Squeak Meisel
Meisel

Squeak Meisel, the chair of the Fine Arts department and a renowned sculptor, has a confession to make about his podcast series, “Fly on the Wall.”

“I stole this idea from my friend Spencer Moody,” he says. Moody, a punk and noise rock musician and artist, recorded a series of interviews that inspired Meisel to realize that there is a whole “cohort of people who make different decisions than I do,” and who have a diversity of approaches to life, art, music, the world and its ambiguities.

“I thought, this is what I get from the visiting artists” the Fine Arts department invites to campus. “I get to expose students to all these different choices and lifestyles,” to all the experiences and decisions that go into becoming an artist.

Some of the artists interviewed on Meisel’s podcast, which premiered during the Fall semester, 2016, have shown their work at some of the biggest venues in the world, such as the Venice Biennial. That’s why they get the invite to come to campus, to teach for a few days, work one-on-one with undergraduate and graduate students, and to give a public lecture.

But Meisel realizes that not everyone has time to come to the lectures. With the podcast, “I can provide more people access to these conversations that few of us would otherwise get. I’ve had people telling me they were driving to Seattle and listening to my latest podcast.”

And while artists’ lectures are often pretty heady, “I can bring that back and say, ‘OK, tell me where you started.’ I think undergraduates”–and, really, any aspiring artist–“need to understand that they’re not alone. They have a tribe.”

The interviews are fascinating and offer views of the world and art making that are both accessible and mind expanding. “A lot of what an artist does,” Meisel says, “is frame something in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily think to frame it. It gives you a new perspective.”

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