Tag: log

OFN Practicum: Week 5 Log

This week, Emily, Maya and I met on Monday and went over our first drafts of our postcards. Emily looked over both of our postcards and gave us some editing suggestions. Maya and I both agreed to start our postcards with a quote and a short description about the artist and his/her work. Emily agreed that we should mention that the artist is a TAAP awardee on the bottom, but that we she include the year he/she was awarded. We discussed whether or not we should contact artists and ask for their permission to post about them. Emily suggested that I contact my artist, Alex Llumiquinga Perez, and let him know we are going to post about him, but that we could remove his postcard upon request. On the other hand, Emily said in most cases (especially for Native American artists) we should ask permission beforehand. Emily also suggested that for older TAAP artists, we can either link to the artist’s individual website or direct them to the OFN website for more information about traditional arts in general. Emily and Riki will be discussing what the OFN tagline will be to include in the postcards. In the meantime, Maya and I will continue our research by looking through the archives. Riki and Nathan directed us towards 3 boxes (47-49) of artist files that will hopefully lead to some more possible postcards.

After meeting with Emily, I edited my postcard. I have yet to post it because Riki has not seen it. I also sent it to Maya for peer editing and she approved it. I went to special collections and put the artist boxes on hold. I then looked through all of box 47. Surprisingly, there were not that many artists in the box that lived in a rural area and are TAAP awarded. I did write down some artists from rural areas that are not TAAP awardees in case they could still be good candidates. Right now the best candidates are Tina Aguilar who lives in Warm Springs, OR and makes Indian cradle boards (baby boards) or Betty First Raised who lives in Burns, OR and does traditional bead work with leather. One interesting candidate, though not a TAAP artist, is DW Frommer who makes leather boots and lives in Redmond, OR. There is a lot of information about him in the archives and could be a good representation of rancher culture in Oregon. I will run this by OFN to see if he is appropriate. In the meantime, I plan to contact Tina Aguilar to see if I could use her for the map.

OFN Practicum: Week 4 Log

This week Maya and I met on Monday to discuss some of the issues we had come across and compiled a list of questions. Maya has sent a list of these questions out to Emily and Riki, which include questions about what links we should be providing (especially for the older artists we found in the archives), whether or not we should contact artists and if we need to ask for permission to post about them. Other questions pertained more directly to the Art of the Rural’s guidelines. We just need to get a better definition of rural so we aren’t picking artist that don’t represent their mission. Also, we were wondering if we should have a postcard to represent Eugene even though it’s a fair sized city. I need to email Savannah about these questions as well some map capability issues I talked about in the last post, though I’m going to wait till after our meeting with OFN on Monday. Maya and I also plan to do some more research in the archives next week now that we have identified more boxes to look through. This week we focused on creating our first drafts of postcards, as discussed below.

I chose to do my first postcard on a current TAAP artist: Alex Llumiquinga Perez. He is one of the few international artists I’ve found so far living in rural Oregon. I created a first draft of my postcard based on information about him on the web, his TAAP application and a newspaper article. You can see my first draft here. In crafting the draft, a lot of questions came up as to how OFN would want the postcard structured. For instance, do we need to describe the TAAP program? Are we focusing on the artist or his/her craft? I essentially tried to emulate the content I found in the TAAP application and I mentioned that Alex is TAAP awarded including a link. Maya and I also thought it would be nice to include a quote from the artist for each post and that the location should be forefront. A lot of the postcards I looked at on the map did not say what town they came from, which I thought was strange for the purpose of the map. Thus, I think we put the location of the artist in the title, so people can see what area this artist represents. Maya and I will be comparing our postcards and trying to find a good format for us both to follow hopefully before tomorrow’s meeting.