Incredibly Organized Studio

Videographer Casey Neistat has his shit together:

Direct link: http://vimeo.com/68558518

Crabapple Leaves

My 2-year-old and I were playing in the rain the other day. We had some fun in the birdbath with some leaves from our crabapple tree:

Crabapple Leaves (click image to enlarge)

Siege on Photography

I'm not saying I necessarily agree or disagree with these thoughts, but here are Siege's (AKA Clayton James Cubitt) thoughts on Photography:

1/ Painting is irrelevant. We've been putting colored dirt on flat surfaces for 30,000 years. Little has changed or advanced in that time. Most of the major advancements that have happened, have happened because of cameras, and their predecessors, the camera obscura and lucida. Painting is done, photography is doing.

2/ Painting is primitive. The medium is the message. The camera as an object embodies the heights of human achievement and aspiration. It says "We are Promethean, we have made this wondrous clockwork machine to enable anyone to make art like the gods." A paintbrush says "Here, not-so-clever monkey, dip this stick in your poo and smear it around on something and hopefully your mom will like it."

3/ Painting is ignorant. The camera is a passport to understanding others, accepting them as they are, and being understood by them. Artists want to understand the human condition, illustrate it, translate it, and record their own soul for others. More than painting, photography forces social interaction, negotiation, and sensitivity by the artist for his subjects. This is a shorter and surer path to understanding. A painter need not venture further than his navel, and most don't...

4/ Painting is elitist and useless. Any art suffers when forced to explain itself in base terms of sheer utility (in survival mode, I'd take one farmer over ten artists), but if reduced to even this brutal standard, photography wins hands down. Besides being a beautiful and enlightening art form, and a democratic one, it is also useful in the strictest utilitarian sense of the word. From science to justice to history, photographs are far more useful than paintings. When man went to the moon, he brought a camera, not a paintbrush. You do the same on your vacations.

5/ Painting is poor. Despite the romantic notions to the contrary, there is no nobility in starving for your art. The real money in painting (or any fine art) is in the secondary art market, which sits looking over the painter's shoulder, like a vulture, waiting for him to die, so that his work skyrockets in value. It greatly disturbs me that Van Gogh lived like a pauper his whole life, and every penny of the hundreds of millions of dollars his work has generated has gone into the hands of art dealers and collectors and auction houses. No art career is a good investment, but the demand for photography is an order of magnitude greater than painting. Even judging commercial art against commercial photography, photography wins, for reach, for volume of work, for income. Starving is for suckers.

Interviewed by Kare11 About CVA's Closing

Kare11 (the Twin Cities NBC station) did a quick interview with me about the closing of the College of Visual Arts on Friday, which was my last day of work there. I was interviewed for the short story. Watch this and you'll see why I usually like to keep my awkwardness behind the camera:

Link on Kare11's website here.

I should have shaved. And combed my hair. And just stayed out of the camera's view altogether.

Sweet News at a Difficult Time

The few of us that are still working at the College of Visual Arts will be done this Friday (except for 2 or 3 people) as the school will no longer exist the first of June. I recently received this e-mail from the CVA Librarian as she's about to start her last week of work at CVA overseeing the 11,000 book collection and 9,000 slide collection:

The librarians at MCAD have been extremely kind about the transfer of about 1000 books to the MCAD library. They are going beyond the call of duty by having a student design a bookplate to be placed in each book. This is added work they did not have to do.

One Less Color Processor in the Metro

The College of Visual Arts held it's last class on Friday, May 3, 2012. The night before, I drained and powered down our 31" Kreonite color processor. The next day, I found a work-study student changed the background of the equipment checkout computer in the Photo Lab to this:

Click to enlarge.

"Taking the color processor off life support. It's official - she's dead."

That's a photo of my hand unplugging the processor for the last time. Brunhilda, rest in peace. May you be resurrected someday.

The Official End of CVA

Back in January, I posted about giving a speech to current College of Visual Arts students once they learned that CVA was going to be closing. Then a week later, I posted about "Save CVA" and some great shirts that an alumni was making. Shortly after that, a group called "CVA Action" was formed to help try to stop the closure of the school and to raise money to keep The College open.

"CVA Action" Rally at CVA 2 weeks ago.

Many of us were optimistic.

Realistically, the numbers were staggering: CVA Action needed to raise about 3 million dollars in a few weeks. They had a plan in place to not have CVA open for the 2013-14 school year (because current students have found other schools and there was no recruiting being the school was planning to close), but then to open back up as a smaller institution in the fall of 2014. After a few weeks of collecting money and asking for donations, CVA Action still hadn't quite hit the $100,000 mark. That's an AMAZING amount of money to have raised in such a short period of time for a small school, but it wasn't enough. Last week, the board of trustees for CVA announced that it was no longer possible to save the school, and CVA Action came out with this statement:

Sad News

Sad news from the last night’s Board of Trustees Meeting: The College of Visual Arts Board of Trustees reaffirmed last night that CVA will be closed at the end of this school year. They took a look at our plan, decided that if we could raise $3 million dollars in two weeks they might be willing to put a couple of CVA Action people on the board and try to open again in a year. CVA Action was formed to keep CVA open.

The Board of Trustees asked us to take part in closing the school, and we cannot do that. We voted unanimously to reject the trustees’ offer. We are heartbroken and angry. We feel that this did not have to happen this way, had the Board of Trustees and school administration had told us of the dire financial situation last Fall. But that’s not the hand we were dealt.

The student response was awesome. The work the students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends did was hugely effective. In the past two weeks you reached out into the community and you found support. You showed true creativity. If we had seen that from the administration and the trustees a year or six months ago, we might have been celebrating tonight. We do have things to celebrate. The students and graduates of the College of Visual Arts are making a difference in the world. Whether it is making beautiful art, founding the digital communications division of a major advertising agency, teaching or any of the other things our fellow alumni are doing, the school has a wonderful legacy to celebrate.

Painting by Eugène Delacroix, modified by Keri Huber

I'm not going to air my dirty laundry here - if you want to know what I think happened at CVA, you'll have to talk to me in person. It seems it was not only because of declining enrollment and rising costs. I feel much the same as many of the other full-time faculty members at the school. But now that's hardly here nor there.

Photo from Michelle Stolz (current CVA student and former student of mine).

It's been amazing to watch my students in these final few weeks at CVA. They're all taken care of and are (mostly) either entering MCAD through a "teach out" agreement, or they've applied and been accepted at a different school. Lately, their shift as been to us as their professors: "So Steve, what are YOU doing after CVA?" My answer is much like many others: I don't know. (I've applied for a few other teaching positions in the Metro area, but I'm still waiting to hear back.) They're so concerned for all of us. They're actually throwing a faculty and staff appreciation party for us later tonight. How sweet.

They're also coming together in other "fun" ways. This past weekend was the final "CVA Prom." I had to miss this event, but it looked fantastic. It was put together by students who held a drawing rally to raise money for it, and it was just the kind of thing you'll find CVA students doing - finding ways to get things done.

Pre-prom photo by Maria Cameron.


Photo by Maria Santiago.


Photo by Maria Santiago.


Photo by Maria Santiago.

To my knowledge, the only other CVA Prom was back when I was a student in the early 2000s. We made a "CVA Beefcake Calendar" with the men of CVA. (I have vehemently denied the existence of this calendar to current students until this very moment.) We sold copies, had a "meet the beefcakes calendar signing party," and made around $500 to rent a dance hall, purchase kegs, hire a rent-a-cop, and "live it up" for the night.

The marquee originally said "CVA PROM," but we changed it.






Two of my all-time top-10 favorite CVA people.






Paul always had a way with the ladies.


Lookin' good, fellas.


Moose and my fiancée.


My fiancée being kissed by my soon-to-be best man.






Marcy, my official CVA date. And I forgot that I wore THAT. (That entire outfit cost me $8.)






This sums up our prom perfectly.

Of course there have been other CVA dances and events, but what set these 2 proms off from others is that they were totally student-driven. Ten years ago, the school "officially" had nothing to do with the Prom. We just all got together for good time. That's the joy of CVA - this school has taught students how to make things happen.

It's going to be an interesting final few weeks at CVA. This is uncharted territory for many of us. Wish us all luck. (But chances are, if you're a typical hard-working, motivated, resourceful CVA student or graduate, you won't need "luck.")

Dorothea Lange on Cameras

Purchase a print of this here.