So, having spent the past couple of weeks waffling (yes, that kind) over which blogware (Vox or Wordpress) to continue Woffling (and yes, that kind) with, my friend Max has finally put my fussy uncertainty to rest, by creating an all-wofflehouse brown-plate special, combining the strengths of both options. He’s a busy boy at present, but if life ever slows down for him, I can’t recommend him highly enough as a website maestro.
I will continue to post on Vox, because I like the social community aspect and the different kinds of traffic it receives, but please come visit me at wofflehouse, and wofflings.wofflehouse, as well.
Southern Exposure's annual Monster Drawing Rally is coming up again!
The mighty women of SoEx bestowed upon yours truly the honor of drawing this year's postcard:
I had a ball doing it. It took a minute to decide on a theme: I liked the idea of making an image that reflected the anxiety levels of participating artists (it's incredibly nerve-wracking, drawing while people watch you), while still celebrating the fabulous event that is the Monster Drawing Rally.
Having just recently seen 'Casino Royale,' I started thinking about how funny it is that utterly sedentary activities like card-playing and drawing can somehow become such action-packed spectacles. Based on that correlative logic, the only thing that made sense to do, then, was devise an utterly glamorous casino-like scene, with the key players engaged in a battle of wits, but...making crappy drawings. It wasn't until I was almost done that I noticed that this year is a "007," which just settled it.
The image below is from MDR 2005, when my Drawing Night compadres and I all drew in tandem: same shift, matching red outfits. You can see some people milling about behind us, watching. It gets way, way, way more crowded as the night goes on.
The image that kicked off my composition was this one, also from 2005:
MH draws like an angel everytime our group gets together, and it pisses me off to no end.
I did a few test drawings based on the shot above, radically altered the egos of those depicted to protect the innocent, then penciled and inked this version:
All color and text was added in Photoshop.
Come to the Monster Drawing Rally!
So you, too, can hover behind some sweaty-palmed nervous drawer, instead of living vicariously through this post!
7TH ANNUAL
MONSTER DRAWING RALLY
Friday, February 23, 6-10:30 pm
Suggested Donation $5 and up
new location: VERDI CLUB
2424 Mariposa St, San Francisco
OK. Another plug for the Carlos Villa show. I can wax on and on about Carlos: he was and still is an
exemplary mentor, teacher, and artist. Consider this me keeping it minimal.
Were it not for having taken a couple of classes with him when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, I don’t know whether I would have found my path. Carlos voiced the notion of the artist-activist-scholar in his Worlds In Collision course, clarifying for me (for the first time, as a young pup) that an artist’s role can and does move beyond self-serving market/gallery/artworld structures into richer, more diverse, community-oriented terrain.
In a full-circle moment that I’ve been truly enjoying, I am now co-teaching “Worlds In Collision: Filipino American Art History” with Rico Reyes at the University of San Francisco. We brought our students to the St Mary’s event on the 14th, and they seemed to really enjoy it. (We’re setting up a blog for our course, so there will be postings at that site, as soon as it’s up. In the meantime, there’s the Worlds In Collision website, for your enjoyment.)
carlos, breaking it down for the kids, Valentine's Day-style
The Carlos Villa: Master Artist Tribute is only up through March 4. Catch it, if for no other reason than for gems like the last image below. At the entrance to the exhibition, there’s this photo of Carlos back in the day, which just kills everyone who sees it:
photo credit: Jerry Burchard
Who knew the man had leather pants?
February 14th is an auspicious date for a Carlos Villa event, given that this man has manifested love in so many ways throughout his career as an artist, teacher, and cultural worker.
“Teaching is number one, very giving. My personality tends toward sharing and I've become more aware of this as I've gotten older. For some, the exchange in the gallery is more viable, but I love teaching. To me, teaching is as valid an expression as painting, the exchange is much more democratic, more rewarding and worthwhile than just putting your work in the gallery and then waiting for someone to love you.”
-carlos villa
Saint Mary's College honored Carlos with its seventh "Master Artist" exhibition. The Master Artist Tribute series was created to highlight Bay Area artists whose significant bodies of artwork are rivaled by the influence of their teaching on generations of art students.
Carlos has been my unofficial mentor and second dad since I enrolled in his ‘Worlds In Collision’ class at SFAI in 1993. He continues to inspire me on so many levels, and this show honors his gifts beautifully. If you live in the Bay Area, make a pilgrimage out to St Mary’s College for the panel discussion on Feb 14, or to catch this show before it ends March 4.
Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2007
12:45 - 1:45 p.m.
Soda Activity Center
Saint Mary's College, Moraga, CA
Featuring Carlos Villa, in discussion with moderator Anna Novakov. Saint Mary's College panelists include Dana Herrera, Jeff Kelly, Tiffany Holder, and Victoria Ramirez.
This program is free and open to the public.
The Carlos Villa retrospective exhibition in the Hearst Art Gallery is open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., through Sunday, March 4.
Here’s that link again for info about Carlos Villa on the Saint Mary’s College website.
...at least for the time being. I feel like I'm dating two blog services, and I'm just not ready to get tied down to one relationship at the moment!
I thought I was calling it quits with Vox, and moving on to Wordpress, but as it happens, I'm beginning to wonder if that was such a good idea. So, in the interest of fairness, I'm not cheating on one for the other, I'm just...keeping my options open, for the time being.
Pros and cons of each, as far as my beginner's needs go: given the profoundly teensy number of posts I've made, anyway, it seems I'm still defining my needs.
- Vox has much more user-friendly tags: the specific things that interest me are more searchable by like-minded folks.
- Wordpress has a fairly generic tag menu to select from ("life", "art", "politics") which makes tags like "filipino", for example, unsearchable (at least within Wordpress itself).
- Vox has their logo posted too often, too prominently.
- Wordpress does not.
- Vox has more free storage than Wordpress.
- Wordpress has blog/feed stats.
- Vox does not.
So that's it, in a nutshell. I'm still pretty vague on the etiquette regarding websilogging (erm, "blogging" for the rest of you), so for the time being, I'll make the same post on both blogs, and see whether one seems more effective over the next bit of time.
I visited Cubao X in 2005 and 2006, and was absolutely blown away by the energy and creativity within the Manila art scene. The talent and the arts community's always been there, of course, but there was something so special in the way that everything was centralized in this one quirky, funky location. Future Prospects, in particular, became such an anchor and a clubhouse for so many artists and aficionados, filling the gaps left behind by other now-defunct spaces like Big Sky Mind.
Expect more posts and links related to Filipino arts and arts exchange in months to come.
Mother Woff grew up in Manila (but not this Manila).
Manila, Humboldt, is next to Samoa, Humboldt.
Samoa, Humboldt, is next to Eureka, Humboldt.
If this makes any sense at all, then you're probably Filipino, too.
I've thought a lot about the pervasive transnational ties most Filipinos in America maintain with the Philippines. The logic behind this photo/town-name cracks me up, but actually, it's a great illustration of the blurred boundaries between "here" and "there". Immigration to the U.S., as with most other host countries, is rarely-to-never a clean break with the motherland, and a clean-slate new beginning. There's always back-and-forth: family visits, phone calls, emails, gifts, remittances.
I've made frequent visits to Manila as an adult and an artist, and am trying to do what I can to create more arts exchange across the Pacific. The internet has an uncanny way of collapsing distance rather handily, in this regard. Sociology books such as Emily Noelle Ignacio’s “Building Diaspora” (Rutgers, 2005) have been providing me with a clearer sense of the possibilities for leveraging transnational exchange between Filipino and Filipino-American artists in ways I could never have conceived of ten years ago. Hell, I didn't have email ten years ago!
Ignacio describes how Filipinos widely scattered around the world, have embraced the internet as a way to develop connections, community and a stronger sense of self-identity. She identifies the multiple modes in which it's contributed to creating a more concrete sense of the Filipino diaspora, how it has helped Filipinos better understand and articulate their postcolonial situation, as well as their relationship with other communities around the world. Moving beyond, or perhaps complementing Yen Le Espiritu’s definitions of “home” (Homebound, 2003), Ignacio suggests that while “home” is ever further removed from geographic place, it is being increasingly territorialized and renegotiated in cyberspace. Word up, sis.
