Odds and Ends

So, I'm realizing that being mind-bendingly busy is not always conducive to getting lots of blogging done.

I've been participating in a wonderful summer institute known by the difficult-to-pronounce moniker PEMCI, which stands for the Public Engagement Material Culture Institute, run by the Center for Material Culture at the University of Delaware, which I attend. Despite being about public engagement, PEMCI surprisingly does not have an up-to-date web presence, but here is an article about a past PEMCI student that explains the program. The schedule for the past few weeks has been wonderful, but exhausting enough that I've been going to bed at about 9:30 every night with no time for blogging. It doesn't help that the Soviet-inspired apartment I'm renting has no internet access.

Anyway, this all means that I'm thinking that I should save the real launch of this blog as a daily entity until next week, and for now, anything I post is a victory. Don't worry! I've been using transit time to jot down lots of ideas for future posts and features. I just have little energy for shaping them at this point.

I can't put up a post with no pictures, though, so I figured I'd share the (rather silly) image on the right. One of our tasks for PEMCI was to design a lesson plan for a K-12 audience, and mine was a combination of a field trip to a local monument and an art project, designing one's own monument. This is my monument to art historians - notice the precise uniform of chic black skirt and scarf. I didn't take pictures of the rest of the base, but I added some important tools of the trade: wine and cheese, a laptop, and tea.

Today, we took a trip to the Delaware Art Museum to learn about how museums do public outreach. Most of what we learned is shop talk that is outside the realm of this blog, but I really enjoyed wandering around the sculpture garden at lunchtime, especially my encounter with the Crying Giant by Tom Otterness, sculpted in 2002 (pictured at left). I first encountered Otterness' whimsical figures in the 14th Street subway station in New York City two summers ago, and I've kept his name stored in my head ever since then. The scale of this piece is pretty monumental - I think I would have about reached his knees (note to self - it's always good to take a scale picture with a human figure when photographing sculpture!). Overall, I was impressed with the Delaware Art Museum's collection in general and with the selections in the sculpture garden: though on a relatively modest scale, the sculptures present offered a lot of fun opportunities to puzzle through issues of movement in sculpture, bodily relationships, and sound. I highly recommend it if you are in Wilmington.

As a parting note, here I am two years ago with one of the Otterness sculptures in the 14th Street subway - you can see that they're on a much different scale!


Public art makes me happy.