I am so proud of you, sticking in there and going all through the web site to find this or perhaps you tracked it down via blogger.com, dispatches containing ramblings and rants re: my work, trying to get exhibition & teaching gigs, and other general art/art admin commentary. I'll try to keep the snarkiness to a minimum.

Lately, just finished a visiting artist residency at the University of Kentucky, in their Fibers Program, to whom I am indebted to Arturo Sandoval to being so kind as to invite me and schlep me around for the week. Despite the occasional 14 hour day, it was loads of fun: great students, lots of good food (being that it's free makes it taste better), and time to loll around the visiting scholar apart on campus working on a new smaller series called "Sexpot Icons" that I actually began as a sample project for this workshop and another teaching residency up at Miami University's (of Ohio) CraftSummer Program for this summer. The UK teaching gig has forced me to do several things re: the teaching gigs which were sorely needed: project handouts which illustrate the 8 or so sequential steps for the textile icon, textile technique handouts, and a large sampler on which I employ all the techniques I teach. While I will not jump up and down and holler about how much fun the creation of those peripheral materials was, it was necessary and of course, I needed much prodding to do it.

I like these opportunities to informally hang out with students, regardless if they're college or my more typical student artist demographic of 30 - 60 yrs old. Also, it was my largest crowd for an artist lecture ever: 300+. It was intimidating, but went really well, or at least they laughed at all my snarky and self-depreciating digs. And, I received e-mails from the students about how it was the first lecture they got anything out of from a visiting artist. Nice ego stroke.

This coming week, bringing in Faith Ringgold to MSU. She's the biggest artist that's been on campus for quite some time. We had Howard Zinn come in about 3 years ago, as far as a "big" person on campus, but not much as far as artists. I bring in quite a few visiting artists in association with the Claypool-Young Art Gallery, but they're not really big names like Faith. Should be pret-tay interesting.

Listening a lot to Sufjan Stevens lately. The UK students really liked the CDs

That's it for the first entry. Not sure the frequencies of this postings, but visit when you can.