Pennsylvania. I in Washington. I found Whitman in the Princeton Best 100 Colleges textbook. I had just gotten the newest edition and I spent about two hours flipping through and Whitman stood out to me, not just for the name being from the city Walla Walla, but the diversity, the off-campus studies department. It was just so many key points that I loved about it, and I came and visited Whitman right as everything was shutting down for COVID.

I got a cheap flight, lots of Lysol wipes, and I walked around the campus with my mom and after about 20, 30 minutes walking around, I just knew this was where I wanted to spend the next three and a half, four years. There was an energy even on a barren campus that there was a life to be lived here. And even without visiting a class or really interacting with a lot of people face to face, I interacted with people over the internet, I just knew that there was an energy that I hadn't felt on other campuses I had visited even when they were full of people.

The name Walla Walla, it's just, it rolls off the tongue. I get asked every time I go home, what's in Walla Walla? And it's fun to talk about. It's a gorgeous town. It reminds me of my own downtown back home where everyone is out every Saturday. All of the shops are always filled, all of the restaurants always have so many people with exciting stories. And the wheat fields are absolutely gorgeous. The wineries are so beautiful with all of the vineyards. I'm always shocked by how beautiful it gets in the spring.

I spent the summer before my junior year in Walla Walla. I worked at Brasserie Four and Bacon & Eggs, and it was so fun. The summer in Walla Walla was so beautiful. The town had a concert series going on, and so I think it was every week they had a little concert downtown, and it was so fun to go and see these amazing Walla Walla musicians and seeing the town, the downtown come even more alive. And the people I met while working were so interesting. There were tourists, there were locals, and everyone was always so sweet. I would meet some of the same customers from Brasserie Four and Bacon & Eggs, and it was really fun to get to know the town even more before graduating.

I started out as a STEM major. I switched a lot from BBMB to chemistry to biology. BBMB is Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology. I've always loved the STEM fields, and I took collage and contemporary art with Emily Somoskey and I remembered how much I loved making art and made art my whole life. And she just opened my eyes to collage as a medium and mixed media in general. And the next semester, I declared my art major after one class with her, and I took beginning painting with her and I took beginning sculpture. I took all of these art classes. It was just unbelievable how amazing the art department is here and how Emily can just unlock a whole new side of art in myself. I love painting even more than ever.

The pieces I work on mostly are oil paintings, which is what Emily taught me to do, and it's so amazing the way that the colors blend together and using this medium that's been used for centuries. But I work across all most painting mediums. I have gotten back into watercolor, gouache paints. For my thesis, I've been making my own paints. I've made an egg tempura paint, which uses egg yolks. I've made my own paint out of cornstarch, and it's really fun. Painting in and of itself is so much bigger than I realized.

For my senior art thesis, I am making fake cakes to go with the idea of food and femininity and these cakes look... I've piped them with baking piping tips. I'm mixing spackle with acrylic paint, again, making my own mediums. And I have a cake stand. I look up pictures on the internet, I pipe them however I want, and I write messages on them that have to do with food and femininity or I put mirrors on them so the viewer has to reflect into the food they could consume but never can consume. It's been really fun. I filled a whole wall full of them. Very excited to keep pursuing that.

The senior art majors, every year, take a research trip to New York, and it is the most amazing experience. We take it to research what we could be doing for our thesis in the following semester, and we visit as many museums as we can. I think I visited about a dozen museums. That includes the Metropolitan Museum, which is absolutely beautiful. The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim. We visited galleries, we visited marketplaces. We even had time to go on our own to visit places, and it was just an absolutely wonderful time.

After I graduate, I am hoping to move to the East Coast to an art central city such as Boston or Washington DC. So I'm close to New York to keep looking at modern art, and I am going to be hopefully working in a gallery or doing some sort of graphic design and then move into grad school to work with medical illustration to combine this past STEM that I absolutely loved at Whitman and my love of art.

Making friends at Whitman. I started during COVID, 2020. And so it was really hard to connect with people. I was only connecting through screens, whether it was Zoom or through social media, texting people. I found one of my closest friends at Whitman through a Whitman class of 2024 group chat, and we have been close ever since. There are people I still find from social media and I connect with them pretty quickly and we meet in real life, and I've made my some close friends that way. I find that almost every class I take, I make a new couple of friends, and it's a great relationship to keep going on and reminiscing about those fun classes.

My most memorable class at Whitman that I always tell people to take is a classics course. I took a classics course my second semester at Whitman and I had an amazing professor, Dana Burgess. He was so amazing the way he taught the material and was hilarious in telling us all about the Greek and Roman history. We read The Iliad, which was absolutely fantastic. I never would've read it had I not taken this class. He was so funny in how much he disliked the Greek gods and their play in human interaction.

While being at Whitman, I lived my first semester in Lyman with a fantastic roommate, and then after that I lived in Prentiss, which was a really amazing dorm, very nice. And then I lived off campus my last two years, and I live with three other roommates and it's absolutely fun. The off-campus houses at Whitman sometimes have names, and the name of my house is The Circus. I don't know why it's named The Circus. It was an accessible house for my housemate and it came with the name, and we love it. We don't feel like changing it.

I love to drive around with my friends listening to music, and that's always really fun to do at any point of the day. And going and picking up coffee from one of the local coffee shops, our favorite being Carte Coffee. Sometimes even just walking around downtown, peeking into certain shops, into the antique stores, going to the wheat fields and just stargazing is always a super fun activity to do on the weekend. The wheat fields are a little outside of Walla Walla, just in the surrounding of the city, and they're just miles of wheat fields that we Whitman students drive out to and have picnics, do cute photo shoots, just lay down and stargaze. It's so fun and something I didn't think that Whitman had until my first year people wanted to get out and just lay in the wheat fields.

I am Astrid Ketcham, and this has been Our Whitman, My Story. There are more episodes of Our Whitman, My Story available right now wherever you get your podcasts. Music for this podcast provided by Big Joe, a band made up of Whitman students. For more information, go to whitman.edu/stories.