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.