Fine Arts Career Services

Now that I am more familiar with the Creando Fuerza exhibit, I feel confident enough to talk about it in more detail.  Last time I wasn’t really sure what sort of tasks I would be helping out with, but during most of last week I talked with Eva (another intern at Mexic-Arte) and we are going to work together to make the preparations for the exhibition run as smoothly as possible!

Although Eva is in charge of contacting each of the 14 talleres (aka workshops) and corresponding with them, I have been helping fill out condition reports for the Creando Fuerza prints that we received from Taller Boricua (who also happens to be one of the talleres showing work in the exhibit on November 22!) a while back.  The condition reports are just a way for us to keep track of the state of the prints when they arrive at the museum as well as verify that we did indeed receive all of the prints from the traveling show.  Here is a link to the prints which I did condition reports for as well as more information about Consejo Graphico: http://www.serieproject.org/consejo-graf….

I also have the task of putting together information about 7 of the talleres, which will include each taller’s mission statement, history as well as its role in the community.  I’m hoping to get started on that pretty soon, but massive papers have not allowed me to do so…however, that is another story entirely.  The coolest part about being involved in a project like this is seeing the prints up close and interacting with the art on a more direct level.  Being an intern at Mexic-Arte just makes me realize how much I enjoy looking and working with art!

Tomorrow we should have more prints in the mail!  All we have to do is photograph each one in order to document which prints belong to which taller.  It should be pretty busy day tomorrow because we still have to photograph some prints from Monday, but no worries because it’s something that I enjoy doing!

Last week was relatively slow. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary really. Just production of a few promos and the input of JazzTrax, Musical Starstreams, Focus, and E-Town. And I recorded a few more people for the Austin liners. They talked about their favorite hamburger, place to climb trees and museum in Austin. I will be producing these fully in the future I believe but for now and just recording them. What I notice when I hear some of my promos air is that the music isn’t as loud as I thought it was when I was creating it. I think this is because the studio I work in is just completely different from listening to the radio in your car. So that is something that I have to keep in mind for the future. On the other hand, I have gotten a little bit better at eradicating mistakes in people’s speech, like p’s when they are really breathy. Some speakers for Fun Fun Fun Fest came in and Dustin Welch played on the air last week. Today a speaker for Hill Country Outdoors came in and Nelo comes in tomorrow and on Friday the South Austin Jug Band again. I think I will start a new project this week that Bryan will assign to me, so I’m looking forward to something different. Just another regular week in the studio!

This past week has been a little slow still. Mainly I have just been doing things to get ready for our move in a couple of weeks. I have been making a lot of copies for press releases about exhibits to make sure we have enough, and they are in the right places before we move to the Smith Building. We have also been doing last minute details on all the activities that will occur at the Smith Building Opening. I also helped get all the membership brochures ready for the Holiday Special. Other than random things around the office, everyone has been really occupied with getting everything ready for the move. We are going to have to measure all the boxes to make sure we get the right size of labels. The Development Office now is very communal and open, so it is going to take some work to get everything separated and organized. It is going to be a busy week. The Smith Building in opening on Thursday so everyone is getting excited for that. I am working it from 5-9 on Thursday. Hopefully it will be a great turnout!

Meeting at the coffee shop beforehand turned out to be really effective. We had 8 volunteers come to help. When they showed up, I was able to give them directions and give people rides that needed one. This week, it was just myself supervising the painting at the school, and although there were some pretty crazy moments, everything worked out pretty well. They few problems I faced mainly had to do with the actual paint, and not with the volunteers. For instance, the yellow paint was not very opaque, and you could see every imperfection on the wall beneath it. It also did not go on the wall very smoothly, so we will need to do at least one more coat of it. However, we ran out of yellow, and so we need to buy another can before we can finish. The same problem happened with the red wall. Before you add a second coat of paint, the first coat needs to dry. We couldn’t add a second coat on Saturday because we ran out of time. So we’ll definitely finish the walls this weekend.

My method of soliciting volunteers from the Blanton Student Guild listserve seems to be effective so far. I haven’t had a problem finding volunteers, but I’d like to raise some community awareness about the mural. I am going to contact the Daily Texan to see if they would like to do an article about it.

I took pictures too! Here are the links:

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/mariaesthetics/IMG_1115.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/mariaesthetics/IMG_1116.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/mariaesthetics/IMG_1117.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/mariaesthetics/IMG_1119.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll264/mariaesthetics/IMG_1120.jpg

Yesterday it dawned on me that we are less than a month away from our big Cantanker Holiday Hipster Snowball and that I have some serious work to do. The event is most definitely less labor intensive than our releases, however, I have been given the task of arranging all of our in-kind donations which involves quite a bit of work. I spent the earlier half of yesterday working on a spreadsheet of local business that fit the “hipster” bill as we’re trying to put together two hipster-inspired gift baskets to raffle off the night of. 3pm yesterday was also our artist meeting where all those involved met at Co-Lab to discuss their work and it’s placement. I then returned home to send out the 170+ in-kind e-mails and retired from Cantanker work for the evening. From now I will be working on my website research and grant opportunities as most everything else for the event is being handled. Donation pick-ups are the next step but that won’t take place for a few more weeks. As I have stated in a previous blog I won’t be able to attend our lovely little holiday party (tear) but I will have done much to assure that it is successful.

In other related news, E.A.S.T. (the East Austin Studio Tour) is this upcoming weekend (22nd and 23rd), where I will be distributing flyers (that I will copy this week) advertising the event  www.eastaustinstudiotour.com). Also, I have also taken on an internship with the 2009 Texas Biennial which will allow me to emerge myself that much more in the Austin art scene and hopefully give way to more opportunities for the magazine to be seen/read. The Undergraduate Art History Association hosted a ridiculously successful student show/sale where the magazine was prominently displayed as well. In other words keep a lookout because you are bound to run across an issue next time you are out and about.

Exciting stuff happened last week at the Long Center!  Andrew let me sit in on a talk given by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts!  What an opportunity.  All the local arts organization gurus were present, and I was among them.  You might be wondering HOW the Long Center was able to secure a Q&A with the Chairman of the NEA, well, it was no doing of their own.  Apparently the Chairman himself is a personal friend of the Longs, and they were gracious enough to bring him to speak in front of Austin arts professionals.

He spoke about the new, revamped NEA grant program.  There will be simplified categories for easier selection and furthermore he has seen to a restructuring of the review panels.  For instance, if the NEA were looking over a dance company’s application, he would have a dancer, a choreographer, a dance aficionado, and a person that knows the area from which the grant is coming/the area’s need for improvement.  All of these changes seem to be an improvement to the way they were operating before, when the NEA had a questionable reputation–something he made mention of several times.  Several members of the arts community asked questions about continuing grants for multiple years, support for artists themselves as opposed to their art, and how to write a great grant application.

An entertaining and obviously passionate speaker, he told everyone that half the excellent grant writers in the U.S. live in Manhattan, and the other half commute there in the morning.  He also said the best kept non-profit arts organization, the one who writes grants most eloquently and continually receives funding, is the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  He seemed adamant about bringing the arts to areas where it isn’t well developed–he told us about a current project joining Mexico and the U.S. in a literacy campaign.

Hopefully his visit will inspire the Austin arts professionals to apply for more grants, and hopefully we’ll see some support at the Long Center!

This week I experienced two new adventures! Well, really today I had two new adventures. Lynn and I put up the Presidential exhibit that we had in the reading room of the CAH in the Gebauer building today. All week, I’ve been making schematics of the cabinet-looking case on the 4th floor of the GEB and placing the artifact replications in them so that we’d have everything planned out for when we put it up today. All the planning was very helpful and made putting up the exhibit easy. It still took us four hours to put putty and/or tape on the backs of the gator board and stick everything to the wall, level it and just make sure it looks good from a distance. Tomorrow I will go back and tie up some loose ends like cleaning the class windows of the case and propping up some artifacts. I enjoyed the experience because it was a nice change of scenery. It was also nice to see our work get appreciated by people outside the Center.

My other adventure was I got to drive the big UT van, sort of. I pulled it up to the curb from the parking lot. I don’t really drive when I’m in Austin, so to drive such a huge vehicle even for a second was quite nerve racking, and sort of exciting.

So KGSR is undergoing some new imaging in order to reach out to listeners a little bit more. The most recent project is one where we bring some of our listeners in to record a little spot. This can be anyone since the idea is to use people who are not used to radio - the average listener. So I get to bring in people I know, friends or family, and I record them saying something like “My favorite pizza in Austin is ______ because I have been going there for 10 years and it still tastes exactly the same as when I discovered it. And my favorite radio station is KGSR”. Or something to that effect. And what’s nice is that they can say whatever they want about something in Austin as that is what makes it unique. Today I got another production sheet with new music on it, which means I will produce some of these promos using the actual artist’s music in the background of a DJ saying something like, “Two Silver Trees new from Calexico”. I have slowly gotten a little bit better at these and have been able to improve how choppy the segues between the listed songs are.

Today was a big day in the studio though, because so many people were inspired by the election results that they called in and requested appropriate songs. I answered a lot of phone calls like these and was also busy pulling requests from the music library and playing the CDs, which meant running the board and the Scots System. Songs like “A Change Is Gonna Come”, “I Feel Good”, “Three Little Birds” (”every little thing is gonna be alright”) and a ton of others. It was really neat to be a part of something that was so meaningful to all of Austin, even though it was something as simple as playing a song.

The first painting day for the mural was last Saturday. On Friday, Beth and Suzy went and bought the supplies. Jerry’s Artarama donated a lot of tubes of acrylic paint in really cool colors. They were also able to get some cans of paint from the paint store that matched our colors really closely, and the cool thing was that they had already been mixed. This meant that instead of $20 for a can of paint, they only spent about $5 a can. So right now, we are way under budget. (Always a good thing! J)

At the beginning of the week, I sent out an email to solicit volunteers to help. I had a good response, yet it was a perfectly manageable number. However, I hit a bit of a snag when only 1 out of 8 volunteers showed up. I was hoping to keep volunteering for the mural relatively informal, so that people could come late and leave early if they needed to. But because so little of the volunteers actually showed up, I realize that I will need to keep it more structured. So for this Saturday, instead of having everyone meet at the school, I’ll meet them at a coffee shop close to UT first. That way, I can give people rides that need them, and make sure everyone knows how to get there. Also, I made sure to get everyone’s phone numbers this time. Increased communication is good!

I’ll post some pictures later!