March 11

So blogging may not be my specialty...but I will try to do better about keeping this up to date.

In the last month we have had one round of critiques with all of the students. On each of the critique days we had a guest from the local arts community join us to add their insights to the discussion. The four guests were: Vince Carducci, art critic and philosopher; Paul Kotula, artist, teacher, and gallerist; Susan Aaron-Taylor, artist and professor at College for Creative Studies, and Jacque Liu, artist. Each brought an interesting point of view to the discussions and some very relevant information to help each student's work.

The other major event since my first posting was our fourth semester reviews. This was a very intense time for everyone involved. All of the Artists in Residence visit several students, but none from our own department, each day for five days. We discuss their work with them in a one on one meeting. This is one of the two times during each student's tenure at Cranbrook where they are being evaluated on their progress in an official, school wide capacity. All of the second year Fiber students successfully passed their reviews and are now developing their projects for the thesis exhibition. (More on that later in the semester.)