Ishita Jayadev ’26 and Clara Ann Bagnoli ’28
Editor-in-Chief and Design Editor
On Feb. 26, around 30 people lounged around the Grove house during a meeting for Potluck, the 5C arts, crafts, and writing club. The students chatted amongst themselves as they cut, glued, and crafted with paper, magazines, and various stamps and stickers. The room was inviting as soft music filtered through the chitchat, and the space felt both cozy and communal, reflecting the club’s recent change in location from the Browning recreation room to the Grove House at Pitzer.
Three of the four co-presidents, Alyssa Hernandez ‘27, Theresa Provasnik ‘27, and Ella Piersma ‘27 recently celebrated the release of their Fall ‘24 zine “Bittersweet” and chatted to The Scripps Voice about how the club started, their roles within it, and the details behind the new issue during the weekly club meeting.
Provasnik began by talking about how the club started. She said that Lena Farley PO‘25, who is currently transitioning out of her leadership role as her graduation approaches, started Potluck during the spring 2023 semester.
“She started it as a way to create community in the arts outside of art classes, because she was not an art major, but wanted to do arts. And it’s really [hard to] do art unless you’re in art classes, and you can’t get into art classes unless you’re an art major. So [it was] a way to create a space [for art] outside competitive academic classes,” Provasnik said.
When Farley studied abroad last spring, Provasnik took over as president. Despite this shift in leadership and attendance as more underclassmen joined, both Provasnik and Hernandez agreed the vibe of the club environment remained the same.
Hernandez spoke about her own experience joining the club and how she decided to take on a leadership role.
“For me, I joined first as a member last year, and started by submitting my own pieces, but as of this year, I took on more of a leadership role because … Lena created this as a place for community, and a lot of my closest friends are in it. So I feel like coming to the club isn’t necessarily business for me. It’s just about being with my friends and hanging out,” Hernandez said.
For both Provasnik and Hernandez, taking on a leadership role at Potluck has included small tasks like making Instagram posts as well as developing longer term goals of creating open lines of communication with people.
“Right now, we are working to create a stronger club. It’s easy to have supplies and be like, oh, you can come and craft, but creating more of a community with longevity, we’re definitely thinking a lot about trying to create something that is not only meaningful to us, but meaningful to other people [so that] people feel attached and they want it to keep going,” Provasnik said.
Hernandez added, “We want people to not just come for one day, but for several and build [community].”
All three co-presidents expressed excitement about their recent publication, “Bittersweet,” and reflected on the creation of the zine which included photos, scans of artwork, and text submissions from students across the 5Cs. The co-presidents compiled and arranged all the submissions using resources like Canva and printed the zine through Pomona’s duplicating office.
“This [publication] was especially cool because we collaborated with the Hive and with my class [Art 181: Ecofeminism and Ecoart with Nancy Macko]. We did a lot of collaging in that class. And I was like, oh, it’d be cool if we could get pages in for the class as well. And so I kind of forced everyone to give me their collages and we put a dedication in. And so if you were part of that class, like, come get your copy,” Hernandez said, laughing.
She elaborated on how the Hive creativity grant, which she had applied for at the beginning of the fall semester, was a huge help for the board as it allowed them to fund all of the printing and material costs of making the zine.
Hernandez talked about two of her own submissions that made it into the zine, highlighting the brown monochrome features of one of them as well as the childhood nostalgia of the pink bunny collage.
“This collage is all very monochrome tones. When I think of bittersweet, I think of brown.” she said, of the first collage. “I didn’t make this thinking I would submit it to Bittersweet, but I ended up doing it because I felt like the vibe was very similar. I made this in my Ecofeminist and Ecoart class as well. I feel like the vibe and the energy of the collage [is very] old-towny, [with] lots of writing and different drawings that I’ve taken from the resource materials.”
For her second collage, she talked about both the process of making it as well as its theme, which reflects on certain bittersweet aspects of her childhood.
“As far as the bunny, it was a drawing that I had made and then vinyl cut. So I sold prints of the bunny as well. But I like the way it’s drawn, and the [idea of the] bunny at a tea party, I feel like it’s very bittersweet. And the message I went with also feels very bittersweet in that I feel like when I was growing up, my mom wanted me to be very princessy, like very girly girl, and that wasn’t who I was at all. So it’s kind of like an homage to my sister and my mom,” she said about her second piece.
The front cover of the zine was an exciting collaboration between the co-presidents and different members of the club.
“When we landed on Bittersweet [as the theme for the zine], we all thought of the idea of a dollhouse as something [that’s] very nostalgic. So we wanted [the cover] to be collaborative this time and incorporate more of our members. The cover is a potluck,” Piersma said, reflecting on the name of the club.
“So we had people volunteer to draw a room. And we have any medium, so this is visual art, color pencil. This is 3D modeling. This is a diorama,” she said, pointing out different rooms of the dollhouse.
The co-presidents also advertised their presence at the People’s Fund market on Feb. 29 at the Motley and Seal Court, where they sold copies of “Bittersweet.” All funds went to monetarily supporting people building power through mutual aid in Sudan, Gaza, and Eastern Congo.
Hernandez said that donating the sales of their zines to People’s fund had been a tradition Farley started and one that the transitioning board wanted to continue.
As for the future of Potluck, the co-presidents smiled while revealing the theme of the next issue: birds.
“If you pick up [a physical copy of] Bittersweet, you’ll notice that there’s a flyer somewhere hidden, just for [the next theme] birds. Usually when we do things, we let our general audience pick. But I feel like, for this issue, there was a lot of backing with the birds. And since it’s Lena’s last semester, it’s kind of an homage to them as well, and we wanted them to be able to have the opportunity to kind of say goodbye in a very bittersweet way with the birds,” Hernandez said, amid laughter over the unintentional pun.
The co-presidents advertised their meeting times, Wednesdays from 8:30-9:45 p.m. at the Grove House and asked people to submit to their next zine as well as join in on club meetings.
“Come to our club meetings. New supplies coming if you join,” Hernandez joked while Provasnik made sure to add, “The community will always be here. Above the supplies.”
Photo Courtesy of Jenna Morais ’28 from Potluck
