Art Fairs, Tenure, and Spring Break

Trevor recently got back from a week in New York at The Armory Show for the gallery, and it was a very successful fair. They sold out of one new Gregory Scott piece (he's the same artist they sold out of at Art Miami in December), sold a few more of his pieces, and sold pieces from a number of other artists, including Nan Goldin. According to T.'s boss, Cathy, it was the gallery's most successful fair to date.

The Armory booth on Pier 94

 She and T.'s co-worker, Juli, are going back to NYC this week for AIPAD show (Association of International Photography Art Dealers), so T. will be manning the gallery with the new Steve Shapiro show. Stop by to visit him if you're interested in Taxi Driver and The Godfather, since the show features still shots from these two films.

While T. was out of town, I did a lot of not much. I hung out with Henry (I talked to him quite a bit more than he talked to me), did a lot of school work, watched a lot of trashy television, and spent one afternoon crafting with my friend Linda (she sewed and I knitted). She's pictured here hammering a snap onto a hand-sewn pouch:

I also had to take care of a semi-sick Henry, who'd decided to eat half of his blanket (about six pounds according to the before-and-after barfing weigh-ins the vet did...) and had some minor trauma to his inner eyelid, which fixed itself pretty quickly, but looked really awful (think walleye). We think he was so distraught at Trevor's absence that he started rebelling in strange ways. He's all better now.

Right before T. left for NY, I found out that I got tenure, which was exciting. The MCC Board of Trustees voted on it on February 24, and although the vote was really a nothing event (it was included with about thirty other "no contest" voting items, which they voted on all at once), it's nice to have it over. There was a Tenure Tea on Thursday for me and my fellow tenure recipients, and we got some sparkly tiaras to wear and some wands to wave:

Me and two of my six fellow tenurees (that's a lightsaber in the foreground)

Me and my friend Justin in his awesome airline sport jacket

In other exciting news, I'm going on our second annual Alternative Spring Break with school. We leave on March 27 and will be in Nashville for three days doing volunteer work with a number of different organizations. Then we'll head to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to help get rid of invasive species. We've got eighteen fantastic students--three are returning from last year, but the rest are new, including a new faculty member to bring us up to four trip advisers. We had our first meeting on Friday and snapped a picture of the group.

We'll be keeping up with the blog that we started last year (here's the link if you want to refresh your memory), and I'll be keeping this blog up to date with some postings as well.

And I'll end with a couple of images from the Learning Community I'm teaching. A Learning Community is a class composed of two different classes and two different teachers--usually a content class (like psychology or, in my case, art appreciation) and a skills class (like English or speech). The students enroll in both classes and get full credit for both classes, but go through the classes together as a cohort. The classes are co-taught by the two teachers, and the skills taught are taught in context using the content. My portion of my LC is a composition one class, so the students are learning the skills of composition and rhetoric, and all of the writing they're doing is about the art and artistic concepts they're learning. It's very cool. One of the first projects they did was a "sound interpretation": the students listened to six different songs and used pastel chalk to interpret those songs with color, line, and shape on paper. They each chose their favorite image from the six they'd created and wrote an artist statement, explaining what they'd done, why they'd done it, and what they hoped their audience would experience. And now those pieces are displayed! Check them out:

The sound interpretations are on the right, and another project our students did, a "texture and context" project, are on the left. Here's a close-up of those:

None of our fifteen students are art students--it's a gen. ed., and they're just in it for the humanities credit. This makes it even cooler that they've produced such interesting work, and they were so excited to see their pieces up in the art hallway, displayed for everyone. I'm so proud of them, and although this class takes a huge amount of preparation, I'm really excited to be doing it.

And now I'm going to stick some laundry in the dryer and organize a playlist of the Garth Brooks songs I just burned from Greg (was anyone else inspired by Scotty McCreery's rendition of "The River" last week on American Idol? The rendition was a little hammy, but it reminded me what a great song it is!). Good night, all, and have a lovely (and slightly warmer) week!