Morgan Donahue

 Video Description: Morgan spreads snow on top of two papers. They squirt several colors of paint haphazardly atop the snow. Dizzy, their 7 month old black labrador service dog in training, joins them near the sheets. their train a little on top of the snow, mixing the paint. Morgan wipes Dizzy's paws, and their feet. Several shots follow of the paint-filled snow melting onto the paper. Coming into this class, I knew that I wanted to collaborate with Dizzy somehow. She is my second go at training a service dog for myself, and I am acutely aware of how much of my future rests on her ability to learn her job and enjoy doing it. This is not an experience that many people relate to, so expressing it through art feels very important to me. I accomplished exactly what I wanted to in my concept post. Dizzy was a bit more interested in eating the snow than I anticipated, but such is the unpredictable nature of working with live animals. I am very pleased that the installation yielded not o

 Andrew Norris is a queer artist capturing queer identity through his art. He works in oil paint, a medium famous for having been used by "the greats" of art throughout history. Not only this, but his work often shares features of famous paintings, with queer icons, cartoon characters, comic books, celebrities, and other pop culture imagery added to the foreground. In this way, his art adds commentary about who has been visibly excluded from the cannon of art. He asserts with his paintings that queer expression is unique, valid, and worthwhile. His work also depicts the types of people who, until recent years, could not be visible as their authentic selves. ID: Friends of Dorothy (from left to right) Persephone, Orpheus, Cassandra, Narcissus, 2021, installation view. Four oil paintings with bright, vivid color depicting queer subjects hang on a white wall. Source: https://www.andrewnorrisart.com/ As a queer person, I really haven't examined my relationship with pop cultur

 Alexandra Bell was a very engaging speaker. I have been to only a handful of convocations, and a couple of those have made my eyes glaze over. That is not meant to be a knock on other speakers I have heard; I just did not relate to them as much or understand their subject matter in the same way. Bell's art itself is interesting, and engaging. The journalistic style of it is captivating, especially in our current age. The media has a way with spinning topics to be completely polarizing, and de-emphasizing what really matters in a situation. I believe that her work has the potential to make people think deeply about the news articles they consume, and how their formatting and presentation matters.  ID: Two newspaper articles on a brick wall. The one on the left is the original New York Times Page, marked in red with Bell's corrections and highlighted. The article on the right is Bell's reformatting, with the title "White Nationalist Protest Leads to Deadly Violence"