FREAK PARADE!

Spring Break found me in Milwaukee, WI with a group of my students visiting studios and agencies. A little side trip brought us to the Haggerty Museum of Art on the campus of Marquette University where we saw a show by Thomas Woodruff.

About Thomas Woodfruff
On a cold and windy night in 1963, Thomas Woodruff, a peculiar cub scout, carried a large American flag for his troop in the New Rochelle, NY Thanksgiving Day Parade. The event left lingering scars. He was known in the neighborhood as the boy who staged elaborate puppet shows in his darkened suburban basement. While still in his twenties, Woodruff collaborated with the avant garde theatre director Robert Wilson on the decor for his opera Edison, and adapted and storyboarded his stage spectacles for television. He has contributed award-winning illustrations to every major periodical in America, including the memorable backpage series “Rock and Roll Still-Life” for Rolling Stone in the early 1990’s. He has created the book covers for novels by Ann Tyler, Robertson Davies, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and many others.

Woodruff has had over 20 one person exhibitions, and his paintings have been included in museum shows internationally. His major gallery works are created in series. In the past these works have often been elegaic in nature and have dealt with the AIDS epidemic. Some of his major projects are The Secret Charts (1994), a series of tromp l’oeil scrolls depicting an alphabet of loss; Apple Canon (1996), his collection of 365 individual apple “portraits” to “keep the doctor away”; and All Systems Go (1999), images organized as “missions” incorporating rocketships, Woodruff’s meditation on the end of the millenium.

Freak Parade has been his most ambitious project, five years in the making. He has recently finished Solar System (The Turning Heads), which showed at PPOW October 2008. Woodruff illustrated Jack Handy’s “My Big Thick Novel” for the 2002–3 Emmy Award winning season of Saturday Night Live; and continues to design for the theatre, most recently the decor and costumes for Salome at the Hawaiian Opera Theatre (2002). He briefly worked as a tattooist in the late 1980’s, and has promoted this and other “alternative” forms of image making in the many exhibitions he has curated. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts since 1981, and is currently the Chair of Illustration and Cartooning.

If in Milwaukee before April 18, check the show out live, or here for a virtual viewing.

Dermestid beetles

Yesterday, I brought my students to the Field museum to visit their in-house designers and learn what they do in-house environment versus a design studio. Jean Cattel, their design manager was a gracious host and showed all that they do as the Field Museums in-house design group, from ads, to exhibits to print maps and all things visual in the museum.

Then we had a brief tour of their replication/model shop where they create many of the actual exhibits and items used in the exhibits.

Finally, we were treated to a truly behind the scenes adventure at the museum. . .the specimen room. This is where they prepare animals for display either in skeletal form or as a fully stuffed/modeled animal. We were greeted by a man holding a gray owl up by its next and stripping its feathers, this was to be used as a skeleton. But how does one get all the flesh and tissue off the bones?

Welcome to the Dermestid Beetle Room. A rather odiforous room full of aquarium tanks and dermestid beetles feasting on pieces of skeleton. Here is what dermestid beetles are and do.

Dermestid beetles are members of the insect family Dermestidae, commonly called carpet beetles, hide beetles, and larder beetles among other names. The particular species you have received is Dermestes maculatus. D. maculatus lives on dead, dry-moist animal matter which makes them the bane of taxidermists and museum curators. Fortunately, this feeding characteristic is great for cleaning bones. At each stage of the beetles life they eat different materials. When they are small/just hatched they get inside the smallest of bird bones and clean out the marrow. As they grow they clean other areas.

The adult prefers to lay eggs on slightly moist material whereas the larvae thrive on dry flesh and connective tissue. Eggs hatch in 3-4 days and the larvae go through an average of 7 molts or instars, reaching pupa stage in about 45 days. The pupal stage is contained within the last larval skin. Adults have a fertile period of around 2 months and live up to 5 months.

As with all insects, the life cycle is temperature dependent. Dermestids are sluggish below 70 degrees and adults cannot fly below 80-85 degrees which is good if you open their container at room temperature  – they won’t fly away. I use a reptile thermostat-controlled heat emitter and maintain a robust colony at 90 degrees.

In the end the one thing the students took away from the Field trip? The speciment room and the beetles!

Letterpressing!

You know when they say walk a mile in one's shoes to know what they know? Well I walked for a day and a half and have a whole new impression, pun intended, of the letterpress process.

Furniture, reglets, coins, lead, timpan. So many new words, a whole new print vocabulary actually. I was a little intimidated by the actual press, but in reality, it is quite benign and easy to use. Even the cleaning of it is quite simple (brought me back to my deli days and cleaning the meat slicers)!

I got three things done over the day and a half workshop. I made kind of an art print, created a potential image for my New Year card, and tried to get a group print going that was 75% succesful. All will be shared over the next couple of days!