TOI Blog

Still Life Object

M. Garcia Torres

Screen shot on my phone taken while using the “Illusion Brought Me Here” augmented reality app and artwork by Mario Garcia Torres during my visit to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Friday. I cried.

Woman in White Coat with Plastic Bag Opening Public Library Door

Group Portrait, Polaroid Photograph, Children’s After School Program, Haight Ashbury Community Coalition, July 1985. Taken on the front steps of the Park Branch Public Library, 1833 Page Street, San Francisco, CA.

(My father) Dante Linne Ventresca (1920-2017)

Dante L. spinning LPs at Hubbard & Cravens Coffee, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2011, photo by Sara Adams.

Honeysuckle Blossoms on Skateboard

Who can truly listen to someone who is lost in their creative process? The artist has a project – right? To find a way to let her little light shine? Everyone of us, like the artist, faces this dilemma everyday. Each one of us possesses some lovely fragment of a greater mystery. And this piece […]

Folderology

“Folderology” (not found in any dictionary) is a Theater of Inclusion made up term used to describe the work we do with file folders. For years file folders as art making and installation materials have been part of our work and we’ve recently brought them into the classroom – in this case the hallway. We […]

Vidal Sassoon and Fall Creek

After scanning through brief words from Thomas Edison, George Bernard Shaw, and Bruce Lee I settled on a quote from Vidal Sassoon – “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” I held my phone up to display the quote to my daughter who promptly asked, through a mouthful of blueberry […]

From the Archive

In the third week of August 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States killing 1,836 people. A few months later Rebecca and I were working on a project in Mobile, Alabama. We drove along the coast from Mobile to New Orleans and found the devastation still intact: missing towns, washed out […]

M. Ramirez

There is absolutely nothing wrong in thinking about your life as an evolving work of art. Seriously, I won’t go into it here but if you explored “conceptual art” you’d easily find the stuff you think about in your spare time passing as art. I’m not putting you or conceptual art down. Actually, I mean […]

The Amazement is Here

The creative process is an experience the mind produces. It’s not something “out there” somewhere. It’s not a thing to go after. It’s woven into our brain functioning. It’s always present. Most of us lack an awareness of this simple truth. We call some people “creatives”. We talk about a “creative class” of people. But […]