college years (late 1980s)

though i was always a creative kid and teenager, spending tons of time making collages, mixtapes and writing bad poetry, i didn’t share most of that with anyone and never considered that i could be an artist because i couldn’t draw well. when i got to college as a pre-med freshman at vanderbilt university, i took an intro drawing course with professor marilyn murphy – the first art class i’d ever taken – and it changed my life. not that i was particularly good at drawing but she taught me that i could LEARN to be an artist, i could be taught and could master with practice any technique, which was a totally new concept to me. i didn’t have to be born some kind of creative genius to pursue art as a hobby or profession. i will forever be grateful to her for helping me come to that realization.

i quickly changed my major to art history (we didn’t have a studio degree program at the time so it was the closest thing) and i proceeded to take 30+ hours of studio art classes as part of my art history degree in my four years at vanderbilt. (i graduated with a ba in art history in 1989.) in addition i learned photography by doing, first as a staff photographer and later as the photo editor of my campus newspaper. i even did a post-college internship with the local daily newspaper (the nashville banner, at the time) as a photojournalist. i loved photography and still do.

i don’t have pictures of much of what i made in college in my classes, but i’ll include just a couple of screenprints that i still have artist proofs of, which informed the direction i would go in after i graduated college – pursuing a folk art style that borrowed from keith haring as much as traditional ethnic folk art motifs. i had an early interest in street art and that has always influenced my aesthetic, and the burgeoning queer rights movement of the late 80s had me thinking about identity, feminism and my sexuality.