I came across an interesting find today. I was going through some of the content from the SNAG archive. SNAG is the Society of North American Goldsmiths. It is the professional organization of academic and professional metalsmiths in the country and an organization which I am a member of. I became a member of the organization when I was getting ready to start graduate school.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, one of my jobs was working in the SNAG slide library. Our school housed the collection for SNAG and we would receive collections of slides from artists and then we would have duplicate sets made, and then we would label the dups and create sets of slides that would be loaned out to individuals who requested specific slide sets. We would mail and receive slides from people who requested these slides, and we would catalogue and keep the library organized. I can't exactly remember the specifics of my appointment, but I think this was part of my assistantship duties. Again, I can't remember exactly, but I think there were of a few of us grads that worked in the library. If Ian happens to read this maybe he will remember.
Anyway, we had a small room in the Art Annex building that the Metals Department was located in and I remember it being a great resource for me when I was starting to teach. Of course this would be a time in which you would prepare carousels of slides to show to current and historical work to students in class. Since we housed the library, I had free reign to show the latest work that was coming into the library. Anytime I started a new assignment in class I could pull slides to show students to serve as inspiration or to demonstrate how a technique was used. It's crazy to think that this was one of the only ways to see contemporary metalwork at the time.
Apparently in 2004, SNAG donated a slide archive to The Metal Museum. It contained the portfolios of over 330 metalsmiths of national and international significance. The Metal Museum then partnered with the American Craft Council Library to make the collection available online. The complete 16,000-slide archive was digitized for long-term preservation through grants from the John and Robyn Horn Foundation and an ArtsFirst grant from the First Tennessee Bank Foundation and the collection is now hosted online at the Center for Craft.
Well it was fun looking through the collection today. The work you see above is by Mark Rooker. Mark was a graduate student in the U of I program a few years before me, so this work was highly influential to me. I used to look at these slides a lot when i was working and if my memory serves me correctly, Billie had framed postcards of the teapot rocket and maybe one of Mark's brooches in the hallway as you walked toward the BFA studio. Again, Ian or Eric might remember this better than me. These images set the bar for the caliber of work that I needed to be making in the program and it probably helped that my best friend, Ian, had been taught by Mark when Ian was getting his undergraduate Industrial Design degree before being in the same cohort with me in graduate school. I remember Ian talking about these pieces so they made an impact on me.
It's funny to use these images as a representation of how much our world has changed. First, slides are a thing of the past. The quality of these images is horrible, but they were the best we had at the time. The images don't come close to the quality of the actual pieces. You only had a limited number of shots to get a good image and once you did, having dups made was expensive. You had to be selective and intentional. Teaching and how I expose students to work has changed so much as well. Students can access videos of people making actual work and speak directly to the person making the work and this can all happen in real time.
All of that said, there is something romantic and nostalgic about the thought of sending a physical catalog of your work to represent what you've been doing for the last year or two. There is also something romantic about a physical postcard along with a handwritten note that you send to people that represents something you are proud of. Now everything is relegated to the same level of minutia because we just scroll past image after image and it all gets lost in our overcrowded minds or the pace of life.
It was magic to pick up a full sheet of slides and realize that it represented that person's work and effort for the last year or so; even the sheet of slides were precious to me. I remember being so careful with the sheet of slides. Even the room that we kept the collection in was clean and particular; almost sterile. There was a reverence to that room (which was kept locked) and the contents of the room was something to be protected. A sense of purpose is an idea that I am left with after thinking about this. The work having purpose, the act of choosing what image best represents the work.
Maybe I need to think about making some postcards again...
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