The Transition of Art

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I keep several running lists of dates near me on the timeline of my departure from the academy. My memory has never been great for some things, though I do practice the Scorpio gift of receipt-keeping and have been known to somehow recall intense specificities of memories relating to vengeance or grudges other people don’t even know I’m keeping for them. The List starts in 2017 because that is when Vaimo and I moved to our country home and when some really big shifts in my life began. Every year that comes and goes between then and now seems to be an expansion of time that is both long like a slinky when it calmly flips down the staircase step, and short when it rejoins its other end making a neat, orderly stack. I carry a post-it in my Passion Planner of my career trajectory to help me make sense of all that has happened in the five years since 2017. It recently came in particularly handy while pulling together an artist talk I gave at Cottey College in early December. I have another post-it note next to my laptop stand in my studio, because I often reference the timeline when applying for fellowships or other artist opportunities. It’s helpful to remember when exactly I graduated with my AFA in Fine Arts for instance (2020), which in turn helps me think back to when I completed my last semester of teaching (Spring 2019). And while flipping the Gregorian calendar always helps inform reflection on transitions from one year to the next, I am finding myself increasingly interested in better understanding myself in relation to this career timeline I keep having to reference. Because I can’t remember if my departure was just last year or if it’s been longer.

It is not just the fallibility of my memory that has created this continuity challenge in my mind, but of course 2020 is a marker of so much change for all of us that continues to shape our present. Graduating at the beginning of our ongoing pandemic and trying to navigate a career shift has not been easy, but neither I suppose has it been easy for my colleagues who were forced to shift to online course delivery mid-semester and for a couple of semesters onward. All while wading through the ever changing guidance set by university administrators on how to keep themselves and their students safe(r) from an airborne illness that continues to kill too many to truly fathom. This December marks three semesters since I have not been in the academy, and by my purposeful use of that marker of time it’s clear my brain, after a lifetime of being in academic settings, continues to want to organize time in this manner. It shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that these old ways of being continue to haunt me.

I’m constantly evaluating my media content whether books, television shows, narrative films, documentaries, and podcasts and as I’m watching or listening or reading, I’m thinking about what I would do with this information if I was teaching. I catalogue books I would assign for classes I used to teach, and I make up assignments for classes I’d like to teach in the future. These habits make me wonder if this is just who I am after nearly forty years of learning and almost two decade of teaching. Or if this is only a habit and one day my brain will stop organizing information in these ways. Will three more semesters of me not affiliated with an academic institution come and go and I’m still doing this? The assignment one is kind of funny, because it requires me to maintain a fantasy in which I have students under my charge again. It makes me think there are parts of me that really miss teaching, being in the classroom, curating a sixteen-week learning experience. I work up assignments in my head for imaginary classes, I wrestle with learning objectives and how the content would help students think differently about a topic of my choosing. I think about how I might work in the current events of protests in Iran or China in the Global Feminisms course I used to teach. I think a lot about the theme I might organize a Senior Seminar around. When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade earlier this year, I mourned not only this court decision, but also the opportunity to be in community with the built-in feminist campus goers- the Second Waver colleagues I was often butting heads with on campus, and my young radical spirited students who were ready to burn it all down. These groups clearly wouldn’t agree on everything, but the intergenerational wisdoms would have been good to experience. And I would have had a clear role, answering media requests, organizing speakers, rallies, protests. It would have been nice to feel like I had more than just money to give toward the next era of reproductive justice movement building.

I’m not sure what “good” any of this reflection (and sharing) is for me. Other than perhaps my intense desire to notice and intellectualize my existence in this time. To feel like in maybe putting it down in words I can start to exorcise my obsessive scholarly habits. Perhaps naming that I am living this weird “beside” the academy life can somehow change how I feel about it. My comfort is more with pushing these uncomfortable feelings away, instead of trying to live with them. Though, I’m learning new tools to try to allow them to co-exist. To welcome instead of deride. I don’t regret my choice to leave, if given the chance to do it again I would. While I don’t regret it, I still miss it occasionally. Although there are obviously many things I do not miss at all. But, as a professor there are conversations to be had in the space of a classroom that aren’t easily replicated elsewhere and I miss that deep engagement. I seek enlightenment through the form of wisdom, not all wisdoms are book learned, nor are they the most inherently important wisdoms, but they’re my most practiced, my most comfortable path for finding the wisdoms. I suppose that the lesson here for me in this time is to be gentle with myself in recognizing a year and a half time is nothing in the scale of my life so far, and that perhaps there is magic for me in what has been left behind. I am living the monastery scholarly life at the ChicFinn surrounded by all I need for the time being. I do dream of book clubs, and study groups, and seminars, and lecture halls, and the feelings I feel only when I’m surrounded by the library stacks. I dream of reading lists and buying books at the bookstore and syllabi and learning objectives. I dream of fireside chats and cosplaying as a Full Professor drinking a scotch at the Campus Club. To clarify, these dreams are of the sleeping variety, not the goal-setting variety. They’re as if another version of me are still on that path, along with the monk version of me at the mountainous secluded tower, along with the current version of me in the timeline that I’m reporting from right now.

It’s easy to hone in on this end of year situation as occasion to start freaking out. I can easily slip into believing I’ve wasted my time - that I didn’t accomplish enough this year, (objectively not true). I can spiral that another year has come and gone which puts pressure on the next one to be even greater than the last. 2023 is going to be our year though Nay Nay. And as we do our annual reflections and goal settings I’ll share with you that I’m going to spend this upcoming year continuing to reflect on my relationship to time. To focus on the time being, or better yet, being a better time being in the spirit of Ruth Ozeki’s amazing book I read this year (A Tale for the Time Being). I’m going to continue to strive to be more instead of do more, to trust more in the universe, to seek more flow than force, to cultivate calm and peace. I’m going to live into the next two semesters with curiosity, joy and delight. I invite you to do what feels right for you in this time and hope you have a Happy New Year. Perhaps, we can all learn something in dreaming about our time.

What I’m Reading

On Mending: Stories of Damage and Repair by Celia Pym

I came into knowledge about this book via TATTER where I not only purchased the book but attended a virtual zoom book talk with the author. (Side note, please keep offering virtual events/opportunities for people like me in the rural northern midwest who cannot physically attend many things but will eagerly sign up for the online option!) Celia Pym’s practice and care in mending objects that mean something to the people who bring them to her shines throughout the stories highlighted in the book. While many of us are thinking differently about the impact of waste and fashion production processes on climate change, mending has seen a renaissance in giving textiles another chance whether they be clothes or decorative for our homes. Pym’s approach in telling the stories behind these objects and her strategies for showing the mend with bright contrasting fibers in sweaters for instance, helped me think deeply about the stories meaningful pieces of clothing have for us. It also made me flirt with the idea of finally learning how to knit (like what I if I could make myself a sweater?!), and take the plunge into designing my own clothes. The aesthetic possibilities of making something just for me seems very pleasing to me, as does exploring the traditions of home sewers and knitters for home and clothes of the past and current era. What was so delightful about this book was the deep engagement with objects that transcends ownership and possession to inspiring us to think about the duty of care we must have to each other and the objects that adorn our lives. 

Artist Offerings

• Titillated by Erin Thompson's personal narrative of erotic encounters in the museum helping me think about the erotic connection to the creative
• This essay Museums Can, and Do, Talk About Race. Just Not Whiteness by artist Zoé Samudzi raises some interesting points related to the recent Philip Guston delays in his retrospective
• This five minute reading experience Between the Lines in real time as the author writes a letter to a past love also titillated me!
• I really like Sarah Smarsh's writing and this essay rings very true to a certain slice of rural life
• Speaking of rural life, this video of the work of the MN Rural-Urban Exchange intrigued me
• A fun (and scary) look into the AI influence on house staging and what it means for our time and our current home preferences for design 

Creative Ritual

You may have noticed it’s been a full month since my last newsletter. The timing of December 15th found me coming back from a week long sojourn to Kansas and Missouri, where it was so great to see family and enjoy time with super engaged students and faculty at Cottey College. And while I had the chance to connect with some folks I only knew from social media networking and was also able to drop off one of the paintings of the Roots series to it’s new home in Matfield Green as part of the Matfield Station corporate collection, I needed some down time between obligations that meant I wasn’t able to juggle my usual newsletter production. I am excited to have booked a Duo Show with D. Helene Woods in Minneapolis that will run in February through mid-March, and am contracting as part of an artist co-op in St. Paul for the rental of some gallery space in the new year. Somehow in all that I’ve started some new paintings, and while 2022 is coming to an end, I cannot wait to see how my art and business continue to grow in the next year! Thanks for cheering me on and being a part of my support system as avid reader of my (mostly) bi-monthly missives. Speaking of cheering me on...

KCF Milestones

In 2022 some of the things I'm most proud of related to my creative practice that you all helped fuel:

• I launched the podcast element of the narrated version of the newsletter essay
• Work was up in three solo shows including two that featured a new body of work
• I gave my first artist talk on a college campus
• I received 8 of the goal of 10 rejections this year for fellowships, residency and art show opportunities
• I finished my first quilt! (Made the top, sandwiched, quilted and bound the edges)
• I published 23 newsletters this year
• I grew to 8 Ko-Fi monthly sustainers (thank you!) 
• I sold more paintings and booked more commissions than years past
• I made friends with the two employees who manage Enterprise Truck Rental in Fargo
• One of my paintings won a Juror's Choice Award
• My Postcards Segment won a Midwestern Emmy

Questions to ponder

How are you thinking about time in this season of your life? 
How does time impact your mental/physical/spiritual health? 
Who were you three semesters ago that you want to honor? 
What can you let go from the version of you that existed three semesters ago? 

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. Happy New Year!

-KCF