I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

The above quote by William Morris taken from talks he gave in the late 1800s, is one of the guiding mantras of my work and one that I’ll be exploring in today’s post.

Before I joined the MFA program I’m currently in, I had this apprehension about entering a fine arts program. One of my main reasons for starting the wurst gallery was because I felt art in general was inaccessible and I wanted to create something that was totally the opposite and super approachable by everyone. That apprehension was quickly alleviated once I familiarized myself with what¹ other² people³ associated⁴ with the program were doing that was aligned with my philosophy around accessibility.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I also buried myself in research to discover other artists that had mined similar territories that I was interested in exploring. Another one of those artists that I discovered that had a big impact on my work was Don Celender. Although not a household name, Celender was a prolific conceptual artist of the 70s whose work focused mainly on the form of questionnaires. One of my favorite of his works was entitled “Opinions of Working People Concerning The Arts” in where he, along with his Art History students at Macalester College, surveyed 400 people in Minneapolis area with 16 questions regarding art. The typed answers along with a photo of each participant were displayed at the OK Harris Gallery in New York who represented him and where he had many solo exhibitions. The answers to his surveys were also always cataloged into a very plain letter size booklet, often simply staple bound.

His work inspired me to try a contemporary version of this concept but employing it in the modern social network, Facebook. I created a series of 15 questions entitled “The Art of the Everyday” and created graphic images of the names of my Facebook friends. I tagged each image with the person it corresponded to, in order to prompt them for a response.