Friday, February 6, 2009

A busy couple of weeks

For a place with no institutionally determined schedule, we sure can keep ourselves busy. The last week is a case in point. After my last post we started discussions on professional practices topics - starting with goal setting and time management. We also started our group critiques with the work of four students on January 28. And then on January 29 things started to get interesting.
We hosted Sue Taylor, art historian at Portland State University, critic, and author of numerous reviews, articles, and the book, "Hans Bellmer: The Anxiety of Anatomy. Before arriving at Cranbrook Taylor lectured at Wayne State University in Detroit on the work of the art critic. On the 30th she presented a lecture titled, "Feminism and Femmage since 1970" at Cranbrook. That was followed by a very intense afternoon of critiques in the Fiber Department. We finished the day with a dinner in Sue's honor.
Saturday brought the opening of my Artist in Residence show at the Cranbrook Art Museum.
On Sunday the museum hosted a lecture titled "Cartoon Violence" by Phoenix based, mixed media artist Jon Haddock. You can see his work at whitelead.com Jon spent the day on Monday meeting individually with Fiber Students and the evening brought a dinner in Jon's honor with the Fiber and Photo departments.
After a rest day on Tuesday we returned to departmental critiques on Wednesday with the work of four more students. Most of the critiques were of the work of second year students who are all starting to develop their Degree Exhibition projects in various ways.