Cross-Genre Spot Collaboration

Yesterday, students came to class to find the following directions on the screen:

We had prepped the students a bit the previous class, by sharing some of "I do this, I do that" poems by Frank O'Hara and some of the site-specific, eco-sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy. (We told them to move fast!) After 75 minutes, the students produced the following stuff. The first piece was installed in the prayer chapel. The next two were in various locations around campus--the loading zone of the new science building and the Rood courtyard, respectively. The last was in our classroom. [Click for larger images. Turn up the volume on the videos.]

Bri Mikalson, Greg Ambrose, Josh Knoph:

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Ashley Brimmage, Michael Garcia, Lauren Morford:

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Eugene Lee, Jacob Sanchez, Sara Nordstrom:

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Trevor Lunde, Dorea Marshall, Roy Chung

VVP Salon!

Last week, our students presented work from their individual, weekly practice. There is a lot of collaboration in this class, but the individual practice is a key component to the course. (The word "practice" is even in our course title!) At the beginning of the semester, students work with the course professors to set up a regular production schedule that is based on time and material constraints. For example, a student might decide to write four sonnets per week, working every Tuesday and Thursday from 1 - 3pm.

This semester, students made short stories based on recent memories; sculptures made out of scrap wood; poems written in the voice of famous characters from novels; comics; poems drawn from the journals of a European sojourn; translations from Korean into English; and manipulated, digital images drawn from other images found on the internet. One artist, each week, made a piece, filmed herself destroying it, and then made a new piece out of the destroyed piece.

For our in-class salon, students shared their work, with a sculptor painting a one of his pieces as he talked to us about the process, a writer assigning us all parts as we read her story out loud, and other interactive presentations. As we ate donuts and drank coffee, we celebrated, and participated in, each other's individual art-making practice. Below are some pictures of our little, early morning party.

So much going on!

We have not been updating the blog this semester like we normally do--mainly because it's been so busy for the two of us who teach the course.

However, we note some of the great stuff we've encountered the past few weeks:

We had a visit to our class by poet and sculptor (and VVP alum) Nick Maurer.
We've been reading prose by Belden Lane, Burton Blatt, Audre Lorde, and Flannery O'Connor.
We've been looking at the paintings of Kerry James Marshall, alongside the poems and short stories of Diane Glancy and the poems of Scott Cairns. Cairns also visited our class last week.

And this past weekend, we all went up to the Broad to see the Jasper Johns retrospective.