I have a complicated relationship with the internet. It started very young under the tutelage of my geek father who had me programming on MOO’s and in Microworld, gave me an email and an instant messaging account, and tried to help me start my website all before I reached double digits. I’ve also had various …
For the past few hours I’ve been scrounging through my apartment, pulling my art from the walls, the dishwasher, the bookshelves, and anywhere else it has walked off too. I’ve removed it from its natural habitat, placed it on an 18″x24″ piece of drawing paper and photographed it. After returning all the art pieces to …
As an artist who is also a young professional and a graduate student, I’m used to hearing both others and myself commiserate about trying to find the time and space to do art. Eight foot tall oil paintings just aren’t plausible in a small, rented apartment on the outskirts of Boston when you work two …
When I was in college and debating between being a psychology major and minor, one of the areas of study that interested me was the effect surroundings have on creativity, emotion, and learning. There are places that are inherently creative, ones where our minds can’t help but wander, and ones that immediately make us feel …
Most people I know in community art are busy, very busy. This includes the teachers who do art or grad school in their “free” time, the IT personnel, waiters, and software techs who create art at night, and everyone else who finds their lives in community art. Between my two and a half part-time jobs, …
One of my favorite games as I was a kid was trying to figure out what I would be when I grew up. I don’t ever remember having an aspiration to be an astronaut, a famous singer, or (to use the dream of a friend of mine) a paleontologist. Yes, there were times I imagined …
For a long time I didn’t have very good friends. There were people I was close with, people I spent time with, people I saw everyday, even people that I thought I would know for the rest of my life, but it wasn’t until college that I truly began to build my community. My college …
When I was young(er), I used to see the videos of 20-something year olds fervently playing music in their livings rooms and basements late at nights, getting off day long shifts to come home just to make music. I always found it a little funny, these people who played late at night not to get …
At this very moment I am absolutely elated, sky-high on performance energy that hasn’t gone away even though I finished telling stories over an hour ago. That’s right, my performance wasn’t some theatrical debut it was my debut as a true storyteller. In my recent class on storytelling I’d been exposed to what was about to happen …
Last Thursday I took a group of children to the MFA for a late night visit. By 6 o’clock, which is only the time that we get there, the children are typically already hungry and antsy after having been at school all day and then at the club for three hours. Despite this, they normally …