The biggest challenge I faced in this project was the time crunch I was under to put together an art show. The little amount of time that I had made it difficult for me to make a nice,clean, professional call to artists and to get it out into the community. Within the first 3 weeks, I felt very rushed to get the word out about needing artists. It also affected the artist I had in my art show, I wish I would have had more variety in the pieces and artists in my show. The little time also made it difficult for me to get a quality advertisement out about my event. In the end, looking back on this, I overcame these things by just blowing them off or not doing them of good quality.
Ten years from now, I'm sure I'll remember how much I enjoyed putting together an art show. Typically I just put pieces in art shows, but through this project, I decided to do the other side and work on creating an art show from the gallery side. From now on I will remember how physically and emotionally difficult it can be, as well as how much work and time it takes to put together a professional, fairly successful art show.
I do think that all schools should offer a 20% project for students at some time. This project offers students the freedom to explore things that regular projects typically dong allow them to. This project allowed me to explore my interests while I tackled an issue that was related. through tackling this issue, I was also able to affect others and give them opportunities that would not regularly have the chance to. Because I made this an audience-centered project, it became more meaningful to me.
04.18.16
I’ve had an art show since my last blog post. My art show was the night of the last post, as well as the following day. Overall, it went well. I have also been working on my TED talk. My TED talk has been difficult for me and it really doesn’t look like I’ve done much on it.
I’ve had a really, surprisingly difficult time with my TED talk. I have restarted and scrapped it multiple times. It's just not working out for me. I think I'm struggling so much because I really do want to end this project strong, but I don't feel like I am quite capable of doing this to my standards. I also feel quite a bit of pressure for this to be flawless because it's worth so much of my grade and I didn't do super well on my last presentation for this class. I also feel like I'm not very strong at giving well put together presentations.
In the last little while, i have learned that I have high expectations for myself. But, at the same time, i have a low confidence that I will actually achieve them. This is hard for me, and I really need to work on this. I've also noticed that I get frazzled with work easily. I’ll be fine with the work that I have to do and then something starts to go wrong and it all goes downhill. At this point I usually give up or really procrastinate, making my work lower quality.
04.08.16
Since my last update, I have learned that other people are generally very unreliable. I went from having 15 people participating in my art show to just 6 artists, including myself. That's over half. A few artists gave me reasons why they couldn’t participate, note that these people spoke up no more than 2 days before the show. These reasons were understandable, they had left town, couldn’t get things to work, and I was fine with this, I was expecting to lose a couple artists. I just was expecting to find out more in advance so I could make other arrangements. The other artists just suddenly stopped cooperating with me and I just had to give up on them after multiple efforts. Another reason that I have such few artists is because my call to artists was never passed on to a gallery's artist list. I had sent out an email with my call to artists and everything, but the gallery got busy and never sent the email on. This really disappointed me, but it was nice to know the reason wy I wasn't receiving other artists, rather than assuming that they just thought they were too good or something and didn't want to participate.
I've successfully accomplished putting together an art show! Earlier this week I met with Phil Bryson, the owner of the show's venue. He seemed to be very supportive of my project and everything that I wanted to do. I also have all of the art pieces that I am going to get for my show. Half of these pieces are already hung up in space, but tonight I have to hang the rest. I will have about 2 hours to hang additional art, sweep, clean the glass, hang tags, and prepare food before I open the show.
As I mentioned at the top I mentioned how unreliable people can be. This has been my main issue recently. It's too bad that I give people the chance to make lots of money off of their art, but they chose to throw the opportunity in the trash. I don't blame them, they don't know how much this show means to me, and I don't expect them to.
03.23.16
The thing that I took away most from the gallery walk was that I actually know quite a bit about my project and that I am super psyched for my art show. Talking more about my project and the final product is really making me more passionate about this. I didn’t receive a lot of critique on my project, other than, “Wow, this is a really cool project.” Even though I didn’t get much feedback, it made me realize that I want more artists from the community than I have at this point. Since the last blog entry, I have done a couple things. I secured my venue, last week a had it but it wasn’t a for sure thing. Just today, I heard back from the owner of the space and he is all for it. I have also researched and found a few ways to display artwork without putting hardware or holes in the walls that I actually like. Overall, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot to get done in one week, but I have sort of been waiting on things to happen and keep moving. Recently I have had issues with not getting responses from the people that I need them from. Throughout the past weeks I have been trying to get artists from the community to participate in my show, but I haven’t been as successful with it as I would like. I also haven’t received all the information I need from my participants. I just today received a confirmation email from the space owner. The lack of communication is sort of stalling my progress. My next step is to start on my promotion for my event. I am going to make my advertisements and get them critiqued. My goal is to have them done and up around town around the start of next week.
03.16.16
Since my last blog entry, I have learned that I actually really enjoy planning events. I have really taken a large step in organizing an art show on my own with a bit of guidance from my mentor. I like working behind the scenes, rather than just putting my art into a show. I feel like this is making this project a lot more personal than I expected. In the last couple days I have called around and managed to find a venue for my art exhibit. I have really started to iron out all the kinks in my project. I decided roughly a week ago that I no longer want to try to bring attention to other issues through this project because I don’t really connect with it and I can’t feel passionate about this project or make it something that I will be proud of if I don’t feel connected with it. I have managed to get 13 artists from our school to participate, as well as a few others from the community for sure. I have definitely faced multiple challenges, but have overcome many of them. Acquiring artists was difficult, but I now have a pretty swell number and am striving for more. Finding a venue was also quite difficult and stressful for me. Eventually things worked out and my connections paid off. Figuring out how to arrange the space and display art is also proving to be quite difficult. Since it is a rental space, I can’t really put holes and hardware into the walls to hang pieces. This is a challenge that I have yet to overcome, but I cannot wait to conquer it. My next step is to get my call to artists email out to Studio & to get more artists participating. I am also waiting to hear back from Phil Bryson about the space and when I can go check it out to get ideas. While I am waiting for a response I can begin to research ways to display art and how to set up the space.
03.09.16
This week I have learned that I have a hard time making solidified decisions. I have ended up slightly changing my project. Instead of focussing on two issues, local issue awareness and starving artists, I have decided to focus just on the starving artist issue because I think that it could be a stronger and more in depth presentation. I am also much more passionate about this issue than overall issues that I have been researching. I have also realized that I need to really get my promotion and invitational pieces done and out there. I have been meeting with my mentor, Ashley Hein, roughly every other day and bouncing ideas around. She has been a large help to me already, helping my solidify my ideas. I am really hoping to get a lot of entries and artists. If I have a substantial number of pieces for my show then I would LOVE to have my show at the Smiley building. I'm developing a more thought out plan for my project as I go. This week I have had two issues. First, I began to realize that I'm not all that passionate about what I have been researching and that I want to slightly change my project. The second is that I am spending too much time on my artists needed announcement and I just need to get it out there. The first thing that I need to do is make my call to artists and start to get entries ASAP. After that, I need to find a venue and advertise the event. I CAN DO THIS!
03.04.16
This week I Learned a lot about myself and the standards that I hold myself to. Just about two days into this project, I had a break down because my dream project wasn’t going to work out. I was having a really hard time getting over this and finding something else that I'd be passionate about. At this point I had thought that this project was already a failure. Luckily I had many people that I could talk to about this and this ended in the project that I am now passionate about. I also had to refine my project based on the time that I have to complete it. I was way too ambitious earlier on and I learned that this could hurt me. Don’t get me wrong, I am still holding myself to high standards, they are just a bit more realistic now. This week I have finished my project proposal and finally started feeling good about my project. I have started to research local/state issues and am starting to get some ideas of what I want to learn about and what I want to include. So far, I am interested in including pieces about animal waste polluting water sources, overgrazing, animal poaching, and Animas river pollutants. I have also decided that I want to base the issues in this project around environmental issues. Yesterday I downloaded photoshop and illustrator onto my computer so that I can start making advertisement and invitations to, hopefully, get artists. I also made part of the image that I want to use on this advertisement. Overall, I accomplished my weekly deliverables. I definitely was challenged when I was told that the product of my project already existed. As a byproduct of this news, I was challenged with making a new project. I also had difficulty coming up with an image that I would like on my open invitation advertisement. At this point I could very well end up changing this image, but it needs to be done ASAP so I can keep moving forward. My next step is to finish my advertisement and get it out there. I’d like to get this in the works by Monday at the very latest. I also will be working heavily on finding a venue so I can get promotional material made ASAP. I also need to start putting my information and notes into paragraph form.
02.26.16
The image I chose for today is a photograph of the Community Supported Art website for Colorado.
For my project I want to create a series of art pieces based around issues (Globally, Locally, or Animas High School related), issues that need to be brought to the public’s attention. I want to create art that makes people feel things. As a product I would like to have a final art show. I could use this show/event to bring awareness to these things and to inform the general public of these issues. It would be nice sell these pieces and make money to donate. I could donate this money to causes that assist the awareness of or battle these issues. I am really passionate about art and allowing options in schools for students that are passionate about it as well. I’d like to put these funds towards an additional art program that allows students to explore their interests in different styles and mediums of art. I’m not quite sure what I’d like this program to look like at this point. I know that many community members in Durango are artists and/or are interested in supporting youth. I will be targeting community members, especially those passionate about art, as well as older/adult members and uninformed high school students. I think that there is a bit of a difference between student-centered learning and audience-centered learning. This difference, for me, has a lot to do with the meaning and experience that goes along with these projects. Student-centered learning and projects are usually just something students do for a grade. They usually don’t hold much meaning for students, nor are they very memorable or teach many helpful skills. Audience-centered learning and projects have a larger impact. They inform and educate the audience, they make the project more meaningful for the student or whoever is working on the project. With audience-centered learning/projects comes a totally different experience for everyone. It allows the audience to play a roll and get in on the experience as well. This also makes the experience more memorable and meaningful for the student. Right now I am just trying to solidify my idea and plan for this project. As wrote earlier, I want to do an art related project, but want to make sure it is meaningful for me and not just a popsicle stick project. I was having a really hard time trying to come up with ideas in my head, but after I started to talk or write about it, all of the ideas started to flow out. There is still a chance that I may change my plan, but I know that I want to have my own art show. The next step is to solidify my plan and to fill out the sheet as a guide along the way. I also need to talk to my adviser, Ashley, and then probably Libby about getting an independent arts program set up and what that requires.