Lindsay Richard

It seems to me that contemporary art is just a way to define what is happening at the current time in a present community by representing either current feelings or  experience through a physical piece of artwork, photograph, article of clothing, video or sound recording.  What is contemporary today will probably not be contemporary tomorrow and probably wasn’t yesterday.  How big or how small the “community” is, is up to the artist.  What they choose to include or leave out in their piece all depends on the message they’re trying to transcend at that particular time.  The idea behind my video is to incorporate not only the artistic practices of contemporary artists we met and learned from throughout the Fall Semester, but to also exhibit how it is possible that all ideas in the art world are cyclical, and while I can pick up on an idea from a video, I can recreate it and alter it to suit my unique viewpoint as an artist.  These ideas also trickle down into the classroom.  Students are equally as susceptible to “the influences of the time” as I am as an art student, and as artists are in their professional careers.  The important thing to recognize is that while experience and technical ability often mean the difference between child art, student art, and the artwork hung in a museum or professional gallery, no idea is “contemporarily invalid” if it is created under the same conditions.

Seminar 1&2 Final Video

While the premise of the Seminar 1 & 2 class is to prepare students to begin processing the idea of managing their lives wearing the “hats” of “artist” and “educator,” it is my belief that through our vast range of experience with both genres, I was in fact able to try on the hat of every person we met while we were out in the field.  No two sets of duties performed by each host were exactly alike, the challenges in each classroom, non-profits arts organization or artist cooperative differed in their goals as organizations, their expenses and variety of support.   It was amazing to see how many different ways art students, and artists in general can engage with young people and begin a discussion about art that could possibly open doors for both parties where previously there didn’t appear to be any.  The system Artists for Humanity has in place offers creative high school students not only a terrific facility to spend their after school hours making artwork, but a real live way to sell their work and gain self-worth for their accomplishments and talents. While the students are given a high amount of responsibility, the pay-off for that responsibility and the freedom to create what they want to create is a worthwhile investment for a young artist looking to strengthen their artistic muscle.  I envy the possibility students in the Boston area have to participate in such a forward thinking program.

Beginning with our first high school experiences I took a lot away from our conversation with Chandra Ortiz.  I was excited to see an educator who is young, excited to inspire growth and change in a new facility and seems to have a good idea how to balance her career, personal life and artist life in order to keep herself energized and continuing to effect positive change.  Her advice to “carve out your studio practice,” & to “make it sacred” was some of the best advice I think I could have received all semester as I was balancing so many hats in my own life.  It doesn’t make a difference whether the balancing act is always between educating and making art, but rather the idea of making time to fulfill the expectations you have for yourself and the things you feel passionately towards to ensure that your spirit is properly fed.  There is something about making artwork that connects to the soul as deeply and personally as the desire to care for others, monitoring oneself and taking care of one’s spirit is that best way to ensure this well isn’t depleted.

I find a lot of comfort in the idea that such positive outlets exist within the teaching world and within the art world for both highly developed artists and young artists only beginning to get their hands dirty.  It is exciting moving forward that all these little jems are at my fingertips should I choose to reach out, lift up some rocks, peer around some corners and form partnerships with some of the awesome artist’s and educators that we had the privilege of accompanying on our journey this Fall semester.

After visiting Shazia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions exhibit for the first time, it was clear to me that in order to understand the work I needed to first understand the cultural context behind it.  Shazia’s featured work in the exhibit ranged from gauche paintings to video installations featuring images of her Indo-Persian miniature paintings, military processions and over-layed text. It was obvious that I needed to see her speak about her work.  My research first led me to the Art 21: episode focusing on spirituality. Later on I attended the Artist Lecture and Gallery opening where Shazia continued to delve deeper into not only details behind her work but the reasons for her motivations both as a woman from pakistan and that influence on her choices as an artist.

Art 21Episode: Spirituality

In this episode we watch as Shazia creates her tea-dyed paper and then prepares a large-scale installation for a gallery exhibit. Each miniature painting must begin with the meditative process of tea-dying the paper.  Slowly, the brush is applied to the paper and line after line of tea is applied and dragged across is, working the bead of tea horizontally down the paper until the entire piece is covered.  It is important that this process be slow and steady so that she can ensure the dye is evenly applied. The Indo-Persian ancient art of  ”Miniature painting comes out of old book painting, manuscript painting, it’s an old art form. All the strange piled up, stacked up perspective, interior spaces, and then all the suggestions of windows and doors which suggest the outside world, or the spiritual world or some notion of perfection. That kind of jewel-like translucency comes through is only because you have a discipline behind it.  It takes many, many layers, at least 10 to 20 layers of color to build it up, and you have to be very careful because if your brush is loaded with too much water you lift off the earlier layers of pigment also because they’re not sealed (Sikander PBS).”  The art of getting miniature painting right takes many years of study, and even then much attention must be paid to detail and patience to ensure that all previous efforts are not ruined.  While attending the National College of the Arts in Lehore, Pakistan, the classroom was a very ritualistic environment where students were expected to leave their shoes outside the classroom, sit on the floor, keep the workspace very clean, and were encouraged to always keep their eyes a foot away from their work.  Study was intensely focused on gaining technical accuracy and as Sikander explains, whose those things were established, “self expression came later.”

Featured in the borders of many miniature paintings lies the arabic calligraphic script.  The script takes on an almost figure like or animal like shape and often represents Sikander’s memory of reading the Quran as a young girl and not thoroughly understanding it but still greatly appreciating the forms. “The beauty of the written word supercedes everything else.” She believes this kind of text has the ability to take you to another level visually because of the forms the overlapping layers of letters are able to take on.  Her primary reasons for studying miniature painting were to eventually use her ability to paint traditionally to then find new ways of representing miniatures in a way that “questioned the relevance of it.”  In later paintings Shazia explores combining Hindu beliefs with Muslim beliefs by changing the known form of popular Hindu goddess forms, veiling a once recognizable face and figure to acknowledge the muslim tradition of ‘not talking about faces’ and the oppression of women.  Using layers of painted transparency paper Sikander produces large scale installations where the faces of women and painted figures are covered by the elusive sheaths of paper in certain areas and exposed in others, alluding to the idea of ‘veiling’ and ‘revealing.’  While Sikander branches out to work on installations and larger scale work, despite the labor intensive process and frustration of working on the miniatures, she always returns to her paintings, commenting that perhaps it is the shear act of doing it that gives her some inner peace.

The themes of harmony, balance, symmetry and exactness tie in closely with the physical practice of meditation.  Included in Shazia’s lecture were several graphite and paper portraits of Monks from her time visiting the Luang Prabang Monastery.  Commenting that “in the drawings also I think I’m very interested in silence”. While visiting, Shazia took photographs of the Monks then later used those as a reference for her photorealistic drawings produced over the course of several intensely focused days of drawing.  Unlike her miniature paintings which often include a full spectrum of colors, the drawings were comprised from the simple materials of a few graphite pencils; the very personal and striking look in the eyes and faces of the Monks gives each of them a very unique and visually striking likeness that allows the viewer to easily relate to the work.

Shazia Sikander is a artist who utilizes the ancient art form of Islamic tradition in order to speak directly to the spiritually and politically charged issues of today’s Islam.  Using primarily ink, gauche, and paper, and animated pieces beginning in 2001, Sikander’s work depicts popular iconography referencing images of the past to illustrate contemporary issues.

Works Cited:

“EPISODE: Spirituality | Art21 | PBS.” PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 19 Jan. 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/art21/watch-now/episode-spirituality>.

Sikander, Shazia. “Shazia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions.” Artist Talk. MassArt Auditorium, Boston, MA. 3 Oct. 2011. Speech.

“The Quiet in the Land : Limited Edition Portfolio.” The Quiet in the Land : Art and Education Organization. Web. 19 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thequietintheland.org/limited-april2.php>.

Images:

“Sikkema Jenkins & Co. – Shahzia Sikander – Works.” Sikkema Jenkins & Co. | Trisha Brown. Web. 19 Jan. 2012. <http://sikkemajenkinsco.com/shahziasikander_works.html>.

Brown. Web. 19 Jan. 2012. <http://sikkemajenkinsco.com/shahziasikander_works.html>.

Beginning our days journey with Mike Mittleman, the artist and editor of Aspect Magazine was an appropriate way to launch into a discussion of media, video, and its active position in the art world.  ”In order to preserve a limited experience for everyone, you are ensuring a limited experience for everyone.” (Mittleman) The way Mittleman describes the benefit to the act of intentionally sharing information with the public that he expects will make many uneasy, resonates with me particularly because I believe finding the answers to the most difficult questions often means submitting yourself to vulnerability and absorbing a great deal of discomfort.  Being trained to possess not only humanitarian eyes but also artist eyes allows me to view ‘The Swirl’ not purely as a record of a cruel act inflicted by a persons desire to torture coy, but as a commentary on something much larger.

This video by Ma YongFong opens up huge questions centered on the issues of morality.  The act of watching the entire cycle forces us to confront our feelings, and in a way, gives many the time to contemplate our own role while watching the video.  What was the artist thinking when he chose to do this? By a few minutes in, this question quickly turns toward introspective ideas.  Would I as an artist ever choose to do something like this? Does the fact that they are fish make any difference to the fact that they are live creatures? Is it any less cruel to torture fish then say, a cat? A dog? This video is particularly powerful because while we contemplate the artist’s intent and his right to produce and show a piece of work like this and label it ‘art’ we not only have to face our own beliefs about what makes something “art” but in deciding how we feel about it we have to try to remove ourselves from our cultural context.  While we can spend our entire artist careers pushing against these basic constructs of the value systems we were born into, the feelings we experience towards actions like these are going to be met with difficulty because while we wish we could view every piece objectively, it is only natural to revert back to our roots as we determine what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong.’  While answering the simple question, was this act cruel? I think yes, on its own, without the video and without publication, we would only possess the story of a guy, who at some point put some fish through the wash cycle of the washer machine in his home, but I feel the story changes when there exists a video record that invites a broader audience to participate visually in an innocent, bystander manner.  I feel an act like the one in ‘The Swirl’ can be positive only when the message reaches others, makes them contemplate their own role in an act such as this one, and we can determine whether or not the  benefits outweigh the basic consequences of the initial action.

Later in the day our ideas of media were thrown a little bit backwards by our visit to the 22nd annual Drawing Show at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Arts Center. The idea of “drawing” represents the complete opposite meaning as an art form to that of a video, perhaps that is because I possess resistance towards ever accepting technology as being on the same plane as any other “traditional” art form like that of painting, printing, or even film photography, but what is relative in both shows is the extremely effective nature of moving pictures to show us the action as the “drawing” over the piece itself.  It is not actually the combination of subject and environmental conditions that we should be thinking about when viewing the video piece, occasionally even disregarding the quality of the filmmaking, but the process that happens throughout the video and its societal implications.  It is difficult to watch a video and relate the action within the video to the act of drawing, but while the artist may not have intended for the finished piece to be read as a human being as formulating a ‘line,’ I very much enjoyed observing the video piece ’60 seconds’ by Jennifer Hedrick through this lens. Drawing is the fundamental beginnings of an artist process, and while this video is simple, just a man walking forth, it takes the viewer time with the piece to observe that as he walks his shadow rotates around him like a clock and we realize that he is actually walking in a circle.  From there we wonder if this video is looped, or maybe we think that the character continues to simply make the same motion forward.  If we can not see where the video may have been spliced, or stay long enough to observe a change in the suns position or wait for the video to run out, then how can we answer these questions with anything less than our speculations?

Mittleman, Mike.  Aspect Magazine, Boston, MA. 1 November. 2011. Lecture.

El Putnam was very generous in her presentation at Mobius, divulging many of the details of her own personal growth, her struggle to find a working artist community and the questions she asks herself about performance itself as an art form. She says “It’s very hard to commercially sell your works, a lot of times the work is ephemeral…one of the challenges of performance art is documentation…how can I do something that connects me to something larger than myself?”  How does an art form such as performance last longer than the mere act?  How does she get her work to a larger audience? The answer for El has been photography and video work, often orchestrated through her own manipulations of tripods and standing cameras, she also enlists the help of other artists to record the performances in a more dynamic fashion.  While the account of the action performed through her body does not compare to the haptic experience El goes through as she creates her gallery scenes, the visual records serve the purpose of providing the work with a way to withstand time, and allow El, as she puts it, ‘a way to explain oneself.’

To utilize one specific example, the “Status” performance was a three night-durational performance resulting in many sheets of paper hanging around the gallery containing the outlines of the shoes worn by the audience members, also listing their brand and the wearers profession.  The following artist statement outlines the intention of the artist: “This work is a commentary on the treatment of shoes as a status symbol, determined by a variety of factors involving cultural identity, including class and gender.  The reduction of the shoes to an outline while presenting only the information that the shoes are meant to symbolize plays with notion in a literal sense, pointing out that the use-value of a shoe extends beyond the need to protect the feet.  My actions are also related to this commentary, with my pacing in intentionally uncomfortable shoes that will harm my feet functioning as a painful reminder of the concepts I present through this work.”

The footwear theme El explores through performance is essentially to create an end result that serves as a cultural study of status based around a necessary material possession, but also to poll her audience and spark their curiosities through their participation.  El uses her own body and her own footwear not as a poster example of her financial capability as an artist to don expensive or inexpensive shoes performing a specific lifestlye-oriented purpose, but rather as representative of her position within society as a female, who at times may be expected to withstand the painful realities of her outright position in a culture that believes in looks over comfort and beauty over brains.

While the collection at Harvard’s art museum also emphasized the figure, they were not representative of the same variety of artist’s process as the work of El Putnam.  The still paintings, collages and sculptures were not visual records of a performance, nor were they the intentional physical results of a performance that took place at one time.  While the range of mediums in the show represented several different viewpoints of the 3D and 2D representation of form, the huge color photograph taken by Gary Schneider was particularly alluring to me.  This isn’t just because as a photo major, photography is always the strongest draw for me within a gallery space, but because the general idea and understanding of photography is that it represents reality as it IS, that the lens can not tell us something that isn’t TRUE, and that idea is simply not the one represented in Gary Schneider’s illusory work of the figure and the face.

Gary Schneider, Helen 2000, 10 minute exposure, pen light on face.

The resulting image is a record of the movement of the face and the change of facial expression throughout that ten minute timeframe.  What is most striking about ‘Helen’ is how deranged and not ‘of-reality’ the photo is.  Upon first glance the photo may even appear to be taken of a person with a disability which causes contortion of the face, while the unevenness of light gives the flesh a color that appears similar to bruising.  With minimal description accompanying the photo, as a viewer I am struck by both the enormous size of the print, as well as several initial ideas as to what exactly it is that I’m looking at.  While similar to El’s work, Schneider’s photographs do have a set duration of 10 minutes, within which he traces over the face of the subject with a small pen light, illuminating each feature and then the next, Gary’s photography is different because while it is a record of an action, the photo IS the intentional final product.  As a viewer we can not look at his photography as a typical portrait where the artist wants us to only understand what THIS person looked like on THIS day under THESE conditions, but as a separate and new thing altogether.  The resulting image is one that allows us to view the subject as a non-specific person, providing us with an alternate way of viewing the body and the face than the way we are accustomed to experiencing in reality.

Out of all the artist’s studios we visited throughout the semester, I believe the most valuable experience I had to date occurred throughout the course of the day of confronting the integrative subjects of “art” and “science.” “ArtScience, in sum, connects. The future of humanity and civil society depend on these connections. ArtScience is a new way to explore culture, society, human experience, that is syneasthetic experience integrated with analytical exploration. It is knowing, analyzing, experiencing and feeling simultaneously”(Brown).  I could feel my perspective on the subject shifting as the day progressed and we as a class were immersed more and more into the creative worlds of Otto Piene and Hans Hacke.  What is most curious about the pieces in The List’s exhibit is that while the forms and processes in the pieces reflect the explorations of a far earlier time, the finished pieces themselves look much like the contemporary art pieces of today.  I feel that this kind of visual accessibility was important for myself as a college student perceiving a piece of history I have difficulty connecting to personally.  As easy as it would be to ignore the monumental ideas that were probably at the time of their creation, quite monumental, the simplistic choices in material made by Hans Hacke and Otto Piene transcend time to convey the same message to an even wider audience today.

Now looking back at the experience of doing background research, and seeing both exhibits, I see just how many different directions the art science discipline can encompass.  Take the sculptural basket forms of MassArt artist and instructor Natalie Miebach for example.  While on their own, her structures stand out as beautiful, meticulous advanced woven structures, the sculptures are actually visual representations of scientific data that she feels could be best represented and understood when seen on a three-dimensional x-y-z plane than on the original graph or chart.  Her work “focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Using the methodologies and processes of both disciplines, [she] translates scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology woven sculptures. [Her] method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space. By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates” (Miebach).

My perspective on “artscience” as it’s own subject has certainly been forever altered.  In considering the thinking process behind the works in the exhibit, I realized just how similar my creative motivations are to that of Hacke and Piene.  I have a tendency to be particular about words, and placing them according to their appropriate meanings, that I become easily frustrated when labels require that we as a culture subdivide categories to the point where we are incapable of recognizing the overlap. But in the case of artscience, the title makes perfect sense to me.  In a lot of ways my art making is entirely an experiment and only ever performed the same way once.  I am less interested in repetitive process of perfecting a particular craft than I am about the “figuring out.”  It would appear that Piene and Hacke were also driven by the excitement of the journey of finding an effective way to visually represent their ideas through art, which evidently, is very similar to the process that I go through in film photography.  The completed piece is not merely a piece of paper with an image upon it, but the visual evidence of a certain reaction(s) or process(s) that occurred that results in a two-dimensional image.  Previously off my radar as a category without possessing a separate definition, I was initially resistant to my feelings as the subject being simply a glorified experiment, but when looking at the context of the 60′s, I find an appreciation for these experiments having huge impacts on the technological advancements of their time.  The biggest lesson I gathered from this day is to breathe and step back from my work when the trial and error process becomes more about errors than success, and allow myself to consider that the answers I seek are more often than not going to be ‘grey,’ rather than black and white.

Brown, Adam. “ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration To Create a Sustainable Futur.”Leonardo Mesh. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 24 Dec. 2010. Web. 26 Dec. 2011. <http://www.thoughtmesh.com>.

Instead of talking about a portion of my video, as most of my records from my observation site are photos, I am going to talk about a couple pieces made by students that I particularly liked. The most interesting part of working with the students at Jeremiah Burke High School has been experiencing how drastically different their art experience level has been in comparison with the amount of art exposure I was fortunate to receive.  Many of the students are delving into the creative genre for the very first time, shocking and unfortunate that they have to wait until their junior year of high school in order to do so.  From a developmental perspective, it makes sense that the students would be producing a lot of work using what I would consider “crutch” materials, such as a tracing element for the repeated shape project, or the plastic face mould for the mask.  The steps to making a satisfactory finished product need to be stilted a little bit more for students with little technical understanding of drawing or the proper construction of a three-dimensional sculpture. None-the-less, I think a lot of the work they produce is very beautiful, and watching the students take a lot of pride in the things that they finish seems a very rewarding thing for their teacher, Alisa Rodney, who has been the founding mother of the arts classroom at the Burke, now being offered for only it’s second academic year as a discipline.

Above is an example of the “Repeated Shape” painting, where the students were to pick a shape and then overlap it with the same shape in order to see how the lines interacted, and then fill-in each separate shape with paint. A lot of students associated with the letter of their first name, or a combination of the first letter of their first name and the first letter of their last name in overlapping order, but this particular piece is great because it uses a non-textual visual image of the human silhouette. Using an ambiguous human shape with color representation of race is an excellent visual display of this overlapping of colors into what was probably unintentional, but comes through as a metaphor for one singular “color” or race for all people.  Whether or not the student is exploring this part of his identity, the resulting piece certainly brings up interesting issues of conflict about race and ethnicity in not only the high school environment, but in larger society as a whole, a topic that conveniently overlaps with current discussions in Art and Human Development.  While above is a simple drip painting of a single material, tomato soup, the image is interesting because in certain places, the bead of liquid has built up a little bit more and gives off a deeper shade of orange that in places where only a little soup has collected on the paper.  I noticed this curious differentiation in “soup values” and saw it as a great opportunity to discuss with the student the basic element of “value scales.”  Previously noticing a few simple value scales around the room I asked him if he realized that though the soup was not representative of the black vs. white scale he might be familiar with, the resulting piece was visually interesting because the color red was acting as black in the piece and the white of the paper was diluting it in order to produce the lighter areas of orange, giving off a really fluid range of the same color throughout the labyrinth-esque piece.  While it’s entirely possible that this point may not have been fully received by the artist, the idea of allowing the student to dabble and come up with pieces, and then later inform them as to what they’re seeing and how to then keep pushing the same materials in order to move forward seems to be the proper model with the students at the Burke.  Later, the same student made a similar drip painting with the soup but held up the piece of paper and let the soup drip off until the layer of residue on the paper was the same all across the paper.  The final results are completely different from the first painting! In this painting, the focus is entirely one of texture, the orange of the soup staining its initial resting place and the little particles of tomato sticking to the moist areas of the page.  It seems to me that this was a great quick lesson for the kids to see that virtually anything can be used as a medium for art making, and secondly, that the same material used in alternative ways can produce drastically different results. Brilliant!!

First off, I had a blast yesterday!  It was amazing to me at the end of the day just how much the experience of working with seniors from a public arts school with limited arts exposure differed from the experience of speaking one-on-one with seniors from an arts centered curriculum.  In the case of the SwampScott students, walking around the museum was focused more on the act of exposing them to the various forms of art available at the MFA, while the BAA students were able to get up close to a piece, analyze it’s content, make guesses about the artists process, and even infer meaning from the piece or pieces.  I felt much more like a mentor and friend with the BAA students, as they were seeking a conversation about art, as well as advice about my own experience thus far in art school.  I thought it curious that while I was working with the large group of kids who chose to focus on the photography portion of the museum, the crowd favorite at the end of the tour seemed to be the contemporary pieces.  I have to think that this could be due to the large and fun nature of the colorful pieces within the contemporary wing, but also that the work in this section could appear more relatable to a younger generation.  Photography shows can be difficult to judge when so much of enjoying a photography exhibit is having an understanding of the cultural context or subject matter depicted within the photos, I think the students from SwampScott High had a difficult time grasping the significance of the Cuba exhibit whereas the contemporary wing didn’t demand such an understanding in order to be viewed and enjoyed.

In terms of the structure of the experiences, the MFA trip for me was far too rushed.  As someone who visits the museum often, and has the museum almost constantly available, I was only concerned that we were literally corralling and running the kids through so much art in so little time that I have to question how much the students were able to absorb.  This is where the “what’s better for the students” teacher question comes in, and also the issue of collaborating with fellow teachers who may have a different idea about how the process should go.  The biggest thing I realized very quickly about the SwampScott students, while having had some experience viewing and considering the format of photographs in the class, weren’t prepared to be analyzing content or composition as articulately as we have been trained to in our college level course.  Repeatedly asking the students to analyze the pieces and figure out how it may relate to their own work seems far too complicated a request when the students may only be beginning to take photos, let alone foster a passion for them. It was difficult to structure our time as a four-teacher team because the ideas and instructions for the students seemed to differ amongst the leaders.  Overall, the lesson I learned as an educator through the museum guidance activities is that you always need to be on your toes about where you are, the subjects you are covering, and most importantly the audience that you are trying to connect with.  I believe the better suited the instructions are for the particular student(s), the more they will be able to take away from the experience and apply to their own work as growing artists.

While the walk-thru we had as an entire class prepared me for the way I and my partner would be guiding the students through the museum based on their interests, (my group being photo) and really loosely just letting them explore and look for the pieces which may be relative to the things they are learning in class.  I like the idea of proposing early on that each student should allow themselves to look at all of the pieces within a gallery but then pay close attention to the piece or pieces which draw them in the most, and to spend some time with those pieces trying to consider why that is, or how it may relate to their current art making.  I think it’s important to let the students come to their own conclusion about the pieces and allow them to have fun interpreting the artists intent based on their own levels of experience and understanding, rather than bombard them with historical knowledge (which I don’t possess much of anyway) that only serves to put the idea of an artist’s work within a museum atmosphere as something reserved for established artists of the past.  My philosophy is that museum visits should be an adventure.  I like the idea that the things which each individual enjoys the most should be stumbled upon naturally so that you can walk away feeling as if you have discovered something.  Ideally, this is the type of experience I would like the students we tour the MFA with to have.

Reflecting on my first day ‘on the road,’ I realize that while both places the class visited were experiences focused on arts in the secondary education classroom, the overall kind of exposure each offered was entirely different.  I feel that Jeremiah Burke provided a venue focused on gaining insight into the experience of the students, while speaking with Chandra Ortiz gave us more of a look into the experience of the teacher from a professional standpoint. Both are incredibly valuable participatory vantage points to consider.  The one-on-one assistance with the students at Jeremiah Burke allowed us all to get a sense of how the academic schedule might flow for students there, while allowing us to form temporary working connections with the students, giving us a feel for their ideas and their individual working style.

While I enjoyed working at Jeremiah Burke, the experience of conversation at Dorchester Academy has stuck with me so much more.  The majority of lectures I experienced in my classes in high school left me feeling stale, as the curriculum has become so boring, flat and routine for the teachers that they’ve lost the “pep” necessary to get you excited about the material.  The energy Chandra displayed for her career, matched with her eagerness to effect positive academic change and artistic success in the culture of her school was incredibly refreshing.  The way Chandra described honestly how imperative it was to balance yourself as a teacher AND as an artist by “carving out your studio practice and making it sacred” despite other obligations and tempting social pressures, being cautious not to lose yourself amongst all of your pursuits, even as a student, was incredibly healthy and positive advice to receive.  While her method of complete isolation for one month out of the year to become disconnected with the external in order to become reconnected with the internal may not work for everyone, this is certainly a practice that I myself yearn for when Im in need of recharging.  In the case of teacher burn-out, it was well put by Chandra, that if you lose yourself then “the kids don’t get you.”  It’s a matter of setting yourself up for what you know you can handle and accepting that limits are inevitable, if you don’t take care of yourself, or have no time to reflect, you can’t get better. At the starting gate of a jam-packed semester and feeling overwhelmed with the road ahead, these personal sentiments about finding balance and still achieving great things could not have come at a better time.