Extra credit assignment 3- Sue Mitchell exhibit

Extra credit assignment 3- Sue Mitchell exhibit

I recently went to the Riverside Museum of Art to go see Sue Mitchell’s exhibit “52.”  The best part about this exhibit is that you can go and talk to Sue Mitchell about her work.  I went with a friend and we had a lovely conversation with Sue about her exhibit.  She was telling us what inspired her to do this.  The exhibit is a collection of her work during her sabbatical that she took for her 60^th birthday.  The exhibit itself was really cool.  It was a collection of 52 trees that she photographed, that were in a park in riverside that she loved to go to.  In each piece, she included a close up of each tree’s bark.  I thought that was really cool because it was like each tree had its own finger print.  I found myself looking closely at each tree, distinguishing what was different about each of them.  She came across her idea for this exhibit when she realized that there were 52 trees in the park.  She was born in ’52, there are 52 weeks in her year-long sabbatical, and the 52 trees were a coincidence she decided to document.  Next to the photographs of the trees is a collection of everything that she had done for the year.  She threw away nothing from her journey to the exhibit.  Here are some pictures I took of it. 

After looking around, my friend and I had a lovely conversation with Sue.  She was really nice and gave us some really good advice.  She told us to keep a sketchbook journal of all of our ideas.  She was showing us her journal that she had kept for a couple of years before she started her sabbatical.  It was interesting to see the progression of her ideas.  She told us that if she had not written down her ideas, she probably would not have been able to pull of the exhibit, or it would not have been on as large of a scale as it was.  She was also interested in science and I am too, so we talked about some things that she was thinking about during her journey, like conservation.  Here is a photo of me and my friend (taken by Sue, it was pretty neat to have a professional photographer take your picture) in front of her picture of the lake in the park.