SPE South-Central

Last year I was lucky enough to have the department I work for send me to SPE South-Central Regional Conference in San Antonio, TX. It was a fun experience and gave me a preview of this year, as this coming October it will be our turn to play host. I began sitting in the committee meetings recently, and learned I'll be running on-site support for the speakers/guests. I don't exactly mind, as it means I shouldn't have to miss Susan Burnstine, Kelli Connell, Todd Hido or a plethora of other artists and professionals at various stages in their career.

We visited the forest fire sites, they mostly just looked like this.

At any rate, San Antonio. The drive was nothing short of an exercise in pain management (over-filled shuttle fan from MS to TX? Oh yeah) and the city was a little more interesting at night than I'm comfortable with. I was also dismayed to learn that my piece had been left out of a show I was in due to damage. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell me until after the show opened, I showed up, and inquired the whereabouts of said piece. Oh, and the conference hotel was in walking distance of nothing.

Nate on one of the nature trails we visited

As terrible as all that sounds, it was a pretty fun conference! I learned much and met a lot of people. I also discovered Joy Christiansen Erb. She gave a beautiful, touching, and painfully honest talk about her recent work Portrait of a Mother. Carrie Mae Weems also gave a talk-- an amazing, inspirational talk about what it means to be an artist and using our art to make change.

Unfortunately I never really broke out my camera unless we were headed on a photographic adventure to a nearby location (and we made quite a few of these considering how much else we had to do and our limited time there).