September: The Great Time Compression

Shortly before Museum Legs came out, a writer friend (Michael Joseph Gross) said: When you have a book come out, you think your life is going to change all the sudden.  That doesn't happen.  But a year on, you can look around and see some changes. And so it happened that, almost exactly a year to the day, I left a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center for a week that included: teaching my first economics class at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, flying back to the east coast the next day to give the keynote to new students at RISD, flying the next day to Philadelphia to talk to a closed session of museum directors as part of a Penn Urban Institute Roundtable on museums as anchor institutions -- and then flying back to Vermont, where it is beautiful, even at its most industrial:

I made a new friend at VSC, Ethan Hayes-Chute, a lovely artist (miniature paintings of beautifully exploding junk balls and life-size houses built of scrap wood).

It turns out Ethan went to RISD and when I asked him about it, one detail he mentioned: some kids are really earnest and dress up for the Artists' Ball as 'I'm a gouache tube!' (this is an opaque watercolor-like paint).  I asked if he would listen to my talk and keep me from being a gouache tube costume (aka dorky dad vibe).  I had to give a talk and then get roughly 400 people across the street to the RISD museum for a drawing project without its seeming like a TSA queue.  I had thought I would divide them into teams by putting colored squares on the seats.  Ethan (of the junk balls) said, "It would be nice if you could put something on the seats that they might want to keep."

The whole time I had been planning the talk, I had wanted somehow to draw a bicycle because that is a famous part of the entrance exam to the school.  You have to do three drawings (a bicycle, a drawing that is inside and outside, and a third that uses both sides of the page).  It then occurred to me that I had to fly to California before the talk and would see age-old friend Sabrina who has a letterpress company.  She said she could work it in.  So, one morning, I started to draw a bicycle:

Considering how rusty I am at drawing, it started out okay.  Then it hit that point where I started to think, I am about to mess it up -- at which point I adjourned for lunch.  I told Ethan I had started drawing it.  His response, when he heard the wheels weren't drawn in perspective at all: "You wouldn't get in."

(He was kidding, though that's probably true.)  Meanwhile, I made an ink version which Sabrina and team graciously cleaned up and printed.

A couple of days later, under the heading that most important things in life involve great sleep deprivation, I left Burlington Vermont and the bucolic Vermont Studio Center

to fly to San Francisco 

for my first economics class at California College of the Arts.  It is a low residency program that meets once a month for four straight days.  This means I give an eight hour lecture in economics, the equivalent of taking all of us on a very, very long run through the hills and valleys of neoclassical market theory.

First, a few moments of, you know you're in an art school when:

1. The inside of the school is the most beautiful aircraft hangar you have ever seen:

2. With these sorts of inexplicable folded sculptures, just around:

3. Casual display of pigments:

4. You go to wash your hands and the soap is gritty, to get off real-deal paint or other materials:

5. The waiting room in the academic affairs building looks like this:

6. A mysterious baby-blue padded, audio-blasting van out lingers out front:

7. The general lay of the land:

8. Classic incongruity -- the Jessica McClintock outlet (the original manufacturer of '80s prom dresses) is right across the street:

I have to wonder how many people wander in unironically:

San Francisco has wonderful signage in general:

When I have visited San Francisco in the past, I have often felt like it is a dream state, but now that I am under the umbrella of a community, I have more traction and notice more.

Class concludes with a barbeque at which (a) my dean offers me and Stuart the futurist half of his burger after asking Stuart to cut it with a fork and (b) I share a can of beer with one of my students while listening to (c) an excellent, mood-lifting DJ the likes of which I do not remember from my own business school experience.

I head to the airport the next morning for a day of connecting flights via Minneapolis.  I feel a bit like this guy (on the floor behind the desk):

Landing very late in Providence, I receive a text from Raj, the dean of students, welcoming me and saying he is picking me up at the airport. It's as if Raj is family.  He gets me checked in.  The next morning, I prepare, and my friend Veronica arrives via train for moral support.  We spend the afternoon at Olga Cup + Saucer, a near Platonic ideal of brunch spot.

John Maeda, the president, hosts us all for dinner.

John is in the background, student government leaders up front:

Veronica to my right:

We head to the auditorium to prepare for the talk:

John's picture of me talking to a slide of a Backstreet Boys concert:

Talking to a student afterwards:

Veronica with Jason, head of the grad student union:

Sarah Ganz Blythe, my collaborator at the RISD Museum (where she is director of education), with Veronica.  They worked together at MoMA:

Thanks to Veronica, I dismissed teams to the museum not just by color-coded pedal of the bicycle drawings, but by teams named for the pets of famous artists.  Veronica emailed one day to say this might be funny, giving as an example Picasso's dachshund named Lump.  I agreed but told her I'd topped out my Google research skills.  Without telling me, she caucused in the art historical community where, amazingly, people know these sorts of things.  Frida Kahlo?  Spider monkey named Fulang Cheng.  Caravaggio?  Black poodle named Cornacchio.  Baldessari?  Dog named Giotto.  Even Sarah Ganz Blythe added Bonnard's dog: Pouce.  There were about ten in all.  And once you know, you start to see the animals in the artists' work.  Another Bonnard of a woman submerged in a bathtub?  There's a dog on the bathmat.  Or, want to find Frida Kahlo with a spider monkey?  Turns out there's a self portrait with about five of them. . . .  

I didn't have a feel for how the talk had gone because I didn't do a Q&A to try to stay on schedule.  However, I can't say how moved I was to see so many people drawing in the museum.  People were sitting all over the floor, in groups and in moments of solitude, just drawing.  Fantastic.

I tried to balance leaving people alone to draw (since I figured I had temporary authority figure status) and wanting to talk to them.  This is Arthur:

Here I am listening to someone tell the story of the Barnes Collection, which is fantastic, in his own words:

This is a furniture designer Raj was recruiting to make something:

An interesting piece in the RISD collection, a pregnancy dress:

Raj, the man himself:

The assignment was to draw an artwork as if it were a portrait of a person.  They drew on postcards left on the floor Felix Gonzalez-Torres style.

They were asked to write on the postcard the nicest thing anyone had ever said to them about their art, or what they wished someone would say.  Then they addressed their card to a student box number.  When people arrived they listed their own number, anonymously, and when they left they crossed out another one that they used:

As it turned out, there were students who left box numbers but didn't leave cards.  I told Sarah I'd cover the difference.  This turned out to be about fifty postcards.  Back at the VSC residency, I asked for help, which I got from fellow writers and artists.  I still ended up in postcard production the next week.

But before that (and after fun late night drinks with Raj, Veronica, and Sarah), I flew on to Philadelphia to talk to a group of museum directors.

The Penn Urban Institute had convened a few museum directors and their senior staff to talk about art museums as urban anchors.  Above, the directors speak on a public program the night before at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  They represent Dallas (Bonnie Pitman), Philadelphia (Timothy Rub), Atlanta (Michael Shapiro), and Chicago (James Cuno).

At the end of the conference, I hung out with the staff of the Urban Institute, and my fellow speaker, Matt (front left):

Here I am with the lovely Amy Montgomery who invited me (and whom I have managed to dress exactly like):

On the way back to the hotel, I drove past the scaffolding for the new Barnes Collection.  Somehow, I had thought it was still up in the air whether it would move.  This looks pretty certain:

After legging it around various airports, there by the grace of the airport mechanic staff, never once stranded or even really late, I arrived back in Vermont, a state that looks beautiful and calming immediately, even from the airport parking deck:

Despite the tranquil view from my writing studio

It takes me at least a full day to fall back into the envelope of the place and under the surface of work.  Here's a meal with lovely Cynthia Colebrook, fellow writer:

She is a funny and authentic writer of a memoir about going to live full-time on a boat with her husband, Teddy, who paints compelling domestic interiors -- of homes and even art museums.

* * *

Some odds and ends from the end of summer, the other compression of clearing the decks to go write:

We had twenty summer interns, about half of whom were British.  on the last day, we walked by the site of the mosque near ground zero en route to final dinner.  Here is Roland Scarlett soaking up the experience:

Rory with Roland, Peter, and Sid in front of the Stock Exchange:

The crew posing in front of a video camera billboard (it is filming me taking the picture in the far background):

Other Peter and Sid:

Me with Sarah and Isabel:

The whole crew in front of the office:

A subset I took to see Veronica's Lee Bontecou show at MoMA:

Isabel and Peter at MoMA:

Our final outing with the British interns (the American universities started back a week early) was a Backstreet Boys concert.  This slide made it into my RISD talk, after Isabel dragged us all from the back (where this picture was taken) up into the fray, a reminder of the importance of participating and being game:

After the concert -- note Isabel's t-shirt:

I left at nearly the same time as the interns, an intense period of packing up the place where I was staying.  I cut through Williamstown to and from Vermont Studio Center and saw my old friend Jen -- here with her daughter Mads in the house they are building:

Here's Mads with Jen and Tom:

One of the first things you see at the writing studio at Vermont Studio Center is this sign explaining the studio name.  If you are a writer who has ever worked as a copy editor, the first thing that jumps out is "independantly":

It turns out they knew the sign was wrong but hadn't had a chance to fix it.  This called to mind Bruce's exclamation in art school, "This is a place where you can fail!"  Except that failure has more artistic purpose at the point you don't yet know whether you are failing.  

I fixed the sign.  

At the Providence airport, they sell chocolate syrup.  In reading to see if it was a local product or otherwise understand the logic for why it was there, I noticed it is made by a company called Autocrat Inc.

On the way to the airport, it turned out the cab driver had just received his US citiizenship a half hour before he picked me up.  He showed me the certificate, and I was elated.  I took his picture and emailed it to him.  I'd post it here, but it contains the certificate and probably some social security kind of number if you blew it up.  It was a happy moment.

Postscript: This painting is in the main gallery of the Rhode Island School of Design.  No one could decide if she was dying or trying to seduce someone.  Thoughts?