Melissa Hidalgo - My Love, Our Public Lands

This first semester of the MAE program has been inspiring due to the readings we have had. These readings have felt personal and heartfelt. These readings have also gotten us to speak and respond on a personal level. A part of it for me has to do with the fact that I don’t have to open up to you all in person. This last year I’ve realized that I have a problem with not being able to open up to people, not even the people closest to me, but especially not face to face. I’ve been getting better at trusting my opinions, thoughts, and other people with them. This class felt easy for me to open up to, not only because it’s an online class but how safe Future and all you make it feel.

One of the biggest things I got from our readings was creating something with meaning and action. Since I started teaching, I have felt like I have forgotten what it is to make art for me and most importantly as a way to express thoughts about something I feel strongly about. Currently, it’s the protection of our public lands. Last week, I realized how important it is for me to speak up for something I love and find peace from. The outdoors is a place that needs our protection and not to let it be taken by greedy people for money and corporate goals.

My project is still a working idea. I want to get people to see the beauty and importance of our public lands and has them feeling something when it gets destroyed.  I’m still not sure how I would like to improve on this but I started experimenting with my students on ways to manipulate an inkjet photograph after it’s been printed. I decided to take some of my landscape photographs (that were taken at public lands) and sort of destroy them to where only the impression of a landscape was left. I would love if anyone had ideas or opinions on this ideas.

Debbie Caillet - Play Book

I was so inspired by the readings this semester. I wanted to take the important aspects, the writings that resonated with me, the words to remember and live by and put them all together artistically. I created a book with pages to hold the thoughts, feelings, practices, play, lessons, and assignments discovered and learned this semester in Pedagogy. I originally wanted to create little book putting into action all of Corita’s assignments but also want to add inspirations from other reads from this course for I feel they are all interconnected. Bookmaking is a love of mine for I love the process of creating a vessel to contain art, writing, and feelings. My passion for creating a cover and the pages within is just as profound as filling the pages with the beauty of words, imagery, and art. I crafted the covers out of clay and my purpose was to have each page created by my own hands using handmade paper techniques but time would not allow. My goal is still to create my own paper for this book and also to incorporate found paper. The beauty of my project/book is the process. Each page added in its own time representing a moment, an observation, a feeling. 

Sarah Spomer Project (Eyewear)

White (black). Female (male). Gay (straight). Artist (mathematician). Millennial (Boomer). Democrat (Republican). Other/none of the above. These are all labels we use to define ourselves and those around us. I’ve wanted to create this mask piece for many years. The goal of this piece is to question the point at which the labels we (and society) place on ourselves cross the line from helpful to detrimental. At their best, labels can help someone come to terms with an identity, claim a place in a social group, discover and pursue new directions, and help forge new connections and understanding. At their worst, they divide, belittle, dehumanize, and blind us. And at their core, what they are is a way to make sense of and come to terms with our differences and our natural inclination to group up based on these differences. Humanity has struggled with, and continues to struggle with, living peacefully with these divides, and it really seems to come down to not physical differences as much as the cultural/religious/political oppositions they represent. Our deep discussions over Sentipensante Pedagogy really got me back to considering these issues, and rekindled my desire to create this mask. 

I did a lot of experimenting to reach this point. A lot of tags, including those with specific colors/symbols and the words themselves, were tossed aside in favor of the more ambiguous, blank look. The repetition and knitting echoes the primary features of my thesis body. The labels are Wal-Mart hangtags that I’ve colored with Copic markers in shades and tones associated with various important cultural identities. The overarching colors, peach and pink, represent my own identities. I don't have a solid clasp, but I would like to create a mechanism that incorporates a padlock. I also might add some dangling tags, as they looked really neat in production before I tied them tight on the knit armature. Rob likes the piece and thinks I should keep playing with it and add it to my thesis portfolio. 

The mask both reveals and obscures the identity of the wearer, both shelters them from the pain of discrimination and hides new perspectives important to growth. How far should we let labels influence us in our relationships, with others and ourselves? What role should we let them play in our daily lives? Trying to find my own place with my own labels, and both my majority and my minority statuses, has taken me on an intense emotional and political journey. After fifteen years, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: if there is a difficult issue with no perfect answers, I’m not sure one SHOULD be completely satisfied in their opinions. Someone with a strong, confident response to a moral dilemma is probably wrong. We should all seek to hear out each other’s perspectives and experiences, and try to bridge gaps. This is a very important part of education, and I hope that it is how we finally address the hyper-partisanship in this country, as well.

My Teacher Box

While we were reading Sentipensante, I liked Pulido’s idea for creating boxes which would reflect the students’ identity, so I decided to make a box that would represent me as a teacher. Because I wish to be a teacher who listens to what the students have to say, I started the project by asking students in the School of Art to write on a small card what is in their opinion the most important quality a teacher should have. The exterior of the box was made based on their answers. Inspired by Corita’s approach to art projects, I chose to pair the most prevalent responses with symbols, some of them ancient, other more recent. Therefore, from left to right, you can see a runic symbol for passion, an African icon for humility, a Celtic symbol for intellect, the equivalent of understanding in Braille, a comedy mask for humor, the Alim symbol for integrity, a Zibu symbol for compassion, and the universal sign for fairness / justice (probably of Egyptian origin). On top of the box stays the Chinese symbol for patience, which most of the students indicated as the key quality. Because my daughter Sara wants to be an Art teacher (big surprise!) and because she is such an inspiration and such an important part of me, the colors on one corner of the box are the imprints of her hand. The interior of the box is both a memory and a warning. The sides suggest painted fragments from Pink Floyd’s "Another Brick in the Wall". As any young person, in the past, I often identified with this song; the bottom of the box illustrates my desire of not becoming “just another brick in the wall”.  

Chris Brandt - work

   The readings and postings from this semester stressed, to me, the importance of relationships and the artistic process.  Rendon and Pausch stressed the student-teacher and family relationships.  Flueckinger, as well as the Rural Studio and the book about Corita Kent, seemed to stress learning the process of creating as well as relationships.
    The sewing project shown here is a collaboration between my daughter, Holly, who has developmental delays, and myself.  I love her artwork, and she loved that I picked her work to sew.  Our enjoyment of art is just a part of our relationship.  My work in clay takes something that is thought of as functional and altering it into a non-functional piece.  I decided to try combining the processes of sewing and ceramics.  I sewed on the clay before firing on one piece, and after firing on the other.  The bisqueware piece is still in process, sewing on fired clay is harder that I thought!

Thread on Linen

8"x10"

 

 

 

Holly's work, and my interpretation

 

Low fire terra cotta clay

coiled and altered

fired to cone 04

thread

8"x5"x4"

side one

side two

 

Terra cotta low fire clay

coiled, altered and sewn

fired to 04

Burnt Umber wash

fired to 06

9"x4"x4"

side 1

side 2

Paige Gates Project

In the books we read, I felt a sense of community brought by educators to their students. The Rural Studio, Mockbee built a valuable and useful relationships with students and poverty-stricken townspeople.The first conversations involving students and prospective homeowners was probably tense. First impression had to be quickly overlooked with empathy and understanding as the foremost importance. To create art emphasizing this, I decided feet portraits would be a good example of the uncomfortable first impression. Asking to take photographs of people’s feet for my copper etchings, was somewhat difficult. Many would respond negatively and did not want to participate. Taking off their socks and shoes, I could see they felt vulnerable and embarrassed.  Soon, the shyness turned to giggles, silliness and storytelling. Because of the togetherness formed after the photographic session, I included a set of mugs. I could imagine a group of unique individuals sitting together having a hot beverage, developing relationships by sharing stories of struggle, heartache and joy. The framed print of their feet hangs on the wall. As Laura I. Rendon states they are “practicing forgiveness, compassion, and learning to say., ‘I love you,’ and mean it.”

Final work and words

This is where you can upload images of your work and your essay/response to your creative process.  You are all authors on this site so it should not be hard to paste something from your desktop. I am more interested in what you learned and how you explored over a finished product. A finished work is welcomed just not required.

Thank you one and all for sharing your thoughts and reflections.