When I was straightening up the dining room for our Thanksgiving feast, I came across this Thank You card addressed to “The Cake Lady” from the art students who attended my August presentation at the Frank Sinatra School for the Performing Arts in Astoria, Queens.
But this wasn’t just any card – it was a giant card packed full of goodies inside drawn by aspiring artists!
While I was preparing the talk about my art career and gathering images on my laptop, I visualized my paintings projected on a small, standard size pulldown screen. Imagine my surprise when I looked up and saw this! No wonder the Cake Lady nickname stuck!
We all had a great time that day. There were a lot of questions so the presentation was interactive. Getting up in front of the students brought me back to my days as an art history lecturer at the University of Michigan, which I used to love! At one point, I even wanted to be an art history professor.
Back then I would spend days in the UM slide collection library of over 100,000 slides, flipping through numerous drawers of slides, looking for what I needed to give my weekly lectures. When I recently showed the kids a sample sheet of slides, I learned they had never even seen slides before. (I know, I know. I dated myself…). How things have changed! This time around I used an iPad too, which gave me the freedom to walk around and zoom in on details.
Thank you to Laura Blau, art teacher and friend, who invited me to speak to her class. (And no, we didn’t talk about clothing in advance. I guess artists naturally gravitate toward black so they don’t distract from the art, and then add chunky, artsy necklaces to make a statement and break up the black. )
Afterwards Laura and the kids took me on a personal tour of the student art show in the main lobby, the culmination of an entire summer’s work. I was so impressed by the breadth and depth of the exhibit, and Laura’s ability to introduce such exciting projects to her students and then step back and let their creativity flourish.
Here are a few of the many fine pieces that span a variety of media and moods, from a delicate black & white cutout of a tree, to colorful paintings and marker drawings, to intense 3D mixed media pieces (this one depicting stress by using real books to represent the weight of the world pressing down). And these kids are only in 8th and 9th grade!
It was such a nice surprise to receive The Cake Lady card during the summer and then to recently find it again. And as The Cake Lady, it felt good to rediscover a part of myself that I had forgotten, my alter ego. When I was up in front of the kids, I fell back into an old and familiar rhythm that I want to hang onto this time around. I just have to figure out how, when, why, and where (minor details…).
Any suggestions?
