Off and on for the last month, and especially in the last week, I have been putting together my portfolio for transfer to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. If you’re not in the know, I dropped out of college four years ago with one semester left til graduation. There were several personal (and several more financial) reasons for it that I won’t go into here, but I’ve been an artist with 7/8 of a BFA for the entire time I’ve lived in New England.

I’ve never been able to afford to return to my former school, even for that one semester, and as I’ve been living 2600 miles away it gets harder and harder to just up sticks and go back to California for 4 months. That’d cost me my job, my home, and it frankly wouldn’t be fun to leave my girlfriend for that long.

Long story short: between my Pell Grant and my Education Award I got for my AmeriCorps Year of Service, I have enough money to finish my degree at MassArt with no money out of pocket, because tuition for Massachusetts residents is fuckin cheap. I dropped off my portfolio yesterday.

Putting the portfolio together has been a really weird and, frankly, unpleasant experience. MassArt’s policy for transfer students is to have them submit 3 pieces of art for every single studio class they want to transfer. My first semester at California College of the Arts was in Fall of 2004, which has left me with 8 years to lose work. I was using a Digital8 camera in those days, the Betamax of digital video, which is now completely obsolete. And I didn’t have an external hard drive for a chunk of college, or even a home computer, so a lot of work got wiped from the school network every summer. Add in that I lost tapes when my camera was stolen and the number of hard drives I’ve had die, and you get an idea of what providing 3 works for each class is like.

Some of my favorite projects are lost forever.

BUT! Some of it has been salvaged. A decent chunk of work from college, and some recent work that hadn’t been put online yet, is being uploaded now to Vimeo and Soundcloud, and will be posted here shortly. I want to talk, at some point, about what making this portfolio was like (kinda shitty), but that can wait til the work is online. Meantime, look forward to a bunch of content going live today.