Sunday, April 26, 2015

A 3-Year Update

I'm told artists and other creative professionals should spend a significant portion of their time on professional practice, things like emailing, photographing work, applying to shows, and flossing. I struggle to prioritize my studio time as it is and so this sometimes seems daunting to me. No matter, as I've learned: no one else will do it for you. If I wait on the world to find my work and tell me how great it is,  I will be waiting a long time. And so world, I am here to practice the time-honored practice of shameless self-promotion. 

Below is a three-year update of recent exhibitions, studio work, and my life in between. And here you can browse a PDF catalog of my smaller work for sale. 

Exhibitions
This past year I was lucky to be included in a couple exciting group shows this year: State Park in San Diego, CA; CNTRL+P:Printmaking in the 21st Century by University of Tennessee Alumni in Knoville, TN; and the Neville Museum’s 70th Art Annual in Green Bay, WI.
State Park at UC-San Diego's University Gallery, La Jolla, CA


State Park, curated by artist Mike Calway-Fagen, is up through May 1st at the University of California San Diego’s University Gallery. My work in the show includes a felt Land Scout sash and badges and a newly published Land Scouts’ Guide Book. I’ve not seen the show, but the gallery website describes it as, “unpack[ing] state parks as sites rich with conflict and complexities---where landscape, myth, identity, class, exclusivity, exploitation, wildness, tragedy, erasure, memory, leisure, spirit, holism, play, and adventure exert their individual and collective forces.”
What You've Got (front and center) at the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
CTRL+P: Printmaking in the 21st Century byUniversity of Tennessee Alumni was held in conjunction with SGCI 2015, an annual international printmaking conference. Sarah Suzuki, Associate Curator for the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, was the curator. My piece in the show What You’ve Got featured a grid of seed balls and an offer to trade. The seeds included for this particular show were all for orange and white blooming flowers, a nod to UT’s colors.

Nerd alert! Posing with What You've Got
at the Neville Museum, Green Bay
The same seed ball piece What You’ve Got also made it into the Neville Museum’s 70th Art Annual where it won Third Place and the juror’s Legacy Prize. (Woo hoo!) This iteration of the piece included a mix of Midwestern prairie wildflowers in the seed balls. The Neville curators were excited to have participatory art in the show and the piece has been entirely traded out. I’ll be delivering a refresher batch of seed balls to the museum later this week. The show is up through May 10th.

Studio and Print Work
This past summer I collaborated with Green Bay printmakers and fine human beings Johanna Winters and Don Krumpos on a large wood cut print for the ReallyBigPrints! event. We carved a 3’ x 5’ piece of birch plywood with Saints of the Fox River. (Shown below.) Each artist drew and carved a saint framed by an arched window. In the background we floated the molecular model of polychlorinated biphenyl, a toxic contaminant of the Fox River. You can see photos of our print and process here. Krumpos, Winters, and I donated two copies of our print to the ReallyBigPrints traveling exhibition. One copy remains for sale if you're looking for some Really Big Art. 

Earlier this fall I got to print a small edition of prints with Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop, the project of Ben Rinehart at Lawrence University. Ben and his students helped me pull an edition of 30 two-color screen prints. The image was part of the Land Scouts’ Guide Book and looks great in the blue and gray we used. Ten prints remain from my half of the edition and are available for sale in my catalog for $50.

Detail from screen print made with Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop
Thanks to a generous grant from my college I was able to produce a limited edition run of the first print edition of the Land Scouts’ Guide Book. The book introduces the Land Scouts, explains how to earn your Observation badge, and includes information on hosting your own Land Scout troop. It is hand bound with digital printed and screen printed pages. I’m looking forward to working on the next Land Scout book this summer. Printed copies of the Guide Book are $25 and you can read it for free online here.

Lastly and most recently, I was honored to draw illustrations for the promotional materials  of the bell hooks Residency at St. Norbert College. hooks is a public intellectual and feminist scholar, and she didn't mind me drawing her as Yoda. One of the original pencil drawings is now part of the recently opened bell hooks Institute in Berea, KY. 


The 3-Year Life Summary
In late 2012 I quit my marketing job to start teaching art and design part-time in Nashville at Tennessee State University and Volunteer State Community College. In early 2013 I interviewed and later got a full-time teaching job at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. Stephen, dog, and I moved to Wisconsin later that summer. Our first Wisconsin winter had a name (the Polar Vortex) and we learned to be stoic and mostly pleasant through a long winter. In the summer of 2014 we moved to Manitowoc, a smaller town on Lake Michigan. We can see a lighthouse from our kitchen window and watched the shallow parts of the lake freeze and thaw all winter. I enjoy finding lake glass and fish carcasses on the beach near our house. I love my job at SNC.


See you all again for the next 2-3 year update. Thanks for your ongoing support of my work. 



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