UWGB: The Devouring
2004–2008
I took eighteen credits most semesters because anything over twelve was free. I wasn’t going to leave a single class on the table.
I tried a lot of paths. Education — I thought about being an art teacher. Anthropology. Global studies. Conservation. Each one interested me. Each one could have been a life. But I landed on studio art and humanistic studies, which was the combination that let me do everything I actually cared about: make things with my hands and think about why humans make things with their hands.
For humanistic studies I focused on Western Civilization, Japanese literature, and Buddhism. I watched every video and read every book I could get through interlibrary loan. I padded my learning with everything adjacent to the syllabus — if a professor mentioned a documentary, I tracked it down. If a textbook cited a source, I read the source. I wasn’t studying for grades anymore. I was studying because I was starving and the library was full of food.
In Astronomy, my professor and I talked about Florence, Italy. I told him I’d never get there. He didn’t argue with me. But the seed was planted, and two years later I was on a plane. That’s how it worked at UWGB — conversations turned into possibilities turned into plane tickets, if you stayed open long enough.
Art was mostly printmaking. I lived in the studio. I mean that literally — I would stay all night, pulling prints, cleaning plates, starting over. The studio smelled like ink and solvent and the particular staleness of a room that people never leave. My friends were the same. We were all in there together, working side by side, talking about art and philosophy and music and whatever else kept us awake at three in the morning. Chris Style was my professor and my mentor. She pushed me harder than anyone had pushed me before and I needed every bit of it.
I tried different things early on — I had studio space to share with other artists for the senior show, Chris Rand hung out there a lot, it was his first year taking classes. I was looking at a lot of websites with art and culture content. I was figuring out what kind of artist I was by trying everything and seeing what stuck.
What stuck was printmaking and the discipline of showing up every day. I practiced drawing every day. I set up a studio in the extra bedroom at home. I worked at Barnsite nights and weekends and went to class during the day and made art at night and slept when I could. It was the hardest I’d ever worked and the happiest I’d been since the farm.
By my last couple years I started winning awards at exhibitions. The NEWArts Council highest award for prints. Scholarships. The kind of recognition that doesn’t pay rent but changes how you see yourself. I remember the awards night — I’d been mowing Dad’s lawn, took a quick shower, drove over to the ceremony still smelling like cut grass, and then drove straight to Minnesota afterward to look for jobs. That was my life: lawn care, fine art, highway, all in the same evening.
I drove to the Art Institute of Chicago several times a year to look and learn. Just me in the car, three hours each way, walking through those galleries until my feet hurt, standing in front of things that made me want to be better. Then driving home and going back to the studio.
I graduated on May 17, 2008. Five years total, though the first couple were just dipping my toe back in. It was one of the most fun periods of my life. Not fun like easy — fun like alive. Like every day had a point and the point was becoming someone I hadn’t known I could be.
It changed me. It was like turning a corner into a new life that I could never go back from. The kid who got D’s in math and floundered through his twenties was gone. In his place was a person who’d devoured an entire university and was still hungry.