Spot Collaboration 1/28 & 1/30

Second Spot Collaboration, Image-based

Tuesday, January 22: For the second spot collaboration of the semester, each student working in a pair or group of three was given a few sheets of paper containing various images. They then had about forty-five minutes to make what they would. Below are the results, many of which were designed to be interpreted narratively. We also got our first puppet show.

First Spot Collaboration, Spring 2020

January 14, 2020: Each spring we start out with a couple of spot collaborations that us the same essential materials and rely on the same parameters. For the first one, we put students in groups of two and three, give each group a page of text randomly drawn from the Internet, literature, email, etc., and ask them to make something of it in thirty minutes or so. Here are images from the first set of collaborations, made the first day of class.

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New semester!

Dan's show

Our fearless co-teacher of VVP, Dan Callis, has a show of new paintings up for a few more days at Long Beach Museum of Art's new downtown space, on the corner of 3rd and Elm.

Go see it if you can spare the time!

Poetry and Mark Rothko

Poet and painter Caley O'Dwyer, who once visited VVP to share some of his work with our students, has an ekphrastic poem up at the appropriately titled The Ekphrastic Review. The poem, entitled "Three Blacks in Dark Blue," is based on Mark Rothko's painting Untitled (Three Blacks in Dark Blue). The poem, a speculative meditation on what death might mean, contains this striking passage:

"What if even now I'm here and there / at once: in my body on this Earth / but also sailing dark into dark, / black into shimmering bands of night."

Read the rest of the poem and see an image of the painting here.

Spring 2019: Last Extended Collab!

On the last day of class, each May, the students present their last extended collaborations in site-specific locations around the campus. This year students, among other things, made a tree full of image-laden, coin-bearing envelopes; created a miniature, secret village; had us plunge our hands into a pool to retrieve rocks emblazoned with symbols representing each participant in the class; and enacted a funeral.