Tergel: Visiting Artist at Emma Willard School

As part of my exhibit at Emma Willard, I was invited to be a visiting artist at my high school!  It was an interesting and new experience. Never before have I had to condense my artwork into a 20 minute slideshow or presented in front of a group of strangers as "an artist."

The art department chair, Mark invited me when we were installing our show. He asked that I create a slideshow of my work and talk about my experience studying art in school and any professional work I have done. He also wanted me to create an exercise for the students to do. 

As usual, I waited until the night before my visit to make my presentation and come up with an assignment. I have a folder called "My Art" on my hard drive that I fill up with work, but hadn't really organized. So I began with looking all the way back to when I was 14 and started photographing for fun for the yearbook. It was hard to choose which images to show. In the end, I chose the ones I found to be the most successful. Images that hadn't necessarily been in shows, but ones that I was most proud of. I also included some of the commercial work I did to give a sense of my breadth of photography. 

I organized my slides into mediums: photography, sculpture, illustration, painting and mixed media. I ended with mixed media because that is my most recent work. For the talk, I had two classes of students: one from photography and one from painting, making up about 40 people total. I rambled a lot and ended up going off on tangents. I told stories about how I got the opportunities I got and the amount of work I had to do for specific projects. 

It was intimidating at first, but then I realized I never really had a chance before to go through a chronological story of my art-self. In the end, I got caught up in my stories and talked for maybe 40 minutes. At the end, the students asked me questions like, "How do you know when a photograph is successful" or "Do you intend on being an artist for the rest of your life". I even had a girl ask me, "In my professional opinion, what is my idea of success?"

That was funny, cause I don't feel professional at all, but clearly to these young girls between 14-17, I appeared to be so! I answered their questions and I had another set of class to talk for. This time around, I had gotten better at talking and had a much shorter slideshow. At the end, I presented my photography exercise that I was asked to come up with. 

I ended up doing the Top & Bottom Assignment where I asked the students to go to their computers, since the course was digital photography students and look for images that could be tops and images that could be bottoms and use photoshop to place them on top of each other, creating a new image that structurally made sense. The girls had a fun time and I walked around, giving suggestions and looking through their images. 

I enjoyed creating an exercise because it was my first time to really "teach" and consider what types of activities would spark creativity in the students! Below is a picture of me with a couple of the girls who stayed behind to talk to me!