My own responses to an imagined availability from PAM

Since it has been more than a week from my last post, I would really like to just move forward and give myself the opportunity to develop the solutions already in my open letter, with an offer to assist PAM's development department_ by researching and writing a grant that brings artists in as residents, docents, teachers/trainers, to expand their programming and fill in the gaps or extend the dreams of the museum, or to meet their needs, or to fulfill their short or long-range planning.

• I will follow that up with doing the research to learn what the goals and dreams of the museum are, as well as where their strengths and weaknesses are, in accomplishing these goals, etc.

• Interviewing teachers, fine art directors, or their docents are good ways to find out stuff.

• Then, I may make an appointment with PAM’s Director of Development to outline or brainstorm this in person, and leave my résumé.

• Finally I will find a need, and offer to work one day a week or more, if I choose, for free so that I can get a feel for this environment to see if I’d really like to work there!

My assessment is, this is all about having a mutually respectful chance to be heard and seen when applying in the first place.

study after T.H. Benton, prisma colour

An open letter of inquiry for the new Director of the Portland Art Museum

I am a new artist in transition to the Portland area since June of this year, having moved from another Western Oregon town in the Mid-Willamette Valley. I have been planning on this move for many years while I have been a full-time single parent. During those years, I accomplished many tasks in order to develop the skills I would need for my new life. It is with the help of friends, that I was finally able to afford my epic moment early this summer.
Upon arriving to the city, one of the first contacts I made was to the Portland Art Museum because this is the institution in which I really want to be employed and pursue my art career.
Yet, as a result of the quality of my employment inquiry experiences, through the website initially, and as well as in person by phone, thus far_ I write this as an open letter from my blog to Brian Ferriso, Director of the Portland Art Museum.

My inquiry is this: why, as a new artist to Portland, would I want to be ultimately negatively impacted by something of a standardized statement: that the PAM is inundated daily by too many artists seeking employment within her walls?
I hope that you very carefully consider that as an outsider and new arrival_ my perspective may offer fresh consideration that is worth your time.

What I think is that here is an institution on the verge of its own success, yet this institution is perhaps inattentively engaged in an unwitting habit of throwing away its own riches!

The obvious solution seems to me_ IF one is inundated with an overflow of offers to help then, why not assign a currently motivated administrator to apply for the size grant that would provide the funds to HIRE all of us educated, motivated, intelligent, and talented 'inundators?'

We can do the menial tasks within the institution to free up the talent at the top, so that you can all get on with the success of the Portland Art Museum, and assert her potential for a real change! Personally, this is my motivation for being employed at the PAM.

Innovatively invest in your institution's success, Mr Ferriso. We are living in times in which it truly takes all of us, to participate in the process of how everything in American society moves successfully toward a quality of life that is again people-centered.

I hope that I will hear back directly from you, very soon!


L'orgie du printemps, oil