A person’s hair sometimes illustrates the inner workings of the head to which it is attached. Beverly Fishman, my mentor in grad school, has curly hair – not gentle ringlets, but fierce, uncompromising curls. And Beverly Fishman is nothing if not fierce.

Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Richard, New York, NY.

I’ve talked to Bev often since my graduation from Cranbrook a year and a half ago. From the window of Galerie Richard at the opening for her self-titled show last December, I noticed Bev’s hair first; her spiky silhouette was set against the delicate layers of EKG and EEG patterns in her paintings. Inside the gallery, I was surrounded by a swirl of psychedelia; I felt both dazed and dazzled.

Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Richard, New York, NY.

Having a great teacher is a mind-altering experience. Great teachers may shock, jolt and intoxicate you. Not unlike the pharmaceutical references in Bev’s work, the effects of a great teacher may last longer than you expect.

A few weeks later I visited the gallery and Bev again. We stood in front of one of her recent works, an array of candy-colored glass capsules called Pill Spill, 2011, as she stated with her encapsulating intensity that two things were certain: she always knew that she wanted to be an artist and she always knew that she wanted to be a teacher.

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When I win the Hugo Boss Prize, I’ll definitely thank the professors I met along my BFA and MFA way.  Without them, I wouldn’t know how to dress for openings, patiently nod during boring conversation, or politely tell a student to shut the hell up.  To me, it’s these small but important aspects of teaching and learning in the fine arts that are so important and inspiring.

As a youngster, it was much easier to identify the role of teacher.  In elementary school, the teacher was the rickety old nun who didn’t let anyone go to the bathroom.  She corrected our speech, like saying, “zero” instead of “oh” or, “I’m finished” instead of “I’m done.” In ballet school, the teacher was the Russian who barely spoke English and yelled a lot.  She told me to turn out my feet when they were too parallel.  She loudly clapped her hands to keep the beat of the melody that I apparently couldn’t hear or follow.  In art school, the role was slightly different.  There was encouragement and patience, not discipline and order.  Aside from correctly identifying years on an art history test, there seemed to be no right or wrong answer from a student.

Google image search results for "Sister Act," from stardusttrailers.com.

The graduate school experience was practically a blur of power between student and teacher that, frankly, scared the shit out of me.  Here was my typical thought pattern—directed at the professor—during my crit: “Why are you not saying anything?  Don’t you like it?  Isn’t it good??  This took me like, a week to make!!  Aren’t you going to confirm how amazing I am?!?”  By going through the system, I developed a type of confidence and independence in my thought process as well as a dependence on the thoughts of other artists whose opinions I valued.  My professors and I have maintained close ties where I still manage to default into a scared and curious student in our e-mail exchanges.

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I wrote about the application process for artist grants in my last post by way of interview with the artist Beverly Fre$h and author Gigi Rosenberg. In this post I will focus on the grant experience.

I’ll start by briefly sharing my own story. In April 2010 I received a Fulbright grant to study textile design in Finland. Upon arriving in Helsinki four months later, my careful designs for the next year almost immediately disintegrated. Trained as a painter, I erroneously assumed that embarking on a new career could be as easy as boarding a plane in New York as a fine artist and landing in Finland as a designer. Working for a client presented more of a conflict to me than I had anticipated. In hindsight my desire to dabble in design feels disrespectful; I now feel content to covet the textiles that I could never make.

To say that nothing worked according to plan is an understatement. And so I had to make new plans. After this shock and forced reconsideration, things worked out for me, especially after I realized that most of my fellow grantees, maybe all of us, had significantly rejiggered our initial proposals.

Near the end the grant period, all of the grantees were gathered in a room where we were asked to write thoughtful advice for future grant recipients. At the time all I could muster was: “Expect the unexpected.” When I recall the person who wrote a grant proposal almost two years ago — the graduate student who believed her experiences would magically crystallize into lasting career stability — I smirk. By the time I returned to America, the traces of that naiveté had been erased.

I felt like a different person as I repatriated. Yet this pales in comparison to David MacLean’s experiences. MacLean is a writer and like me he got a Fulbright. He traveled to India in 2002. Then, mysteriously, he woke up — as if he had been asleep – with no recollection of who or where he was.

MacLean’s story is exceptional; nonetheless, however trite the advice, grantees really should expect the unexpected.

The following is an excerpt of David MacLean’s story, which will be published in full by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in his forthcoming memoir, The Answer to the Riddle is Me.

 “Draw the Devil from this Boy”

Written by David MacLean

Illustrations by Wook Jin Clark

Image: Wook Jin Clark.

On October 13th, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India with no passport and no idea who I was. I was standing on the train platform, staring at a monitor. People were pushing past me. Train announcements in another language were coming out of static-filled speakers. Men in red shirts carried massive loads of luggage. There were crowds of women in burkas standing near a stall where a man was making omelets. Massive trains would sound their massive horns before they trundled out of the station. And I suddenly was in the midst of all of this.

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Who says the coolest artistic moments of 2011 had to happen at Venice?  I sure don’t!  To say that I’m at my computer all the time is an understatement, so the following list reveals the most exciting artistic gems that made for some very sad and lonely evenings hitting replay for hours on end.  The magic and wonder (or haunting sign of the apocalypse) of the Internet is that everything is archived and we can watch it over and over and over and over again!  So, enjoy!

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Image: from Adbusters.com

Protesters in Zuccotti Park, October 2011, Image: J. Gleisner

“The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.”

“News, far more than art, is artifact.”

– Marshall McLuhan

Somewhere in the ether Marshall McLuhan is smiling. The oft-quoted maxim of the Canadian futurist — “The medium is the message” — has been reified by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Protest is the medium; moreover, protest is the message.

To the annoyance of its detractors, Occupy Wall Street has avoided articulating its own agenda. The singular, most resounding demand of the protesters is the simplest: to be heard.

Protesters, 2011 was your year. Still many ask, what exactly have you accomplished?

In brief, you reinvigorated America’s roots as a protest nation, you extended the Occupy movement beyond New York’s Zuccotti Park to 900 cities worldwide, you cajoled celebrities (Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Russell Simmons) into action and you moved musicians (Lupe Fiasco, Kayne West, Jeff Magnum, Tom Morello) in Liberty Plaza. Most importantly, you have made the phrase “income inequality” a political hot-button for the upcoming election year.

As this year crawls to its end, media coverage of Occupy Wall Street has slowed to a near halt. This movement began online and it could have easily ended there. It didn’t.

However, the new year must bring with it a new phase of the movement. At present let’s look back at Occupy Wall Street — not its message per se (or lack thereof), but at its media; not at its dreams, but at its memes.

The Top 10 *Memes of Occupy Wall Street

*I am liberally defining “meme” to include all the viral internet media — posters, catch-phrases, photos, images, street art and videos — that have defined the Occupy Wall Street movement.

1. America’s “Tahrir Moment”

July 13, 2011 – The Canadian anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters proposed the following:

“On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.”

- From “A Shift in Revolutionary Tactics,” Adbusters, July 13, 2011.

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Buttressed by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, talk of the “Tahrir moment” went viral within two weeks. Two months later Wall Street was occupied.

2. “The Ballerina and the Bull”

September 17, 2011 – Protesters were entreated, they tweeted and they accreted. On Saturday, September 17, The New York Times announced the beginning of the movement. Protesters arrived, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and dancing around the movement’s unofficial mascot, Arturo di Modica‘s 7,100 pound bronze sculpture Charging Bull on Broadway.

This bull is featured prominently in another widely-circulated poster from Adbusters (below).

Image: from Adbusters.com

As if to prove that anything really is possible, a ballerina danced atop this sculpture in early December as the poster illustrates.

3. “We Are the 99%”

August 23, 2011 – An anonymous post on Tumblr by a 28-year old New York activist named “Chris” (last name, unknown) voiced the collective frustrations from underpaid and overworked Americans. The post, like the media generated by Adbusters above, rippled through cyber space. The poignant expression from the We are the 99 percent tumblr became the movement’s slogan.

Image: wearethe99percent.tumblr.com

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention We Are the 99 Purrcent.

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“Gallerists!  Curators!  Where are you??  I’m here!!  I’m ready!!”  With an extreme sense of hysteria, faith in God, and nothing to lose, I ran up and down the hallway of my graduate building yelling those words.  It was this past April when I had my final MFA Open Studio event and I was hoping to get discovered and transformed into an overnight successful gallery artist with a spot in next year’s second New Museum triennial for emerging artists in their late 20’s and early 30’s.  Now, eight months later, out of school and unemployed, I’m hypnotized into a trance as I sand some wood in a parking lot of a warehouse, for a sculpture that will be exhibited in my first ever solo show, opening in exactly 16 days.  The over-confident trickster grad kid has left the building and all that remains is a scared, confused, and lost dude trying to make sense of his reality and praying that what he’s creating is something remotely close to Art.

Google image search results for "Art," from arttherapy-co.org.

I grab another piece of wood and try really hard to be present in this moment.  I need to sand this wood and prime it before the sun goes down and the temperature drops and dew starts to collect on the surface of these sculptures.  My former grad classmate is assisting me on this project and I can’t help but be thankful that I met him at school and I quietly wonder what his aspirations are and what he hopes to do after he graduates in May.  Is he like me–does he think about the whole gallery thing?  Are there are a lot of teenagers out there that hope to show work in a gallery one day?  Is that a contemporary daydream?  We all know that there are children hoping to one day win American Idol or America’s Next Top Model, but what about Work of Art: The Next Great Artist?  Who are these people that end up representing different countries at the Venice Biennale?  I mean, someone has to fill those artsy roles, why can’t it be me?

Google image search results for "America's Next Top Model," from marshu.com.

“Jeffrey,” I tell myself, “please, focus on the wood!”  I inspect the wood for any imperfections that I could sand away.  For my show, I need to create a new body of work that has never been seen before.  In grad school, presenting new work every five weeks for a critique was a piece of cake, so much so that during my Intermediate Review, my mentor professor asked me to consider why my production was so manic.  To this day, I don’t know if I ever stopped long enough to really contemplate the answer.  I’m trying to, right now, during this monotonous process of smoothing out a piece of kiln-dried redwood, but I can’t stop my catastrophic thoughts: will I finish on time, will people like it, will anyone review it, what do I do after the show, should I move to New York, does my future husband live there?

Google image search results for "gay marriage," from ithacalibrary.com.

As the temperature quickly drops below 50, I move the sculptures inside the warehouse and I wonder where my grad kid confidence went.  It just disappeared!  It just, poof, went away.  I used to bang out work and walk into critiques with an obvious excitement to show new work, and now, I just want to install my work in the gallery and run far away until my dealer gives me the thumbs up that it’s okay, or the thumbs down that I wasted his time.  In the end, this is what I wanted and this is why I went to grad school, and now I have to deal with the reality I signed up for. Geez, I wish I had just gone to grad school to find myself!  Just kidding.

F stands for Fre$h.
Beverly Fre$h, that is. Artist, performer, rap star, and former corporate graphic designer, Mr. Fre$h found his first flicker of fame when he was included in the 2009 Book of Guinness World Records. History was forged before my eyes at the Cranbrook Art Museum degree show in May of 2009 when Fre$h set three world records. A frenzied crowd focused on Fre$h’s face flecked with yellow yoke as he smashed forty-one eggs on his head in under a minute. He broke further records for the most chocolate candy Whoppers caught in his mouth from a distance of 6’6” (also in under a minute) and for the tallest stack of cassette tapes.

Image courtesy the artist.

F for Fortune.
Fortune favored Fre$h in the months following his record-breaking feats when Fre$h went to Berlin–for free! Fre$h won a grant, namely, the Daimler AG Emerging Artist Grant. The award annually funds a one-month stay in Berlin for one Cranbrook graduate student who “exemplifies the spirit of DaimlerChrysler Services’ core values: integrity, openness and respect; social responsibility; inspiration and empowerment; and commitment to excellence.” A rapper might seem a far cry from the car company’s core values, but Fre$h attested his affinity for effectuating excellence as well. There is money—free money—that can and will befall even the most far-fetched of fantasists.

From the flip book, !BEVERLY EATS CAKE! Image courtesy the artist.

F for Fervor.
F is for fervor; F is not for fake. However tempted one may feel to feign enthusiasm when writing a grant proposal or pitching your part before a selection committee, most people can, in fact, spot a fake. Before a board of company officials, Fre$h delivered a fierce PowerPoint, outlining his development, influences and conceptual framework as an artist. He finished his presentation with a mouth-foaming performance of “O When the Dogs Bark.” The foundation for fruition, as Fre$h affirmed, is frankly, that you cannot fake the fervor.

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The other week, my non-sexual digital boyfriend’s laptop crashed.  Our nightly online video chats were reduced to boring phone conversations.  He said he lost years of writing: pages of journaling, ideas for memoirs, and random personal quotes that would one day make it into an inspirational coffee table book.  As I browsed through my own external hard drive (having learned my lesson to back-up everything from a terrible computer crash in 2007) I noticed how borderline-obsessive I was about organization.  Most importantly, I noticed how masochistic I was to keep track of every juried art competition I’ve ever entered in the last decade, most of which I failed to successfully achieve.

Google image search results fro "Juried Art Competition," from transartists.org.

After getting my BFA in 2005, I needed some way to get my artwork out there.  “Did you apply” seemed to be the catch phrase with my peers, a kind of reminder of rigorous academic training in the fine arts.  Creating artwork was one-third of the entire artistic process—the other two-thirds consumed by social networking and dreaded paperwork.  Every week I stumbled upon a new art website with a new mission to bring you the newest calls for artwork.  I manically applied to everything and anything, free or pay-to-play, and juried by anyone from the senior curator of X museum to a nobody with some extra time and money to make artists’ lives a living hell.

As soon as I saw an open call, I was ready to apply.  I have a root folder in my external hard drive that has my artist’s statement, CV, biography, and title list ready to E-mail.  I even have a fabulous picture of each and every single one of my artworks at a max size of 1000 pixels—but it’s the selection of the work that becomes the hardest part.  The Present Group wants objects, Video DUMBO wants moving images, GLAAD wants queer themes, Avant Gaurdian wants fashion photography, Skowhegan wants this, Artists Wanted wants that, Future Generation wants this, 3rd Ward wants that…. Not only am I applying for group shows, I’m applying for opportunities to get myself out there.  I’ll do anything!  I’ll even try out for reality television!  I want to express myself outside the walls of my studio.  Am I sick or just a product of contemporary culture?

Google image search results for "The Real World," from dipity.com.

This year alone, I’ve sent out material for consideration to twenty-one calls.  It’s a roller coaster ride with everything in life, and these applications have been no different.  I participated in the highly controversial ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan after an application fee of $50.  It turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my artistic career thus far.  Locally, I applied to multiple group shows at Southern Exposure and Root Division, and wasn’t selected for any.  On a more depressing level, I applied to a free and all-inclusive Slide Slam show for graduate and recent graduate students in the Bay Area at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts—yes, everyone was accepted—and still managed to be omitted from the final presentation.  Going back up the roller coaster earlier this month, I was a finalist for the inaugural Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium Writing Fellowship.

I’m tired of applying for everything but it’s already become second nature.  I’m desensitized to rejection E-mails but I look forward to reading how professionals deliver “unfortunate” news, and of course, the acceptance E-mail every once in a while.  At this point, I don’t even know what I’ve applied for or how many baskets I’ve put my eggs in until I’m contacted that “no, you suck,” or “yes, you’re in,” or my NSD boyfriend reminds me that I save everything.  I don’t really pay-to-play anymore, unless the jury looks swell or the online buzz for the competition seems worth it.  And I definitely stay clear of any website that looks super shady—terrible scrolls bars, icky font, no Facebook link, etc.  I’ll leave you with this anecdote: the other week, I got a call from a casting director of a reality show, saying that she had saved my application from a few years ago, and that I might be perfect for a show coming out next summer.   I don’t know if I’m ready for that, but you know what?  Yes, I Did Apply.

“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” -Aristotle

“Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.”  -David Hockney

Artists Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw in their studio. Image: J. Gleisner.

There is a scene in Woody Allen’s classic movie Annie Hall in which children announce to the viewer not what they aspire to become when they grow up, but what they actually become in their adult lives. One boy is the proud president of the Pinkus Plumbing Company. Another sells tallises. The third boy says, “I used to be a heroin addict.  Now I’m a methadone addict.” From the mouth of babes Allen voices the truism that sometimes there’s a gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing.

Many of us, this writer included, have confronted this gap. Not once as a child did I dreamily gaze into the future and say, “When I grow up, I want to be an administrative assistant.” Actually I knew from a very young age that I wanted to become an artist. I am. But I also have a full-time job.

Between my full-time job and full-time studio practice, I work hard—very hard. I’m not alone. Indeed, the will to work must mutate from an academic obligation into herculean determination in young artists out on their own. Without a maniacal, insistent drive to create you will surely drown in the sea of other aspiring artists around you. Feeling adrift after a full day of filing and faxing at my day job, I headed to Greenpoint a few weeks ago for a rousing evening with two of the most ambitious young artists I know: Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw.

Chances are you have met Jen and Paul. If you haven’t, you will. They will make sure of this. I was first introduced to Jen and Paul at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where they began in the sculpture department and left together as a performance artist ensemble. Since they graduated from Cranbrook in 2010, Jen and Paul have been busy. In slightly less than two years, they have operated their own Fish Fry truck, been featured at Scope New York, hosted a series of apocalypse-themed dinner parties/performances at the Lower East Side Gallery, Allegra LaViola, and performed at Mass MoCA.  Later this month, the pair will participate in the show “No Object is an Island” at the re-opening of the Cranbrook Museum of Art.

Paul's Rattail. Image: J. Gleisner.

A curious (but by no means unexpected) development since Cranbrook is the appearance of Paul’s rattail, which commenced, fittingly, at our graduate commencement. Symbolically, Paul’s hair tassel tracks his growth since grad school. Inside their basement studio the rat tail is at home with its feral surroundings; the tanned hide of a cow carcass is folded in a corner next to a stack of oversized gambling chips. Remarkably, Outlaw is Paul’s real last name; he looks and acts the part.

Likewise Jen is a maverick in her own right. Whereas Paul prefers sleeveless undershirts, Miss Catron has branded her own combination of quirk and elegance. On the evening we met, Jen was stylishly dressed in the color of the season, camel. Her get-up—part cowgirl, part seventies power suit— was evidently hand-made, as are all her clothes. The charming concoction was offset by her vibrant red hair. With her brilliant mane, her theatrical outfits, her alien energy—Jen could generally be described as high-octane.

Jen and Paul are distinct in my circle of friends not only in appearance but because they are making waves in the larger pool of talented emerging artists in New York. A worthy goal for recent grads is to find a way to fund your artistic production. The more taxing challenge is to get paid for your artistic production. Admirably, how Jen and Paul make money and how they make art are not always unrelated. Like me, they also have day jobs.

Jen and Paul's Fish Fry Truck. Image courtesy the artists.

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I wake up surprisingly refreshed this morning with enough time to make my usual breakfast, browse the Internet, and watch Academy Award-winner Whoopi Goldberg moderate the ladies on The View. Every morning I fry three pieces of bacon and one egg and put it on a baked cinnamon-raisin English muffin. I couple it with a giant glass of orange juice with pulp, which my best friend says, “is a meal in itself.” Whoopi is hilarious and I love her view but the news is already too “yesterday” for me as I’m on Pacific Standard Time and anything noteworthy has already been highlighted on the entertainment blogs I read while my bacon is frying.

Google image search results for "The View," from kara.allthingsd.com.

After breakfast, with the television off, the dishes clean, and my tummy full, I turn on some streaming progressive trance music and hit the Web for a job hunt. Every morning I try to find a few companies to send my resume to. The Bay Area is saturated with start-up companies, so I tend to look for community manager positions. With Facebook and Twitter giving users access to praise, and the ability to criticize and question any product with the ease and grace of an angry twelve-year-old, many companies have hired social media gurus to act like really smart babysitters. When I lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I took headshots and made websites for actors. There aren’t many actors in San Francisco, period, so my photography and design skill-set has been pushed aside so that I could focus on honing my social media skill-set. Plus, I got held up at knifepoint outside my apartment this summer and the dude took my camera, so I can’t do that for a while anyway.

After my job hunt, it’s studio time. It’s basically time for another meal, so I make some ramen noodles and go back to surfing the Web. As of late, I’ve been fixated on Peace Poles—tall skinny wooden posts with the inscription “May Peace Prevail on Earth” planted outside churches, homes, or sites of recent conflict—so I do some research on the objects. For me, everything religious has a gay twist to it, so the aesthetic of the pointy wooden post nudges me to research The Herndon Climb. At the US Naval Academy in Annapolis there stands a 21-foot grey obelisk called the Herndon Monument which is the site of year-end event known as The Herndon Climb. One thousand young academy plebes attempt to climb the lard-covered monument to replace a plebe hat sitting atop it with an upperclassman’s hat. By the end of the two-hour-ish event, the scene formally looks like last call at a gay dance club—shirtless teens soaked in water and covered in grease, tired from all the shouting, grunting, and physical activity.

Google image search results for "The Herndon Climb," from wikimedia.org.

Now that I’ve overloaded my brain with wikis and JPEGs, I venture out of my apartment into the real world and walk to the local lumberyard to check the prices of material for this project. I’m planning on making my own gay Peace Poles. Two hours later, after I look at every piece of wood, twice, I decide to make a left outside the lumberyard instead of a right and I end up walking around the city. I’m a flâneur and this is my dérive for the day. One of the most important concepts I learned in grad school was the French Situationist idea of the dérive. Simply put, it’s a “purposeful wandering.” Academically put, it’s a revolutionary means to navigate away from urban capitalism. A great first baby-step (pun intended) is to journey around San Francisco with a map of New York City. Regardless of what percent you are during these trying Occupying times, a simple dérive can help make your day a little better.*

*You would think a cliché graffiti artist or homeless person would know the streets of a city like the back of their hand, but it’s also the 1%, like Bruce Wayne, who can navigate the streets with just as much rigor. Dandies perusing the pavement in Prada have the disposable income to perform this time-consuming and seemingly useless act. More importantly, my asterisk was put here to say, “be cautious.” Sure, a dérive can make you feel better knowing that you walked a totally new and exciting way home and discovered a video-rental store that you never knew existed, but if you wander into a precarious area without caution, you’ll get mugged and die.

Google image search results for "Batman," from blogs.setonhill.edu.

With the gorgeous San Francisco sun setting behind the Kink Palace in the Mission, I return home and fry some pork chops for dinner. While the meat is defrosting, I remember that my favorite Los Angeles-based interior decorator, Jeffrey Alan Marks from the hit Bravo reality-television show Million Dollar Decorators, will be in SF this week for a major fall antiques show. I hop onto Twitter and send a blind tweet asking him if he would be up for a studio visit with an artist and by the time I’m done eating my dinner he’s blindly responded “yes” with an exclamation point. My last artwork sale was to a local interior designer so I hope that this is a financially fruitful meeting. It can also be a nice anecdote to the Bravo production team when I audition for next year’s season of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

I have the hardest time falling asleep. My mind races with too many thoughts. I’ve thought about taking Klonopin but there are too many studies that link creativity to madness and why would I want to live a life where the relationship between Peace Poles and Batman didn’t resolve within three simple paragraphs? Tossing and turning in my bed, I wonder what the hell I’m going to do tomorrow morning when I wake up. I know I have The View to watch and some cover letters to write and some studio time and some Web surfing and some tweeting and some blogging and some dériving and some eating to do, but really, what do I really have to do?