MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will host works by student artists from neighboring Linn County colleges Feb. 26 through March 26 at the Peter Paul Luce Gallery in McWethy Hall.

The Cedar Rapids Area Colleges Student Art Exhibition 2006 features artists from Coe College, Kirkwood Community College and Mount Mercy College. A reception is 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26.

Coe students will show ceramics, sculpture, collage, prints, paintings, photographs, drawings, film and animation. Works by Kirkwood art students include wood-fire ceramics, photography, relief prints and digital media. Mount Mercy students will show work in painting, printmaking and sculpture as well as video, installation and fiber arts. Cornell art students helped install the work.

The area show was once a longstanding tradition among Linn County colleges. Cornell’s Art Interest Group, a student organization, proposed reviving the event to gain a better understanding of the organization and planning required for a gallery installation.

Luce Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free.

MOUNT VERNON — Pastel drawings of the old stone quarry in Mount Vernon are on display Feb. 28 through April 28 in the Orange Carpet Gallery of The Commons at Cornell College. Admission is free.

This series of works by Mount Vernon artist Susan Coleman is based on points of view from the quarry, also known as Nature Park.

Coleman has been gallery coordinator in Cornell’s art department for six years. She received master’s degrees in drawing and painting from the University of Iowa and has shown widely throughout the Midwest and Eastern United States. Her work is based on landscape themes encountered in her local environment. In addition to Cornell, she has taught at the University of Northern Iowa, Kirkwood Community College and Dartmouth College.

MOUNT VERNON — Geraldine Richmond, professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, will lecture at
Cornell College on “Quilting Together a Professional Career in Science” on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Her lecture is for Cornell’s Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series. Fox attended Cornell in the 1940s and is a retired speech pathologist at the University of Houston.

Richmond also will give a talk on “Going Nonlinear in Probing Structure and Bonding at Aqueous Surfaces” on Thursday, Feb. 23, at 11 a.m. in Room 100 of West Science Center.

Richmond holds the Richard M. and Patricia H. Noyes Professorship in Chemistry at Oregon. She is known for her fundamental studies of molecular processes at semiconductor, metal and liquid surfaces using state-of-the-art laser techniques. She has received numerous national and international awards for these studies and has over 130 publications to her credit.

Her extensive international efforts in recruiting and mentoring women in the sciences at all levels have been recognized with many awards including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Engineering Mentoring from the White House. In 1998 she founded the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists, known as COACh. This organization has assisted more than 10,000 women academic scientists from around the country. In her Cornell talk Richmond will discuss the scientists – particularly women scientists – she has known as friends, colleagues and students.

The Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series brings to campus high-achieving women in the science or social science communities to lecture and serve as role models for students intending careers in these fields. Fox holds a doctorate in speech pathology and psychology from the University of Missouri. She taught for 30 years at the University of Houston, where her primary research focused on cleft palate toddlers, along with other communication disorders.

The lecture series, begun in 2004, honors Fox’s parents, Raymond and Cecillia Russell. The first lecture was presented by White House science policy adviser Kathie Olsen.

MOUNT VERNON — A Chicago woman who has spent a decade leading delegations to Iraq, taking food and supplies in violation of U.S. law and U.N. sanctions, will speak at Cornell College on “The Further Invention of Nonviolence” at 11 a.m. Friday, Feb. 17, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Kathy Kelly is a Chicago teacher who has been jailed, fined and honored for her actions to promote peace and nonviolence. Founder of Voices in the Wilderness and Voices for Creative Nonviolence, she has made 22 trips to Iraq since 1996. Her 2005 book, “Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison,” recounts her time in Iraq from the first Gulf War of 1991, through 12 years of economic sanctions, to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that began in 2003.

Her most recent project is the Winter of Our Discontent, a new campaign to challenge U.S. military and economic warfare against Iraq.

In 1988 Kelly was sentenced to a year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites; she served nine months. In 2004 she served three months in a federal prison for her nonviolent resistance at Fort Benning, Ga., home to the School of the Americas, an Army military combat training school. She has helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq, and she was among the first internationals to visit the Jenin camp in the Occupied West Bank. She is a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and has received awards nationwide for her work, including the 2004 Cranbrook Peace Foundation Annual Peace Award, the Houston Peace and Justice Center National Peacemaker Award and the 2005 Peace Seeker of the Year honor from the Montana Peace Seekers Network.