And the work continues...City Hall Annex is a GO!!!

Friday, March 4th, 2010

To my surprise, everything for the City Hall Annex Show is going very well. It is still crunch time for signage, call tags, and presenting the work. I met with my principal this week who was delighted to see the progress of this showing of student work from our school. She wants a small reception at the venue which we will have on Friday, March 26th from 3pm - 4pm. We are ordering a bus to take the artists and their families to the venue and we will celebrate their wonderful accomplishment. Our own culinary program will cater the reception and make the food and beverages for it. I will need to go into work on Saturday to finish up the displays and place the call tags on the frames. I am actually attaching them to the back of the frames so they actually hang off them. It is a quick fix to the problem of not being able to hang the work and tags on the walls directly. They will look very cool when they are done.

Meanwhile, back at the factory ii, the exhibtion designers are beginning the prep for the walls and display cases for the main exhibition which will open on our campus April 5th. Carlos and Aaron have been doing a remarkable job. They will also work with other students in artwork preparations. We are using the colors of black, yellow, cyan, and magenta as our backdrop colors for the entire exhibiton. We think it will give the exhibition a modern and contemporary feel. The curators have been busy with field trips and TAKS so we have had to put that on hold for a week. The exhibition will be curated in basically four essential parts: Historic Houston, Iconic Houston, Trendy Houston, and finally a section labeled, the Experiments in Watercolor. Some of the feature artists have been producing muliple paintings and are wanting to explore the media beyond the techniques we learned in the classroom, so we are going to have a part of the exhibition which features this exploration. The final phase of work will involve selection of the many pieces of art being produced for muesuem's silent auction fundraiser. These pieces will be featured on the blogs so that patrons who want to see the selections may do so before they even get to the reception on Thursday, May 13th.

On a final note, Courtney Tardy and Jim Parsons from the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance stopped by on Wednesday to help me with the call tags and work titles for the art. They were blown away, as I have been, by the quality and integrity of the pieces. What impressed me was they did not require the actual photos the students painted from to identify the landscape scenes. They named buildings and venues we visited on the field trips in January from looking at the paintings alone. Jim presented to their board of directors at their quarterly meeting that afternoon, and were also blown away. So blown away, that I have been asked to come to their office to meet with two internationally known designers who have some ideas and would like to promote the exhibtion further. I am very excited for this opportunity for our students to have this "real world" experience of dealing with other organizations and supporters of our exhibition.

Life is going great at the factory...and the work continues.