It was my great pleasure to present a lecture titled “Street Art and Me” on Thursday, Sept. 29 in Manhattan, Kansas at Kansas State University's Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art. The lecture focused on street art, the seemetellme series, and the use of social media to engage artwork collectors. The event was co-sponsored by the department of history, the College of Education and the Women's Studies Department. The seemetellme project was a source of inspiration for History in a Bag, a project developed by K-State's Heather McCrea, associate professor of history, as a teaching tool for her spring 2011 history course.
After the lecture I conducted a workshop on the seemetellme process. The participants took photographs of themselves “JR style” after the great Parisian photograffer which I printed out in long strips. Additionally they were asked to bring a few small items of their own to the workshop that related to them personally - a snippet of a newspaper, stamps, special papers, xeroxes of other images, feathers, hot peppers, string, beads, etc. I provided the magnet backed boxes. Then for about 2 hours we glued, and punched, and sewed, and collaged, and wrote notes to the people of the big apple (NYC) from those in the little apple (Manhattan, KS). About 40 works titled FACES OF MANHATTAN were created. The workshop artists kept one work for themselves and gave me one to put out into the streets of my Manhattan in the coming weeks.
My thanks for the success of this lecture and project go to my great long time friend Heather McCrea and my wonderful new friends, Cyndi Danner-Kuhn and Kathrine Walker Schlageck.