Sandy Skoglund Workshop at NATA Conference

I'm just back from presenting at the very successful Nebraska Art Teachers Association Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. One of the highlights was an interactive workshop with keynote speaker, artist Sandy Skoglund, held at the university.

I had met Skoglund some years ago, when she was the keynote speaker at the NAEA New York City 2001 National Convention because I was the conference coordinator that year.

Sandy Skoglund was fantastic as before: genuine and gracious. She designed the workshop to share and illustrate her working process. Many of the features of the gallery space were prepared and arranged ahead of time for the installation: a wide platform placed in front of a wall, and furniture and other objects painted in a bright pink. Other than that, the only materials were hot pink and yellow sticky notes (lots of them).

In the university gallery, the first assignment from Skoglund was to cover the wall in front of the platform with overlapping, hot pink sticky notes, starting at the bottom of the wall.

Everyone got involved in the process.

While the wall was being covered in pink, Skoglund directed other participants to cover the previously painted furniture and other objects with yellow sticky notes.

A phone was one of the objects that was painted hot pink.

Once the wall was covered, Skoglund peeled the white protective paper off the platform and then directed the group to cover the floor with yellow sticky notes in a repeating pattern. When that was complete, Skoglund positioned the furniture and other objects on the "stage."

Once everything was in place, Skoglund placed the participants in the scene and took photographs. Here we learned that her framing of a scene all takes place through the camera. Then the participants were free to position themselves in the scene and take their own photos. Liz Langdon made a perfect model in this photo.

The installation is to stay in place for some time so people can return to the scene and perhaps stage more photographs.

The final installation.