a seminar in Birmingham

i have mentioned earlier in this blog that i have been traveling the SE area to discover the things that would keep me energized and help me expand my network in the region.

this weekend i was in Birmingham AL, the largest city in Alabama (nearly 750k residents and 2.3million in the metro area), to attend a faculty and professional development seminar sponsored in large part by CAA at Space One Eleven.

i have recently decided that i need more representation even though i know that i will still want to make art that is hard to sell to collectors. i am eager to follow the Christo/Jean Claude methodology of selling ephemera/artifacts associated with my projects and thus works like my drawings (Study for My Past Life as Yuri) will fulfill the commercial side. they form a bridge into the more esoteric and less material regions of my projects. i see the opportunity for the drawings and similar work to become a type of advertisement to get exposure to encourage the further exhibition of the hard to market portions of my work into the museum/university/and experimental gallery system.

the first workshop was about resume/CV development and whilst i found that most of it was a refresher there were points where the speaker confirmed that he would have made a similar decision in how to list or organize the document. this session was led by Larry Jens Anderson and he is awesome despite the fact that he felt the language in my statement was too 'flowery'. it reminds me a moment when Shannon Wright told me that my application to a school was fine, but maybe i should tone it down a bit because no one was going to believe i talk in that fashion. then she said even though you do... sigh, it is the nature of this beast.

Larry is sharp and tells you immediately what he thinks; i was in awe by how he listened to people read their artist statements and could give an instantaneous critique! you go Larry! additionally, the work he does is fantastic. he dropped lots of amazing tips on all manner of things including how to get a brief sit down with the director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center to consult on your work. this was definitely worth the $20 cost of admission!