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.