Portfolio Capstone Essay: Lost in Art

My whole life I have been lost. I grew up moving from place to place all across the U.S. and I never stayed in one spot for too long. It is hard to be a child and never feel a true sense of home or belonging but there was one place that no matter where I lived I felt like I was accepted and successful. I know it sounds corny but for me that place was school. Literacy, writing, and communication came naturally to me and having an English professor for a mother didn’t hurt either. Academia and scholarship was just something I always had a knack for, I vividly remember the inner turmoil that I caused my high school honors chemistry teacher when I passed her class with an A as a sophomore without ever having opened the textbook. Not only did I love learning and studying in school, but I quickly found an affinity for the arts. I began sewing and ballet when I was 4, I picked up the cello around 8, and finally the paintbrush at 11. I was always a little bit strange and eccentric growing up and writing poetry, reading books, and drawing were my favorite ways to pass the time when I wasn’t coating myself in neon green paint and flour or melting records and CDs over candle flames to make little sculptures. At my first middle school (consider changing it to “When I was in middle school) I took my first art class and found my home in the visual arts. We had a dark room that glowed black and red and always smelled sharp, our tables and brushes were coated over in layers of technicolor paint that chipped away to form a landscape straight out of “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” and it was here that I found my true love of painting.

Many years later I am sixteen beginning my undergraduate experience at Everett Community College through the Running Start program. Being in college so young was exciting and I loved taking all of my prerequisites. I ultimately pursued my Associates of Arts in Studio Art and found the most benefit in my technical oil painting classes. My experience at EvCC was amazing and I made many friends and had great opportunities. I volunteered and was the first student speaker for the Running Start Outreach Office. I also worked at the college bookstore on campus as well as two additional jobs all the way through my two years at EvCC. This was where I took my first psychology course that sparked my passion for learning about the mind and behavior. Before I graduated, my oil painting professor recommended me to a local gallery for their summer show alongside Chuck Close’s exhibition. They subsequently invited me to show a few pieces and I submitted my work for their selection, that was my first gallery show in 2016. Finally, it was time for me to choose a college to transfer to and it was not an easy decision. My entire life had led up to the moment I was truly going to go to college and complete my bachelor’s degree. The importance of selecting the very best school seemed all-encompassing and after being waitlisted or rejected from my dream schools across the country I felt again, completely lost. I had been battling with myself for a while about whether to follow a path of psychology, academia, and security or art, creativity, and spontaneity, though I knew where my heart lied. It was a confusing time as I simultaneously felt the privilege of support from my parents to pursue art and follow my dreams, which is a luxury not many people get. Though I also felt fear and pressure to use the mind I had been given to accomplish something more societally accepted that could possibly pull me and my family out of the working class. I made to hard decision to give up my dream school and my future plans and stay in the state for college. I toured an art conservatory college I was accepted to as well as UW. I immediately was attracted to the Interdisciplinary Arts degree major because I had never seen an art degree model like that in the country before. Most arts colleges run on a structured or conservatory-based model that limits students to developing (develop) their particular medium technically over time. What was unique about the interdisciplinary model was that students can study not only the medium of their choice, but they will also be exposed to other forms, styles, and subjects from Art & The Environment, to Ephemeral Art, to Global Agitation & Performance Art, to Curatorial Studies, to Cultural Psychology, to Women in the Third World, To Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, to Community Research, to even The Contextual Appeal of Tupac Shakur. I found the answer to my problems at the University of Washington Bothell because I wasn’t limited. I could develop myself as an artist while still studying and using the academic topics I loved to inform my work.

I always saw myself as just a painter until I came to UWB and saw that my work and my portfolio didn’t have to be one dimensional. To be a successful artist I believe it is necessary to intake as much as you can and experience all that you can in order to achieve conceptual depth within your work. As I have begun to grow as an adult, scholar, and artist I have learned to work with others collaboratively, to take leadership roles when necessary, to make difficult decisions, to write, market, and communicate clearly, to challenge existing structures of power, and to take an interdisciplinary approach to my work. My experiences curating during my time at UWB affected my personal and professional trajectory greatly. Being able to have full access to an artist-run gallery space in the heart of Seattle and work with teams to design my own group exhibition and recruit local artists to produce site-specific work was extremely fulfilling. I did face many challenges (in) organizing and communicating with my peers to produce the quality of a show I desired though I am very happy with the finished product. I learned how critical effective collaboration can be and developed an adaptive leadership style to working with a large number of people. During this time, I also toured other Seattle artist-run spaces and met their owners, curators, and contributors. I was inspired by the grass-roots, do-it-yourself feeling that these spaces had. While they looked perfectly crisp and professional, behind the scenes creative minds were innovating the field of art display, a field traditionally monopolized by institutions.

My time curating for the Alive 2.0 Performance Arts Festival at UWB and experimenting with activist performance art in 2017 also contributed significantly to my desire to radicalize the landscape of contemporary art. I continued to find the institutionalization of art practices disconcerting and decided the only way to combat this boxing-in (consider changing this word choice) is to fully commit to innovating conceptually and aesthetically significant public art. I took up pasting, performance, projection, installation, and the ephemeral in an effort to bring art to the every-day. I believe that in order to combat destruction, creation must exist equally; which calls for an injection of creation, creativity, and art into the public and into average people’s daily lives.

I have returned to painting now as a senior at the University of Washington to apply everything I have learned to my favorite medium. Commencement is weeks away and even though I am graduating with Summa Cum Laude baccalaureate honors and a President’s Medal Nomination, the most valuable thing that I will take away from my undergraduate experience is the confidence and capability of myself as an artist. I feel now that I have the abilities to tackle any project, any subject, any medium, any style, any technique, or any conflict that I may encounter. I am able to think not only creatively but also conceptually, critically, and analytically. I cannot wait to shift from my life as a student to my life as a professional, working artist and find a new place to belong. After coming to UWB I don’t feel so lost anymore, in fact I feel excited and prepared to start my work changing the structure of the art world as we know it.