Ross Museum recycled Exhibit!

I believe I mentioned I had driven to Brooklyn and back in 48 hours to pick up artwork for the next exhibit at the museum. Well, we opened last week, and I think it looks fabulous!

The exhibit is our response to the National Colloquium theme "Cultivating a Green Campus". (for more information, you should go to the Ohio Wesleyan University site!) The colloquium sponsors a campus wide topic each year, and every department tries to relate something to it. Anyway, I got to curate our exhibit, and found 5 women artists who all work with recycled materials!

The first is Chakaia Booker, represented by the Marlborough Gallery, she works with steel belted radial tires and makes these incredible sculptures. We got 4 of her very small pieces; her work is really incredible!




We also are exhibiting Aurora Robson, who just got back from months in Texas, installing a gigantic sculpture for Rice University. She uses recycled plastic water bottles (think "Dasani") and this is the result! (this piece is dangling above my head in the gallery skylight!)

I also invited Francesca Vitali, otherwise known as Frucci on Etsy, and Hayley Muse Rupersburg, known as Museglass on Etsy. They have the most incredible jewelry! Frucci's is recycled paper from junk mail and shopping bags, and Museglass recycled produce containers and bags, sandwiching them between glass!

The final artist is a fellow Ravelry cohort, Lyne Kearns from New Zealand. She had approached me on Ravelry when she saw my ravatar "redpanties" and so she made me my very own Red Panty handbag, from recycled ladies panties!! I am making her a red panty quilt in return.

Sometimes I really love my job!

New York, New York!

Whew! What an exhausting couple of weeks! My daughter and I went to NYC the first of May for a mini-vacation, bonding experience. She's graduating high school in less than 3 weeks, and this was a last opportunity to do something together - you just don't know if your kids will want to spend alot of their time with you as they get older!

We stayed at the New Yorker Hotel on 8th and 34th, a lovely old Art Deco hotel. It's being renovated, but luckily our room had already been rehabbed!! The neatest thing was right outside the main lobby doors, there was this:



A gorgeous old bronze door!! That's my daughter, hiding from the drizzle! As you can see, we bought LOTS of $5 pashminas, 10 in all, I think, in every color and pattern we could find. They became gifts for some of her friends, but of course, there was one to coordinate with her prom dress, and one for me! As you can see by the big Conway bag she's holding, we did some shopping, because why go to New York if you don't shop a little? Conway's was right along 34th street, and had some cute, trendy clothing at very low prices, so we picked up a few items for spring. I am a sucker for architectural detail, and after walking past this all weekend, I decided I had to snap a photo of it. I loved the gorgeous Muses on the panels of the door itself; some appeared to have been worn smooth by amorous hands over the years!




I can image using the details of the border around the door as inspiration for a quilt, or chasing the pattern into a piece of silver as a brooch, can't you? The details of such workmanship fascinate me!

While we were in New York, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and took in the Egyptian wing. My daughter has been accepted to college in the fall to study archaeology, so of course it was appropriate! Unfortunately, the day we visited, the Temple of Dendur was CLOSED!! What a disappointment! I'm not sure if they were working on it, or if there was an event planned for later, but we could only peek around some partitions to look at it.




We also had dinner with a photographer friend and his wife, a darling couple! They live down by the Strand Bookstore, which, by the way, is like Half Price Books on steroids!! 3 jam-packed floors of remainders and used books on every imaginable topic! There is even an entire section of ARC's, which are Advanced Reading Copies of books sent out before the official publishing dates to critics and what-not. I know there are fans who specifically collect them, to see what changes might have been made before the actual release copy comes out.