Made some new stuff this weekend.  Also spent a lot of time lying in bed reading Judy Chicago’s book Women & Art: Contested Territory.  Had dinner with my friend Jade, discussed art, relationships, and life choices.  Feeling a little bit more clear-headed now after several days of feeling stressed and getting strange dizzy spells (I blame my stupid never-satisfied metabolism, grr!).  Of course, staying up until midnight blogging again (why does the motivation always come at 11:30pm, huh?) instead of going to bed is probably going to set me back to ground zero when I get up for work tomorrow morning.  The holiday pay will make up for feeling completely scatterbrained, right?

New on the table:

And I finished one of them:

Last weekend was Art-a-Whirl in NE Minneapolis.  I did some studio crawling on Friday and Saturday, art swapped, chatted with lots of WARM artists (some of whom I hadn’t actually met in person before, yay!) and on Sunday I helped with the photo booth at Suzanne Shaff Photography in the California Building (Suzanne is fairly new to the area, & I’m helping her out w/web and social media stuff).  We saw the tornado that hit North Minneapolis from the windows on the 6th floor, and promptly panicked and hid in the stairwell for a little while until the sirens stopped.  Pretty freaky.  Ooh and I met Amy Rice!  Love her work 🙂

Also received the happy news this week that I am one of eleven artists selected as Placemaker Artists in Springboard’s Friendly Streets project with Jun-Li Wang!  I don’t know a lot of details yet, but here’s the description they had in their call for artists which is a nice summary of what we’ll be working on:

Placemaking is people coming together and actively working to turn generic public spaces into community places where people can create connections with one another. By “activating” spaces with elements that encourage human interaction – from physical objects such as art, furniture and plantings, to activities such as parties and games, a generic space can be turned into a place where community gathers, happens and thrives. Springboard for the Arts believes artists play an instrumental role in creating place and creating community.

The setting is the Central Corridor Friendly Streets Initiative, a project addressing the design and use of the residential streets immediately north of University Avenue during construction and operation of light rail. The Initiative will host a series of block parties this summer to introduce residents to concepts and methods such as creative placemaking and traffic calming to make streets more user friendly.

I took a workshop on developing successful community projects with Jun-Li in November and am really excited to be working with her again & building on those skills.  I am also really excited for the Northern Spark festival coming up next weekend!  I am going on the Megalops at 11:00 with an assortment of friends, and who knows where the night will take me from there.  It’s another one of those “so much going on that it’s completely overwhelming and impossible to see it all” type of events.  Sometimes I wonder if our art community here, as loveable as it is, occasionally tries to do too much at once.  Maybe I’m just being selfish because I don’t want to miss anything.  How can one possibly choose between listening to sound art radio stuff on top of the foshay tower, playing laser tag at the soap factory, taking in the short film festival at the central library, watching the egg & sperm ride and video projections near St. Anthony Bridge, not to mention all the stuff going on at the Walker’s Nightshift?  And that’s just a small portion of all the events going on.  AAAHHHHHH…………………………………..