It was great to be part of the mid-year senior thesis review panels today, as I have in several seasons past. As you may have heard the news, the school publicly announced the acquisition of its future campus on the North Park Blocks. This will take some years to build and shift, but it is certainly welcome news for the art community-at-large. As our panels and students raced from building to building, providing brief critiques of the work being generated from its new blood, the news was a buzz through the school. This is an achievement on so many levels, momentous, yes. I also managed to stop into the Feldman Gallery to check out the Untraceable exhibition and found myself mostly drawn to Hans Haacke’s treatment of a portion of an old-fashioned American flag. The show is a strong, but quick glimpse, into many events yet to come that will touch on the broadness of war and its aftermath. The repetition of the images referring to and re-enactments of the torturous Abu Ghraib ordeal are repeated at least three times within the context of the exhibition. It’s a flash image of our visceral times.

Back to the senior reviews…it is certainly something I look forward to. You catch a glimpse of what the new generation is thinking, how they are going to tackle complex concepts and media, and know they are the next wave for gallerists hungry for fresh new perspectives. It was an honor to serve with a changing panel of five other arts professionals throughout the day. It’s great to hear, from their perspective, an assessment, creative feedback, critical and contextual. Serving on these panels really gives one the opportunity to be the first outside the academic confines of the institution to help, in some way, move the process, and offer an outsider’s perspective. As usual there are always some students who are further along than others, and lots of surprises. Some of these surprises form between now and the final thesis which is in a few months. The ROI here is being part of the larger intergenerational patchwork of artists, students, teachers and others. So, here’s to PNCA - Raise Your Flag - higher, higher!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Daily Grind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.