Saturday, August 22, 2009

Inner Harbor Art Festival

I was (and still am) so honored to be chosen by Maryland Art Place (www.mdartplace.org) as one of the artists to represent them at the first ever Inner Harbor Art Festival. Last Monday, I was on Fox 45 morning news in a segment that was promoting the festival. Cathy Byrd, MAP's executive director, did a fantastic job introducing the artists present. I was happy that I didn't have to talk on camera haha all I had to do was knit by my work and look pretty. It was a great experience and great exposure and totally worth getting up at 4 am for!

The first day of the festival was today and it was very overcast all day. About 150 artists were represented and selling their work. Kids and dogs seemed to like my work the most! It was a great experience for an emerging contemporary artist like myself. It was very crowded but we had to shut down two hours early because of a big storm. The festival continues tomorrow from 10-5, and then on Monday is new graduate student orientation at MICA! What an exciting weekend...

Cathy Byrd being interviewed live about the festival

My work is in the foreground of this photo. There were 5 other artists featured.

News truck!



All set up!

Me, my grandma, and my mom sitting in the tent!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

New Work up at Joe Squared

Joe Squared is located at 133 W. North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21201. Some of the work I did at VSC is currently on view there--go and eat! Their food is delicious!





Tuesday, August 4, 2009

me in my studio at vsc

thanks anita horton for the pic!

Experience at VSC

i got back from vermont on friday and i had planned to stop at stormking but the torrential downpours taking place in the northeast prevented me from doing so. so i called my great aunt helen and told her that i would not be stopping at her place for the night in danbury, ct and i drove the whooooooooooole way home. it took almost 12 hours, but i was just so excited to see my cats and get back to reality that i had to do it.

i would not go back to VSC. i had a really great experience as far as meeting other residents and visiting artists goes, but there were some things that made the month-long stay uncomfortable. johnson, vt is VERY isolated. the town itself is about three or four blocks long. cell phone service was terrible, so we all had to either walk or drive up this very steep hill to get reception. there was no TV, and that was fine with me but i felt really out of the loop about what was going on in the world. my room had no air conditioning, which was fine at first bc it was kind of cool the first two weeks there, but when it warmed up my room had absolutely no air flow and it made sleeping extremely uncomfortable. there was also construction going on directly outside of my window: a bridge was being torn by little by little every day that began promptly at 6:45 am. what a terrible wake-up call! i got sick of the food fast, partly bc im a very picky eater and also because there wasn't enough variety for vegetarians, allergy people, etc. there was only one option for dinner and for those of us who don't eat red meat or pork, this usually meant eating rice or potatoes as dinner. i lost between 5 and 10 lbs during the month--ridiculous! we (sculptors) were told that we had to pay a welding fee and then pay for welding by the hour--this was NOT advertised on the VSC website or in any paperwork, and i found it ridiculous considering that we're paying allllll this money to be there. same thing with yoga; on the website it's stated that there's daily yoga blah blah and nowhere does it say "oh yeah you have to pay for that." i just didn't really understand where the money we all paid was going to. it's not like the buildings or studios were extraordinarily taken care of. another weird thing was that there were no mirrors anywhere besides a small one in each bathroom, so we all really had no idea what we were looking like haha.

i don't know if it was my group or what but i just found that there were too many flower/cloud/landscape painters and not enough artists using abstraction or more contemporary imagery in their work. i was happy with everyone in sculpture but not so much with the painters and that's not to say i didn't like the work itself i just didn't find it that interesting. all in all i liked VSC for providing me with a quiet place and studio to get a ton of work done. it was nice having a metal/wood shop downstairs from my studio, but I would not do a residency there again.

bad images of paintings (sorry!)

I apologize for these terrible images, once I get back into the swing of things at MICA I'll take some great images. The yellow painting is my favorite, it's about 5 ft x 4 ft.




more paintings





Big painting

I revised this painting after a fellow resident casually said that it was very "Spiderman-ish." I was not going for that so I respected her comment and painted over the messy net. This painting is about 5 ft x 5 ft.


Willie Cole Visits VSC

Renowned sculptor Willie Cole was one of the visiting artists while I was at VSC. I've always liked his work and I really enjoyed his slide talk--he was very laid back and casual...but too casual during the studio visit I had with him. He just had no idea what to say during the visit, and admitted to it too! It wasn't that he didn't like my work, he just didn't know how to talk about it, which was disappointing. I did manage to ask for his autograph haha.