my week: my month

The past month at work has made it challenging to keep up with much else other than family shenanigans and basic housekeeping. I generally try to avoid using the expression "crazy busy" but life has felt a little like that over the past three or four weeks. Last week was, however, from what I hear, a bit of a grand finale around here, with final committee and board meetings and commencement on Saturday. The blow of a one-day weekend was softened a bit by listening, back-stage, to chills-inducing speeches from Joan Jonas, and mostly, for me, anyway, as amazing as meeting Joan Jonas was, Molly Prentiss. She talked about writing and making art and the kind of work artists must sneak in to the corners of their lives to get it all done, including something along the lines of "embezzling time" from employers. Which is not to say that's what I am currently or ever doing, but in that spirit, I wanted to at least catch this blog up on a few things that have kept me inspired at the end of more than one soul-draining 12-hour day over the past month.

ART:

Piet Mondrian-inspired cake, nails, and swimwear, via Design Milk.

Musings on footprints, a final blog post on Printeresting before they shake things up a little.

Ollie Wagner, getting a little love in what I assume is his local paper. The only person in grad school who understood my Kicking & Screaming references.

I recently checked out a possible studio space at Hive Artist Studios in Oakland's Jack London Square. I can hire a housekeeper or rent a studio, it turns out. But for now, I'm doing neither, since realistically I wouldn't even have time to move in (let alone much time to get any real work done) until after 4th of July. But I think the studio debate is not a question of if, but when. 

It's been awhile since I wrote about my mysterious obsession with The Last Unicorn and how it may or may not relate to my work over the past ten years, but recently I purchased both the DVD and the book, so perhaps she'll make an appearance again soon?

Adding this to the itinerary for my Boston trip next month: Janet Echelman's aerial sculpture over the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

CRAFT (and design and stuff):

Think you've had the best chocolate chip cookies? Think again. Leave it to the Smitten Kitchen gal to make a couple of delicious improvements to my personal kryptonite.

DANCE (and all the other stuff):

In preparation for Joan Jonas' visit, as mentioned above, I read this interview. 

QUAYTMAN: What was the downtown performance scene like that you entered in the '60s?

JONAS: I didn't really enter a scene, so to speak. I saw Oldenburg's happenings and dances by Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown, and also pieces by Rauschenberg. I saw this collaboration between dancers and visual artists. What attracted me was that you could be a visual artist and do something time-based. I think Oldenburg called his work performance, but there wasn't anything like performance art yet. There was a feeling, rather, among friends. There were sculptors, painters, dancers, musicians; it was all these different people working in different mediums. So there wasn't one, isolated scene. Everybody went to see everybody's work, including mine.

I'm intrigued by what she writes about the early performance art "scene" and the collaboration between visual artists and dancers and it makes me wonder if this is a thing to research, this shared enthusiasm for dance among fellow visual artists? I'll let you know what I find.

Finally, snakes in a park! File this under "oh Oakland".