I purposefully waited to present this Studio towards the end, even though it was technically the first Studio we constructed. The “SITE Office” was a production studio and hub for collecting and organizing all of the generated content from Nomadic Studio daily. SITE initially stood for Stockyard Institute Teaching Experiment, and dates as far back as the cover of the “Musical Chairs” Workbook in 2008. With a provisional place in the museum to work, we decided to make this long-forming educational production house a real thing for a while. If the Rumpus Room was my Studio, and the Workroom Jim Duignan’s, the SITE Office was Beth Wiedner’s ideal Studio. Beth led the design for this dense multimedia workspace, and without it, none of the thousands of files from Nomadic would have been captured.
The SITE Office had it all. We hand-selected every piece of furniture from the striking orange couch to the durable desk and seating. Watie White’s remarkable mural “Common Ground” enveloped the back wall. Christophe Roberts’ “Our Bird” lorded over the ever-changing free zine library. Bert Stabler’s gorgeous and elegant infographic connecting over 100 Art Education institutions radiated next to the reference library. The SITE Office was a mix of new, mid, and old technology. It had a full computing and printing station, Keith Brown’s NCPR Kiosk for digital educational references and lesson plans, ample table seating and even a rolodex. Still, we envisioned it as a great space for the teachers of the future.
We used the SITE Office from the very first day to the very last, so it was fitting that for the month of November, Nomadic Studio’s theme was Officially “SITE”. And with that, we held no events for the last month, and just sorted and collected everything we had documented since the very beginning. As this tour is wrapping up, I still have a grip of events to cover, and some reveals up my sleeve, but it’s nice to be reminded of how cool that space was, and how much we created in it.
Faiz
