Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Thursday's assignment, and more interviewing info

WHAT'S DUE FOR THURSDAY'S CLASS

1. Two or three images of your work (in digital form -- either pictures or scans) that you will post to your blog. These can be sketchy or preparatory images of work-in-progress -- it doesn't have to be finished work.

2. Contact info for your three potential artist interviewees, and at least five questions you intend to ask your artist (you might use the same five questions regardless of who you end up interviewing, but you also might have some questions that are specifically tailored to each potential artist. You will only need to conduct one interview for the purposes of this class, but as I said before, please have two fallback options.

The interview itself (not the transcript of the interview, but a recording of the interview itself) will be due in 1 1/2 weeks, at the beginning of class on Thursday, Sept. 8.

MORE INFO FOR YOUR ARTIST INTERVIEW

Your interview subject should be someone who is doing something you'd like to be doing, after you're out of school -- or perhaps simply someone whose work interests you on some level. You will be interviewing them about how they do their work -- not in terms of art technique (although if that interests you, that could be part of the interview), but how they've arranged their life so they can do work that is meaningful to them. Maybe they're not making their own artwork full time, but they've made space in their lives to feel their artistic impulses somehow.

How have they, logistically, made it work for them to do the sort of work that they're doing? How has their career progressed and developed?

Come to class with at least five potential questions to ask them. If you want to make an initial contact with them before now and then, that would probably be smart, but don't do the interview itself until we've had a chance to develop interview questions further. I'd recommend saying you'd like an interview of about 20 or 30 minutes. You can frame it like this:

"I am taking a class called Advanced Studio, and part of the aim of the class is to think about how, practically, we will pursue art-making after we graduate from school. One of the projects is to interview an artist about their career -- how it has progressed, and how they have managed to balance their work and their life. If you would be available for a 20 to 30 minute interview on that topic, I'd be very grateful." Obviously you can make it more specific to your target interviewee.

1 comment: