Week 5, Residency 2. 1 hour. Perpich Center for Arts Education, Golden Valley, MN.
This week I met with Jeremy Lundquist, who I will be assisting during my second residency, which is at the Perpich Center for Arts Education. Jeremy teaches printmaking and bookbinding classes there to junior & senior level high schoolers. The classes are pretty much daily, but I’ll be there one day a week. There will be a lot of work time, some demos, and likely critique—quite different from the one-time, intensely energetic workshops I’ve assisted with at MCBA. I’m excited and a little nervous for this residency. Straight-up work time is probably my weakest area teaching-wise, but it’s a good opportunity for me to work on jumping in, asking questions, being available and observing closely without hovering…I’ll figure it out. I want to be able to take an active role as a TA, and not just sit around watching.
I didn’t do any hours in my other residency/shadowing placements this week, but I made serious progress on my thesis project ideation. I’m planning to make a large-scale artist book that explores themes of displacement and queer kinship in relation to my personal life. I also have the beginnings of plans for some long-term projects in a couple of my other classes. In Post-Digital Printmaking, I’m learning how to use a CNC router to cut a large-scale wood block for printing (think 4ft across) and I also learned a new Adobe Illustrator skill (how to line trace a drawing to convert it to a vector file). In Art in Community this week we visited the Whittier Alliance and talked with two of the people who run it. I feel like community engagement is going to be an important part of my work going forward so it was really wonderful to learn more about the area and some of the ways that people are working on the ground to build community here and protect it.