You know, I’ve found much to my delight – or dismay, I haven’t decided quite yet – that living in this insane city is just as much of a whirlwind as the city itself. I mean, where else could the weeks blend together so much that I nearly had a heart attack upon realizing yesterday that it was May already? Maybe it’s the cold medicine talking, but since I’m pretty sure you’re just as floored as I am that it’s almost summer, I’ll admit that I don’t know where the time’s gone either.
Cold medicine? No, no, don’t worry. You don’t have to leave an anonymous tip to the local mental health facility that yours truly is self-medicating to numb the pain of another semester gone by in a flash. As you may be able to discern from the title, this past week and a half or so has been a smorgasbord of activity for us. In addition to all of our regular classes and the like, we’ve been bombarded with plenty of stuff to keep us busy just in case we were planning on enjoying some off-time.
Well for one, our internships were officially over April 21st. It was actually pretty sad to be done with this venture into a professional environment. It was such a great opportunity to be able to experience for two days a week what a potential career could be like after our time at Cornell is done. I was working at the development department for the Whitney museum. What did my little intern nook look like? Ok, ok, I’ll provide a picture if you really insist:
That’s Jen. She didn’t want me to take a picture, but I said, “Welllll, Jen, I have to. I am an official BLOGGER. That means I have to whip out my camera obnoxiously at inopportune moments and disrupt moments of tranquility with the little beep it makes because I can’t figure out how to turn the sound off. It’s just what I do.” And then I took the picture. So that’s the nook, like I said. The office housed about 50 employees, and about 47 of said employees were women. Strange? Very much. But I went to an all-girls high school for four years, so this estrogen overload was nothin’. My desk is the closest one, with the white bag on it. Pretty cool, right? I got my own desk, my own computer, office phone, even my own office CHAIR. It was the high life, man, the high LIFE. Though I did some researching for different grants and occasionally dropped off a form or two at a foundation that supports the museum, I primarily sat in that desk and entered old files of foundations into Raiser’s Edge, the main computer program used by the Whitney to organize data. By the end, I knew those files inside-out, I tell you. Okay, maybe not inside-out, but it was interesting to see the overlap of information. Some of the files went all the way back to the late 60s. Pretty neat, if I do say so myself.
So, the end of an era. Well, an internship. Moving on…in our Drawing Projects class, we had a critique for a collage project. We were instructed to choose a collage-based artist as inspiration and create a piece out of that influence. Critiques always make me shake in my Batman converse just a little bit, but the variation in work was, as always, pretty dang inspiring.
Sarah Sanders and Greg Funk examine the piece of Kay Lee (not pictured)
Greg, Professor Stephanie Snider, and Sava Demanski contemplate Chase Wilson’s artwork
Greg’s piece (left) and mine (right) hang awaiting the moment of truth behind Stephanie.
Sava (top photo, left), Sarah (top photo, right), and Jackie (bottom photo) display their artwork for crit.
The critique provided a great deal of insight. Think of it as, say, a film review. You may love it, you may hate it with every bone in your body, you may just be sitting there with a blank stare of sheer confusion – but any way you look at it, chances are you’ve received a new handle on the film. It’s the same with an art crit. No matter how you feel about what the other person says, you ultimately walk away with a different perspective towards the piece than you did to begin with.
I also took a few shots of everyone working in the studio after class:
Jackie shows off her schnazzy TV
A view of the studio from the corner
Sarah hard at work – eating, that is! – at her desk.
Alrighty then, moving on. We’ve still got lots to go!
Studio visits have been mighty prevalent this semester, and one such visit was to the Calder Foundation. Well, okay, I lied a little. This wasn’t quite the typical studio visit, as Mr. Calder passed away some thirty years ago. And it was to the foundation’s office, so it wasn’t quite a studio. But details, details, it was a visit that allowed us to see up-close-and-personal the works of such an influential sculptor.
Alexander S.C. Rower, Calder’s grandson (third picture from the bottom), was our very own personal guide, giving us a fantastically comprehensive idea of Calder’s work, both as it was seen by the public and the behind-the-scenes stories that involved his grandfather in the making of his work. It was quite a phenomenal opportunity to hear about such a prominent artist, and to be able to see so many of his pieces up close and personal, like the musical mobile sculpture in the second from top photo. It was left with no instructions for how it should be set up, and the various pieces – champagne bottles from the early 20th century and a metal gong – can be rearranged however one so feels like. Totally rad, am I right?!
Now, we come to the last but most certainly not least part of my post: student art shows. As I mentioned last time around, the art kids were in full preparation for setting up an exhibit for our Art 2000 course. Cornell arranged for us to get the space, but the preparation of the space and arrangement was solely up to us. No pressure, right? Rigggghht *insert sideye look here*. We started off by painting the decidedly grimy and somewhat moldy (ew.) walls a glowy, clean white to better appreciate how our artwork would look once installed. Soak in the beauty of this spot-free baby:
Everyone takes a brief, albeit very well-deserved, painting break.
Whew, look at all that wall we had to paint!
After class that day, a few of us experimented with the space Friday night:
Fiddling with the placement of the pieces
Chase debates if the space looks quite right yet.
Well, after heading home to a somewhat night’s rest before heading back Saturday afternoon to do the actual setting-up of the pieces, “By Chance, In a Way” opened Saturday night (April 21st). We had a very surprising turnout of visitors, and from the immediate reactions we received, a lot of guests not familiar with who we are were quite surprised to learn that we were only undergraduates. Though we are all artist with very diverging tastes and interests, the show came together beautifully. In the words of our professor, Douglas Ross, it was a “modest but strong showing.” Success never looked so sweet (those of you who disagree, well, just smile and pretend like you agree so we can have our 15 minutes of glory):
Sarah and Kay stand by the refreshments table; Chase’s “Frontier” piece is in the foreground.
(from left to right) Jackie, Anthony Graves, Douglas, and Chase discuss the conveyer belt and how fun it would be to ride on it. No not really. Or did they, hm??
Two of Sava’s collage pieces (there were four total in the exhibit).
A somewhat blurry view of Jackie’s video piece of a gorilla at the zoo (bottom left) and three of Greg’s paintings (upper right).
Some guests play with Kay’s interactive piece.
Sarah talks to an inquisitive visitor about her comic book piece and pseudo-convention.
Another one of Chase’s works.
Douglas trying to show off his mad ninja skills. Yes. They were dang impressive.
Some guests examine the work of yours truly: photographs documenting drawings of tourist locations in NYC on my hand.
Sarah (far left), Anthony (middle), and Douglas talk about my piece.
Douglas and I do the good ol’ “I’m taking a picture of you taking a picture of me!!”
Some architecture students (oh hey, there’s Mason and Viktoria!) chat with art kids on Kay’s work.
Well, there you have it. I think for now I’ve covered all the necessary deets: art critiques, check; studio (sorta) visits, check; and student show, check! Unfortunately, time is a’dwindlin, which means there are only a few posts left before I’m gone from New York and back home on the opposite side of the U.S.-of-A. But I promise to, until that moment when we are so cruelly torn apart, keep you thoroughly updated on all of my shenanigans. If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that predictability isn’t in my vocabulary (technically, yes, but that would ruin my argument, so play along with me), and that I like to go out with a bang. Oh yeah. My last few weeks in New York City, when I’m not diligently working on final projects, of course, are gonna be somethin’ else. And that’s saying something, cause this ol’ town has seen a whole lot of somethin’ elses.
Great post Nellie!
Thanks Brooke!!