Sculpture Department Odyssey

By some stroke of luck, I ran into my friend Elaine this morning waiting outside for Molly so we could break into the sculpture department and explore together, and she told me she was just on her way to her sculpture project class. GASP, the very same one I'll be taking starting... oh my god, two weeks from now, what? OKAY, anyway, so I sent her as a messenger asking if Molly and I could sit in on his class, which ended up being fine, and essentially he showed a powerpoint and talked a lot about these found object sculptors (Tara Donovan, John Freedmon, and Bill Woodrow) as inspiration for their next assignment, using found objects to create a "charged" sculpture. He seemed like a really laid back and sincerely interesting teacher, so now I'm pretty pumped about his class and will probably try and take his Space class next semester.

After that I ended up roaming the building by myself working up the nerve to corner someone and start asking questions. I walked around a small exhibit that was in the process of being installed involving some ceramic block hands in "thumbs up/down" stances, some "body adornment" plaster/silicon molds, some myth based jewelry, and a really cool bent wood project.

From there I ended up wandering into this huge room with ridiculous caged off work areas and I freaked out because they were all so large and "extravagant" and filled with so many interesting looking things and in-progress works and I was like, "THIS WILL BE ME NEXT YEAR, I COULD HAVE THIS." And then I worked up the nerve to waltz into one of the open cages and talk to girl working inside... and I found out I had been wandering around the graduate studio spaces for the past half hour. Lesson learned: ask more questions, and earlier.

I was redirected to the opposite end of the building to an even larger room filled with probably at least 4x as many cages, albeit smaller, and equally interesting myriad of materials and people and pieces. It was essentially a ghost town, but finally, in one small corner in the back of the room, I found a girl working on a huge wall sized weaving, and finally got some info.

Somehow I always seem to run into juniors who have also had double Fridays with Val and therefore know exactly why I'm wandering around like someone with amnesia, so she was really accommodating and friendly. 

• Very conceptual department; materials less important, big portion is the conversation (especially junior and senior years)
• Really strong community: artists sharing tools; coming up when they see a person working on a project and asking questions about concept, materials, etc.
• Awesome teachers, funny, laid back, etc. Tim Devoe for really detailed, clean woodshop or metals work. Eric Masters, building off of everything they learned from Tim (even though he told them to basically forget everything Tim taught them).
• Sophomore year: one major sculpture class that will demand most of your time. A sophomore seminar class, learning about what sculpture is, writing proposals, etc. Art history. Something along the lines of a concept/concentration class, like in molds, welding, etc, to learn more specifics. And then project/studio classes in other majors, or gen eds (hopefully I'll get that all out of the way early though).

I expressed the bit of a struggle I've been having over deciding between applied and fine arts, mostly concerning wanting to have the technical skills that accompany applied arts like illustration, but then loving the freedoms of fine arts in terms of concepts and materials and such. She said as much as she did love sculpture, she was sort of wanting a more applied arts job now that she was getting to the later end of her college career. She recommended I could double major in an applied and fine art, which I've definitely considered more than once, but I've also been considering a double in a more academic major. Plus, double majoring in two arts sounds mildly suicidal/is that even humanly possible?