![]() After a couple of conference calls with the staff at Children's Museum of South Dakota over the past few months, I finally spent the day on-site meeting staff and planning our new collaborative installation project for Summer 2015! Very happy to have such supportive partners in the development of a new exhibit space and community-based installation themed in PONDS and STREAMS. It is CMSD's and my personal goal to maintain a blog about the project detailing its development with artifacts, documents, images and reflections. My visit began with a tour of the museum and its exhibit spaces. Since the museum I work for, Children's Museum of Southern MN, is not yet open or complete, I loved walking through exhibits filled with children and families! CMSD is filled with a collection of varied exhibit spaces and experience. Since it is the dead of WINTER, we did not explore their outdoor prairie play space which includes multiple dino digs and TWO animatronic t-rexes.
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Our first day at Children's Museum Pittsburgh was AMAZING! Staff have been amazingly welcoming and supportive of our process. We unpacked our goods and hit the ground running. Day one included thrift store runs, fabric collecting, gluing, cutting, tying and exploring the museum space. DID YOU KNOW that museum contains an amazing collection of artwork? REAL Warhol painting hang inside the exhibits to children to see up close and personal. NOT POSTERS, the REAL PRINTS. wow. With one day under our belt we are getting closer to the opening. Tomorrow will be a long day...
![]() THE NEST has been in planning mode since JUNE 2014. It began with conversations between CMP and myself when they invited me to come for the FINE Artist's Residency. I soon invited Anastasia into the project because or fabulous collaborative past working on installation performances. Plus she has an AMAZING design aesthetic that I trust and speaks to my own. We soon began talking of an evolving space that tells a story and uses clues for visitors to construct the meaning of the space. THUS, THE NEST was born. We have gone back and forth between a couple of designs thinking about different spaces within the museum, material considerations and time constraints. Above is an image of the space where our installation will be built- the CMP Art Studio. The image of the side shows our design inspiration- a giant nest made of macrame rope and maps. OUR CREATURE is a vagabond, a traveller. Its home takes many forms and for the next 10 days...IT LIVES INSIDE A MUSEUM! Whew. It has been a long journey in preparation for THE NEST @ Children's Museum Pittsburgh. LUMiNS (our team) is ready to arrive at the museum, unpack all of our materials and get building. We have been speaking by video and email for FAR TOO LONG and its time to meet our fabulous collaborators who live in PGH. We are lucky to be working with a fabulous puppeteer theatrical designer, and teaching artist,, Lisa Leibering, who has worked on many projects at the museum before and knows the ins and outs of on-your-feet art making with young people. Lisa design work is seen ALL OVER Pittsburgh and she is the Manager of School and Community Programs for Gateway to the Arts and a professor at
California University of Pennsylvania where she teaches costume design and theatre courses. Also collaborating with us is Jamie Murphy, an award-winning, Pittsburgh-based leader in the dance community. Jamie brings dance and choreography around the country and currently teaches with Pittsburgh Ballet Theater School. HOW LUCKY IS LUMiNS to work with such incredible artists?!? SO excited to announce that a team of artists and I will bring an EVOLVING installation performance, THE NEST to the Pittsburgh Children's Museum as part of the FINE Foundation's Artist Residency beginning Sept. 20 through Sept. 29 2014! LUMiNS is the name of our artists' collective which includes myself as director, Anastasia Schneider as production designer along with fellow collaborators Lisa Leibering, Jamie Murphy and Siri Hellerman. Our team comes from Minneapolis, Phoenix, NYC and Pittsburgh to present this exciting work at CMP.
THE NEST is an installation space that will evolve over nine days in residence at the museum. A GIANT creature has made its home inside the museum and together with visitors we will make artwork, explore clues and ask big questions to discovery the identity of the creature and its story which, really involves all of us! MORE INFORMATION found at https://pittsburghkids.org/events/1341 ![]() Well, on this 27th day of July, 2014, I have to come clean on a few things: Not only did I not follow-through on my 'Meditations in Nature' project for the month of July (post below) where I situate myself within a natural setting for an hour a day but in fact, I sat outside only twice in an entire month. Not 27 times like I should have by now, twice. In a month where only a single day has had temperatures above 85F I have two meditation sessions and only a single blog entry. Believe me, I have plenty of excuses and reasons why it did not happen but none actually matter or are worth explaining. Fact of the matter is, I am not capable of keeping a commitment to myself right now. Times are rough and though my free time flows freer than it has in close to eight years, I flaked. It is not the first thing to fall to the wayside and it will not be the last. Why am I composing this admission on a blog? I could have deleted the previous entry altogether to pretend like I did not have the intention to commit 31 days to nature (or commit to anything for that matter) and move on. I do not have anyone to keep me accountable for late work or lack of follow-through on a creative endeavor. Grad school is over. I have myself and its time to lay the hammer down on my newfound "independent artist" status. Showing up is the first step, gal pal. In an attempt to process this highly uncertain and terrifying time of life: I must express myself in a format that is raw, live, and mostly uncensored to document the evolution from hopeless MFA graduate considering chiropractic school to the next phase. Right now, I am thirty years old, unemployed and living with my parents in my childhood home. I have a partner and two dogs who are all in tow relocated to a smallish town outside of the Twin Cities. I have no idea what is coming next in my professional life which might be exciting but also causes me stomach anxiety. After turning down a secure and salaried job immediately before moving to MN, I question what I really want as an artist and a functioning human. A friend tagged me in a FB post where you are supposed to say three positive things for the next five days. I found it ironic that the challenge arose during a time when all seems lost and confused so I am going to rise to the challenge and think positively. So even though I let myself down this month, I have also gained some things: 1). I have spent the month consciously contemplating the natural world. Which, it turns out is not "in the woods" or a long drive up north but 2.5 feet from the table where I sit. Twelve inches beneath the carpeting and foundation beneath my toes. Though a simple and obvious statement, I have just realized that nature is around me all the time. Though I lament the very unnatural landscaping and asphalt roads I am not ever without nature or the natural world. Nature follows me, even in a metropolitan area is the state of nature that goes along with industrialized human life. I have to accept it and celebrate its somewhat successful triumph to exist amidst and in spite of human's thoughtless destruction. (I said I was working on positivity, not that I have arrived yet). Finding authentic "nature" was one of the obstacles in the Meditations in Nature project. I only had to open a window or sit on the front step to immerse myself and observe the natural world. 2). Sharing nightly meals with your parents is great. I am grateful to have the Summer to share meals and time with my parents. Having spent only sporadic time with them over the past couple years during visits home or to AZ, I have gotten to sink into the everyday comfort of knowing them once again. 3). Sleep cures all worry. No matter how stressed or panicked I feel, I can always find respite in deep, restorative sleep. With only a few morning obligations per week these days, I fall asleep when i'm tired and wake when my body says it's time to. Good bye alarm sounds. During graduate school sleep was limited and came at the cost of grief because every extra hour of sleep was an hour of neglected work time. Hourray for connecting to my body clock! I want to conclude my entries with an idea (of which I have many right now) that might be developed into something substantial or maybe not, but now it lives outside my self and floats in the ether. Idea of the day: Twin Cities Teaching Artist Collective: Annual conference and monthly meetings of teaching artists of any and all arts disciplines to share, gripe, greet and learn from each other's experience. DAY ONE7/2/2014: 10:12 am |
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