Visiting Scholar - Fereshtei Toosi

Fereshtei Toosi is an artist who creates projects that often involve the whole community, and are all about participation. For example, one was about food culture. It involved gardening tutorials, helping with disabilities, and designing various projects for school. This project took place in a mainly African-American neighborhood, and she wanted to encourage people to connect with their heritage through food. Out of this came the book Garlic and Greens, which includes various recipes and oral histories.
I thought it was interesting how so many of her projects and work relates to food and how people connect to it.

Clare Finin & Michael Ho - Current Research in Graduate School

Clare Finin - MFA Candidate in Metals

There is a lot of emphasis put on the studio side of things in an MFA program.
Life in the MFA program has a lot of responsibilities and can be very stressful and busy. There are meetings, homework, teaching, emailing, etc. She doesn't have time to hang out with her friends or have time for leisure. However, this is her passion and she wants to be doing this.
Clare likes to research the relationship between objects and emotions from the past. When we hold a certain item, we are able to once again feel old emotions. This helps shift the object's meaning to something much more personal.
Clare loves to research, critique, create, and read. All of these things help her think of new ideas and push herself further in her work.

Michael Ho - MA Candidate in Art Education

He began to be passionate about art in his later years of high school. He got a scholarship to a summer art school, and after that he knew he wanted to pursue art. After going to community college and not doing so well, he decided to get a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting in Houston.
Michael began teaching elementary art and he became interested in education. As an educator, he learned more about himself as an artist.
However, Michael wanted to learn more and so he decided to go to graduate school. He wanted to be able to be an artist, a teacher, and a researcher. He needed to credentials in order to move up in the art world and have more opportunities.
Michael does what is known as art-based research. He became interested in why people needed to call themselves an artist/teacher/researcher - was it necessary?
If he was doing what everyone else was doing, why did he not feel like he was accomplishing all of this?
His research dealt with identity and so he used psychology to help him understand it better. For example, he referred to Erickson who discusses different ages and the related psychosocial crisis.
Still, he wondered why people needed to be hung up on the word "artist". He decided it was more important to have actions than to become obsessed with whether or not he was an actual artist.
"We should be concerned with the action rather than the title."

Visiting Scholar - Jason Long

Jason Long spoke about architecture and the various buildings he had helped with designing.
First was the 11 Street Bridge Park. This combined art with functionality in many ways. It's interesting because it's an elevated park, which was a first for Washington DC. It kind of reminds me of the High Line in New York City.
Another building was the Lucas Cultural Art Museum. It was designed to almost "float" so that it wouldn't block the view of the lake.
All of the buildings that Long spoke of seemed to take the environment around them into account, so that the building and the land had a nice flow. I liked that, because I feel as though that is an important aspect to architecture that a lot of people don't normally think about.

Kiki Smith in "Printmaking"

Kiki Smith is a printmaker. In this video, she is working on a print for a friend who is also an artist. She says that drawing/printing hair is much funner to do, but that working on skin is very difficult. Making the prints is a very long process, because each time she will go back and change a tiny thing. Between the first and last print, there is a large transformation.
I like how she refers to printmaking as a mystery, because you never quite know how they will turn out.

Emmy Lingscheit - Printmaking

The imagery in a print isn't a reproduction of another work, it's a work of art itself.
Matrix : a positive that makes the impression on the paper out of ink
Printmaking has been around a long time, and keeps evolving over time. It's played a large role as a technology in recording history.
Printmakers made first-person accounts of what they were studying. Before photography, this helped people all over see things they otherwise wouldn't have.
Printmaking creates a sort of community, because there are many steps and skills necessary to the process. It's important you have others to help you and work with.
We use things that have been made by the process of printmaking everyday, such as money.
There are many different kinds of printmaking such as:
-woodcut
-lithography
-screenprint
-letterpress

Andy Warhol used printmaking in many of his works, and used it as a symbol of mass-production in society.

JR "My wish: Use art to turn the world inside out"

Could art change the world?
JR is a street artist from France. His friend called him and said he should try to "change the world, not save it", and that got him thinking.
He spent his teenage years doing art in the streets as a way to leave his mark. Then he got a camera, and started to use his prints as a sort of graffiti.
Riots began to break out in Paris, and he decided to try and use his photography/graffiti as a way to change. When the government began to show and appreciate his work, he realized "the power of paper and glue".

Jennifer O'Connor - Art Education

Jennifer O'Connor worked at a non-profit community arts center in the southwest side of Chicago.
It was located in a working class neighborhood with a diverse population. The classes included visual art, dance, music, and theater. They put on plays, musicals, and films, and held auctions and local charity events.
Jennifer was interested in having classes that were based on genuine art education. They were designed by teaching artists and used quality materials. The arts center began to expand, and served more than 15,000 students annually.
The gallery at the arts center contained works by local artists, contemporary artists, outsider artists, and even student artists. There were many student exhibits with art from area schools.
The job helped Jennifer meet many different artists and have new experiences.
Some of the best parts of working at a non-profit community arts center were creating classes, working and meeting with artists, and working with parents and students in the community.
However, some of the lows of the job were finances, working with schools who didn't want programming, and working in an environment where visual art was not valued.
Non-profit work has many challenges. There is always a need for new ideas and new people, and it can be difficult and draining. However, it is very rewarding and an amazing experience.