I spoke in blog posts awhile ago about being a studio artist at GoggleWorks Center For the Arts in Reading PA. I have been there since 2010 and love it as much as the first time I stepped foot through the door. Here are some photos of events and things that have gone on there...
To learn more about GoggleWorks:
www.goggleworks.org/
To learn more about GoggleWorks:
www.goggleworks.org/
We take turns hanging our art in common areas of Goggleworks, "artist of the month" series...here are some of my collages hanging.
Goggleworks is so cool at night...
This is one of our exterior buildings that was painted by Alan Cernak, whose studio is next to mine. Alan is an oragami artist and fine artist also, and sculptor. He makes really cools stuff and shares his studio with his daughter Lily. To see more of his work:
I have taken jillions of photos with my iphone in the last few years, I am obsessed with it...here are a few printed out and hung for another artist of the month.
Stunning Goggle, again at night...
When we are artist of the month, we get interviewed for a local TV station called BCTV for a show called "The lively Arts at GoggleWorks". Here I am getting interviewed by the lovely Elaine Soltis.
I have also taken a large series that I call "strangers with tattoos". I am always going up to strangers who look interesting with visible tattoos and asking if I can photograph them. I will do a blog post just about this, but so far out of about 200 people, only one has said no. It was a girl working at a Dunkin Donuts and I remember she had bright star tattoos on her neck and bright pink shiny lip gloss. She was working and probably was afraid of getting into trouble...here are a bunch of those portraits.
I am going to do a blog post just about these tattoo photos (or maybe even a whole new blog), but here are a few. The first photo of the arms was actually not a stranger, it was a student I taught at Albright in a Diversity class. That photo got me started on this series a few years ago. The second photo is of a hoochie mama who was sitting near me in Florida 2 years ago, and she posed for me. The third is a guy who runs the Berks County Juggling Club. He had sleeve tattoos on his arms and I asked to snap a pic. He said, "ah, you wanna see some tattoos?" His whole body was like some sort of carnival poster...
We have had shows at GoggleWorks showcasing the art of neighboring counties, and last year I curated a show called "art on the edge", named because Berks County is along the edge of Chester County. I had 5 talented Chester County artists exhibit their work at Goggle and it was a great show. Brian Cesario, Brett Anderson Walker, Nancy Salamon, Abby McClure, and Mitch Lyons.
Here is a link to a review in the Reading Eagle about this show:
Some clay monoprints by Mitch Lyons...
We have an annual artist show at GoggleWorks where present and past artists display their newest work. Last year I had a few photos in, and here is one of my hand photos with the person who it was taken of. Her name is India and she was a student I taught at Albright and fell in love with, she is a magical and spiritual person. I took the photos of her hands at a picnic she invited me to, celebrating her graduation from college and 60th birthday...pretty cool. (She looks like she is 30, and has the hugest heart and laugh...) I had her in a diversity course and the richness she brought to that classroom, telling stories of racism she has endured as a hispanic woman in the USA, still can bring tears to my eyes when I think about them.
Local artist Nancey Seghetti brought the "One Million Bones" project to Berks County and GoggleWorks had a workshop where I made this hand out of clay. These bones were set up on the mall in Washington DC, more than a million of them made by people all over the country and world, to show the plight of genocide that is still happening.
If you would like to read more:
I put magnets up on my studio door sometimes, and it is cool to see what will be written when I get there. (Even with no bad words it can get naughty.)
A small pic of one of my pagoda collages on the front of the Reading Eagle's Weekend Section, promoting the Arts Festival we put on annually at GoggleWorks.
Some bottles I made and a little fall display in my studio. The pallet that you can see belonged to Raylene Divine, a beloved GoggleWorks artist and Berks County Pediatrician who passed away, her family had a big sale of her art and this is one of the things that I purchased.
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