"All right guys, what can we make that's relatively easy and cheap but will sell well for our fundraiser?", I asked the dozen or so members of the CCRI Art Club. As President of the club, I felt I had to take the lead on this. A few mentioned sketches or pottery but I reminded them that we also needed a product that would have broader appeal than just usual artworks since we wanted to raise as much money for our New York trip as possible, yet still stay true to the "art" theme.
I thought back to my JA days and was struck by inspiration...
"I know! Silk-screened T-Shirts!", I blurted out.
"That might take too much time to get the screens made and then to actually produce them...", cautioned Mr. Morrissey, our faculty advisory.
Of course he was right. I was surprised the logical argument came from Mr. Morrissey since his artistic expression was anything but logical. During one of his classes I attended recently, he featured a video he'd created in which the only subject was a blank concrete wall, with the camera panning slowly in and out, to a score of bizarre off-tune electronic music. The worst was the fact that the "film" ran, just like that, for a whole 45 minutes! Tom Morrissey was CCRI's resident post-minimalist guru, but unlike the hippy-dippie or snobby-fufu image that one usually conjures for artists in this genre, he was actually very down-to-earth in appearance and demeanor. I mean, he taught Commercial Art for cryin' out loud.
Then I think it was actually Linda who came up with the inspired thought that made it work: "How about if we splatter fabric paint on the t-shirts in the style of Jackson Pollack?", she exclaimed.
(Yes, Linda, the same Linda I would eventually have a decade long friendship with, was a member of the art club. Yet she attended only a few meetings, since she did have a busy extra-curricular schedule with two kids to raise and an estranged husband to argue with. Glad she was there on this day though.)
"Great idea, Linda!", I congratulated her and the group agreed with the kooky soccer mom in her mink coat covering her jogging suit and sneakers attire.
So we bought an array of solid colored T-shirts, crew neck sweats and hoodies, dipped straws into buckets of red, green, yellow and blue fabric paint and flicked the paint-filled straws all over the place. Fabric paint was splattered all over the newspaper-covered floor of the art studio, ourselves, and some of it even made it onto the product! We had a blast! And the shirts came out looking great. The whole splattered paint look was "in" then so on the day of the fundraiser, held in the school cafeteria, we sold virtually every shirt we had.
With the success of our sales, we had enough to finance our New York Art Club trip. Linda and a couple of other members couldn't make it so we ended up being a group of about nine plus Mr. Morrissey. We coordinated a charter bus with another school club so we could split the costs of transportation from Rhode Island to New York, but once we arrived, the two clubs went their separate ways.
We first hit the Mecca of museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then made our way across Manhattan's museum and gallery scene over the next 3 days. MOMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and a slew of galleries.
Some of the more memorable moments:
While viewing the decidedly minimalistic artworks on display at one gallery in SoHo, Mr. Morrissey accidentally kicked a fluorescent light tube that was part of a sprawling display in the middle of the room. It loudly skittered across the hardwood floor as we all looked on in horror fearing it would shatter and he'd be faced with the obligation of buying the piece, priced at over $10,000. But surprisingly in didn't break. The gallery staff person nonchalantly walked over to it, picked it up and placed it back in the cacophonous array of tubes that was the artwork without consternation as to whether it was being placed in its original position. He looked over to an ashen-faced, wide-mouthed Tom, smiled, and said, "Don't worry about it, it happens all the time."
We had lunch one afternoon at a bar in SoHo called Central Falls. It was named for a little city on the border of Pawtucket in Rhode Island called, Central Falls. The old oak bar in the place was said to have been moved to New York from a bar that had been closed years ago in Central Falls, RI. We met with the owners and told him we were from a community college in RI and he seemed thrilled to see us admitted that he was not himself a transplanted Rhode Islander, he just bought the bar from a classified ad and had it shipped here.
My sour memory of this place was in its prices...they were outrageous! $10 for a salad, and it was cheaper than the $15 sandwiches so I opted for that. I wanted a glass of wine with my lunch but the waiter told me the only wine they sold by the glass was the port. Without him cautioning me as to the price, he let me order it. I realized when I got it that it was more of a dessert wine and it came in a tiny aperitif-sized stemmed glass. I begrudgingly knocked it down in one sip. When I got the check, I saw they charged me $50 for the wine! I complained to the waiter but he gave me attitude like if I didn't pay it he'd call the cops. I paid, but it pretty much wiped out my spending money for the trip. (These prices were outrageous even by today's standards. I think they gave us the special "rube tourist" menus when we let it be known we were from what they would no doubt consider the hick state of Rhode Island.)
Mark, one of the straight-guy club members I was sharing a hotel room with (oddly enough, there were no gay guys in our club, go figure) and I decided late one night to take the subway down to Greenwich Village from our Midtown hotel to catch what we thought would be New York's wild nightlife. All we found were some hole-in-the-wall blue collar bars and one tired, rundown gay club filled with tired old barflies. We drank at each one anyway and by 3:30 am were stumbling drunk. Somehow we made it back to the hotel without getting mugged or arrested.
We had done a lot in those three days and on our last night Tom surprised us by springing for us all at the festive Mama Leone's where we had a great dinner, drank lots of great wine and reminessed on our superb trip to the Big Apple.
I thought back to my JA days and was struck by inspiration...
"I know! Silk-screened T-Shirts!", I blurted out.
"That might take too much time to get the screens made and then to actually produce them...", cautioned Mr. Morrissey, our faculty advisory.
Of course he was right. I was surprised the logical argument came from Mr. Morrissey since his artistic expression was anything but logical. During one of his classes I attended recently, he featured a video he'd created in which the only subject was a blank concrete wall, with the camera panning slowly in and out, to a score of bizarre off-tune electronic music. The worst was the fact that the "film" ran, just like that, for a whole 45 minutes! Tom Morrissey was CCRI's resident post-minimalist guru, but unlike the hippy-dippie or snobby-fufu image that one usually conjures for artists in this genre, he was actually very down-to-earth in appearance and demeanor. I mean, he taught Commercial Art for cryin' out loud.
Then I think it was actually Linda who came up with the inspired thought that made it work: "How about if we splatter fabric paint on the t-shirts in the style of Jackson Pollack?", she exclaimed.
(Yes, Linda, the same Linda I would eventually have a decade long friendship with, was a member of the art club. Yet she attended only a few meetings, since she did have a busy extra-curricular schedule with two kids to raise and an estranged husband to argue with. Glad she was there on this day though.)
"Great idea, Linda!", I congratulated her and the group agreed with the kooky soccer mom in her mink coat covering her jogging suit and sneakers attire.
So we bought an array of solid colored T-shirts, crew neck sweats and hoodies, dipped straws into buckets of red, green, yellow and blue fabric paint and flicked the paint-filled straws all over the place. Fabric paint was splattered all over the newspaper-covered floor of the art studio, ourselves, and some of it even made it onto the product! We had a blast! And the shirts came out looking great. The whole splattered paint look was "in" then so on the day of the fundraiser, held in the school cafeteria, we sold virtually every shirt we had.
With the success of our sales, we had enough to finance our New York Art Club trip. Linda and a couple of other members couldn't make it so we ended up being a group of about nine plus Mr. Morrissey. We coordinated a charter bus with another school club so we could split the costs of transportation from Rhode Island to New York, but once we arrived, the two clubs went their separate ways.
We first hit the Mecca of museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then made our way across Manhattan's museum and gallery scene over the next 3 days. MOMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and a slew of galleries.
Some of the more memorable moments:
While viewing the decidedly minimalistic artworks on display at one gallery in SoHo, Mr. Morrissey accidentally kicked a fluorescent light tube that was part of a sprawling display in the middle of the room. It loudly skittered across the hardwood floor as we all looked on in horror fearing it would shatter and he'd be faced with the obligation of buying the piece, priced at over $10,000. But surprisingly in didn't break. The gallery staff person nonchalantly walked over to it, picked it up and placed it back in the cacophonous array of tubes that was the artwork without consternation as to whether it was being placed in its original position. He looked over to an ashen-faced, wide-mouthed Tom, smiled, and said, "Don't worry about it, it happens all the time."
We had lunch one afternoon at a bar in SoHo called Central Falls. It was named for a little city on the border of Pawtucket in Rhode Island called, Central Falls. The old oak bar in the place was said to have been moved to New York from a bar that had been closed years ago in Central Falls, RI. We met with the owners and told him we were from a community college in RI and he seemed thrilled to see us admitted that he was not himself a transplanted Rhode Islander, he just bought the bar from a classified ad and had it shipped here.
My sour memory of this place was in its prices...they were outrageous! $10 for a salad, and it was cheaper than the $15 sandwiches so I opted for that. I wanted a glass of wine with my lunch but the waiter told me the only wine they sold by the glass was the port. Without him cautioning me as to the price, he let me order it. I realized when I got it that it was more of a dessert wine and it came in a tiny aperitif-sized stemmed glass. I begrudgingly knocked it down in one sip. When I got the check, I saw they charged me $50 for the wine! I complained to the waiter but he gave me attitude like if I didn't pay it he'd call the cops. I paid, but it pretty much wiped out my spending money for the trip. (These prices were outrageous even by today's standards. I think they gave us the special "rube tourist" menus when we let it be known we were from what they would no doubt consider the hick state of Rhode Island.)
Mark, one of the straight-guy club members I was sharing a hotel room with (oddly enough, there were no gay guys in our club, go figure) and I decided late one night to take the subway down to Greenwich Village from our Midtown hotel to catch what we thought would be New York's wild nightlife. All we found were some hole-in-the-wall blue collar bars and one tired, rundown gay club filled with tired old barflies. We drank at each one anyway and by 3:30 am were stumbling drunk. Somehow we made it back to the hotel without getting mugged or arrested.
We had done a lot in those three days and on our last night Tom surprised us by springing for us all at the festive Mama Leone's where we had a great dinner, drank lots of great wine and reminessed on our superb trip to the Big Apple.