In the Stacks
Being a ‘patron of the arts’ sure sounds like a fussy way to identify yourself. But shoot: in 2022 I had an incredible time just putting money down so artists I admire could make art.
This happened with Dracula Daily! The incredible outpouring of reader responses - jokes, memes, text posts, etc - include an outpouring of visual art. When I got the book deal to make a real printed book, I was able to take the advance money and pay reprint rights for some very cool artwork - drawings, paintings, digital stuff - to include in the book.
But one I’m very excited about isn’t visual at all - it’s writing! To celebrate the new year, I commissioned a new short story by Robin Sloan, best-selling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. It’s a kind of love-letter to Lawrence Kansas, the town where I live, and a celebration of learning new things. We printed nice copies and gave them to clients and friends of my software company, Brand New Box. You can read it here and read a longer version about the process over there.
Hey nerds
While this project was already underway, I saw this viral tweet thread encouraging rich nerds to commission art like the Medicis:
Sometimes I get frustrated when I compare arts and tech salaries, but
— Dr Kate Compton #BotGirlSummer (@GalaxyKate) June 8, 2022
look
tech people
I'm not saying you are the problem
I'm saying the exchange rate is in our favor
and someone with a FAANG salary could literally commission their own opera once per year
so we should do that
(It’s worth reading the whole tweet thread. GalaxyKate here makes a great point that honestly: we should all be putting cash down to get more art into the world.)
Now look: we don’t make FAANG money at BNB, so this doesn’t really apply to us on the scale of ‘put on a whole opera every year about why Ruby is better than Python.’ But normal people? We can do this too. I commissioned a short story from one of my favorite living authors and it cost the same amount as getting a big painting to hang over the couch. Really!
Except - and here’s the part I’m really happy about - when you buy a big painting from a favorite artist, you and your guests are the only people who get to enjoy it. If you commission WRITING, then that story can become available for everybody! (This definitely rhymes with Tim Carmody’s idea of unlocking the commons, also a good read.)
Making it physical
So: Robin did all the hard work here and wrote the story (which is great, and again: you should read it). But we also went a little overboard getting this out into the world.
First and foremost: we printed it! A limited run of small handheld books, Field-Notes sized, with a bunch of custom features:
- letterpress and cover on a nice rich paper stock
- the front is die-cut so those white circles are little windows into the inside
- an inside pocket (books with pockets are the best)
- a fake library checkout card in that pocket
- and yes, are those dates on the checkout card a secret code? I’ll never tell.
And also, that card is the spot where we scribble our handwritten note to the clients and friends who got one of these editions in the mail.
Making it digital
And then, well - I really couldn’t resist here. The story features a Big Red Synthesizer - a fictional version of an actual red modular synthesizer at the actual Lawrence Public Library. You can play with it there! In fact, we took one of our Final Friday outings a few years back to learn how it worked and make some music together.
Wouldn’t it be fun if we made a little online synthesizer you could make some music with? We did that too.
That’s it. Go read it already!
52 Musems: Done!
So! My big 2022 project was supposed to be going to 52 museums in the year. I did this! As a big annual project it definitely got overshadowed a bit by Dracula stuff, but still got it done. Here’s my recap/observations post!
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First: I added notes and photos about each museum visit to a little minisite: museums.mattkirkland.com
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The world has a lot more small History museums than I realized. I generally am not very interested in American history, and I live in the midwest. So there are a lot of small museums around that cover a specific place’s history - which is usually focused on early settlers. This seems natural, as museums are based on collections of objects, and that’s what those places have. There’s always a small bit that gestures towards the native people in that place, and then the majority is like: wagon wheels! Plows! After a couple of these they run together.
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I counted several soccer stadium tours, which… I think qualifies! I mean, it’s very much ‘here’s our history, here are some artifacts from the club, here are our trophies, here’s the dressing room, don’t touch the grass, here are the seats, etc.
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I set up this goal because I felt like I don’t take the opportunities I have to see interesting museums - even though generally I love them! This was a forcing function to help me get to more of these. But what I didn’t count on was how little anybody else in my family wanted to go along! Dragging the fam turned into a chore, and then when I stoped making them come along, it felt like a hobby that was taking me away from my family for too many hours in the year. So: maybe overdoing it.
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I tasked myself with finding one specifically neat or interesting thing in each, and highlighting that. That was a good little plan; even when I didn’t have a lot of time (or curiosity) to see a place, that helps me focus, and it worked great.
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Setting a goal with an end date is good: I like Arbitrary Stupid Goals like this, but I tend to forget to make them accomplishable.
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My favorites are art or natural history museums, but the weird ones - where clearly there was just a collector who got out of control - are so great. I do love those.
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Highlight: Morrill Hall Natural History museum in Nebraska was great! The hall of elephants is really impressive, but also I discovered a painter there that I really think is great.
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I think I had the idea that I would learn more about running a museum during this exercise… but I did not. I have more questions than ever about how museums are run and managed!
That’s it: no big revelations. Does it make me want to start / run / work with a museum? YES.
Love Garden Squid
Erika and I tend to schedule weird arts classes as dates. Normal enough, right? This spring at the Lawrence Arts Center, we signed up for a window display course, taught by Nick Stahl (who does design work for a few local business darlings) and Rosa Nussbaum (who makes inflatable and soft sculptures - we took her soft sculpture class this spring.)
The assignment was a group project: in just a few weeks, dream up and execute a window display for Love Garden, the downtown record store. Their logo is a squid.
This was really fun. The squid body is made of carpet padding, which is a weirdly good fit for the mottled skin of a cephalopod. It was sewing and fit over a skeleton made of PEX. And it turned out quite a bit like our original maquette / mockup:
It was definitely a group project where we split up to work on different things. Erika spearheaded the wavy foreground / background decorations. I took point on the eye - which is a nested series of plexy domes, with a looping video of different eyes behind it.
It glows really well and seems to follow you around a bit as you walk!
52 Museums
This year’s big New-Years-Resolution project is: I’m going to at least 52 museums through the year. This isn’t like, a generative design project or anything: it’s just a good excuse to go to all the museums I’ve been driving by and not making the time for.
The world is full of fascinating-sounding places, especially if you have a high tolerance for weird and/or boring. I certainly do, and there are really weird and/or boring-sounding museums in the area where I live, but I’ve never made the time to get myelf to:
- the Stagecoach Museum
- the Deaf Culture Museum
- the Hair Art Museum
- the Money Museum
- the Agricultural Hall of Fame(!)
These all sound like they’d be cool, right? Right?
I LOVE museums, and think that really anything that has been paid sufficient attention to can be interesting. And that’s the crux of a museum, right: some collection of objects, collected by somebody who was very into this thing. That attention, all focused on some thing is kind of interesting in itself, and the formal qualities of a museum (objects on display, explanatory cards, self-guided rooms, etc) really throw me into an automatic state of ‘why is this interesting?’ Maybe that collection or area of attention is big and obvious, like Modern Art or Natural History. I love those. But maybe it’s not, like the Toby Jug Museum or Leila’s Musem of Hair Art.
SO: in 2022 I’m going to at least 52 museums: one per week. And of course, documenting the process at museums.mattkirkland.com.
And of course, I’ll drag the family along to any that I can.
Notepad, scissors, glue stick
When the 2020 pandemic hit, our church pivoted to Zoom, like everybody else’s. I usually doodle or sketch during church, but I found that a zoom service really opens up the possibility for MUCH more involved craft work. I tried a lot of different possibilities, but settled on magazine collages - it’s simple enough that it doesn’t distract too much from the message, but interesting enough that it keeps my hands moving.
So now I’ve got a dumb collection of dumb collages pasted into my sketchbooks. I’m going to start collecting them here, I think, so I’ve got them all in one place.
When we went back to in-person I missed this, and so I wasn’t too disappointed when we had to go back to zoom during the Omicron wave.
These are all dumb, but I’v been laughing about ‘How do we get consumers to eat more potatoes? NO no no no no your best friend is a potato!’ for like, a year.
