It's hard to believe that in less than one month I will start school again. My summer has been busy, especially as I have been traveling about an average of three weekends a month to Decorah, Minneapolis, and Chicago. I've finished reading only one book on my reading list - and I'm only 50 pages into the second one, I have an unfinished painting sitting in my room, and my bike was thieved a couple of weeks ago - so now my somewhat athletic pursuits have been replaced by pilates and yoga work out videos. It might be easy to count my entire list of summer goals as a FAILURE, but surprisingly I don't feel that way. One of my goals was to walk everyday to work - and for the most part, I have. That's about an hour more exercise than I had been getting, so any exercise is good exercise in my book. Even if I don't do my workout videos every day, I do try to do them at least 3 times a week - so again - that's more than I've done in the past - so good for me! I've also taken steps to maintain a more healthy eating lifestyle. I recently bought brown rice, whole wheat pasta, and a mountain of fresh organic produce from Whole Foods. I've been trying to eat a salad every day for lunch. I've also severely limited my Chipotle intake; I'm ashamed to admit it was getting out of hand and I'd begun to count on it as comfort food - or food to buy when I really really didn't want to make dinner. I think I've also had a lot of fun being more social as I've strengthened some friendships with my UWM classmates.
The biggest failure of the summer for me has been the lack of thesis exhibition ideas for Fall of 2010. For those of you who don't know, my masters program requires us to put together an exhibition surrounding an artist or theme in order to graduate. We have to go through the motions of loaning out artwork to put in our gallery (a LOT of paperwork), designing and writing our exhibition catalog (basically the written part of the thesis), and designing the exhibition space, labels, lighting, titles, opening reception, etc. I have zero ideas. Thankfully I have one more semester before I have to panic. My area of study is technically Contemporary Art, but I also have to take into account which professors I want to work with because, let's face it - some of them are complete jerks and make life difficult. Again, probably the biggest challenge is actually obtaining the artwork for the show. Most of my favorite contemporary artists are huge names or have sculptures done outdoors (ie site specific and unable to be moved). The museums that might be able to lend me artwork are limited as well. For instance, if I was doing an Alexander Calder show (a Modern artist) I would love to be able to use the MCA's collection in Chicago. Do you think they would lend to a Wisconsin University and move Calder's mobiles out of their own display just to help out a poor grad student? Doubtful. My best idea so far is trying to round up Claes Oldenburg's drawings or models from various museums which could be cool - but I have NO idea how practical that really is. Probably not very. I also had this idea to study Roy Lichtenstein and juxtapose him to comic books - but again - I'm not sure where I could get his artwork from and virtually everyone talks about him and comic books - so that's not really new information. Any ideas would be welcome. I'd love my exhibition to be colorful and whimsical and playful - but I'm hitting some dead ends.
I realize I haven't talked much about my museum internship. It's been a good experience, but I'm glad I only have two weeks left. I'll maybe post some pictures and talk about my favorite aspects of the job later. I have to write an 8 page paper on it - so maybe I'll post some excerpts from that. I'm also applying for another job at the University which would allow me to actually handle the artwork in our collection and work with the archives and our registration system. Who knows if I'll get it - it's a position under the same boss I work for now, but she really wants me to stay in my job at the slide library... so I'm not sure if those feelings will get in the way of her hiring me for the job....
Emily
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