"2021 could rightly be labeled catastrophic.

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As an Art Professor teaching undergraduates during the Spring 2021 semester, Jenny Drumgoole was tasked with an impossible challenge. How could she engage young minds and encourage their creativity, resilience and growth when the world was falling to shambles? How could she guide their artistic impulses from the siberia of a virtual classroom? Her strategy was to reincarnate a persona that could interrupt the madness with humor, glitter, and a slapstick optimism that only a clown could provide, while interrogating the zoom technology they were required to use in real time, and making the whole premise of the class about relating to the present and each other. “Make and Do with SOXX” was born.

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Catastrophe takes many forms. It comes as a furious spectacle. Facepaint covered protestors high on adrenaline and pepper spray scrambling up scaffolds with murderous rage.  It comes silent as a ghost, cresting on airborne particles circulating in lungs filled with illness. It steals loved ones while you sleep, ignorant, and leashes your dog to walk it out your door and into an open grave. It splits professional alliances into bitter feuds, fuels derision at faculty lunches. It boxes all of us into psychic coffins devoid of IRL connection, traps us in rectangular mirrors that zoom across wires to phantom touch while paper masks dangle from our left ears like limp flags on a lazy breeze. 

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It is into this awful 2021 chaos that Soxx wades, spoon in hand, not to simply stir a pot, but rather boil up some stone soup, ladle it into her students’ bowls, and nourish a generation of young artists who’ve literally been thrown to the wolves. Like a psilocybin-laced “Artist’s Way” protocol crossed with an unhinged influencer’s social media feed, “Make & Do with Soxx” is not just a course with syllabus requirements. It is a communal prayer, a collective scream, a willy wonka tour of the shared schizophrenia we’ve all somehow found ourselves in – present day “reality”.

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Below is both set and setting for the happenings that occurred over the course of the semester. Class assignments, ephemera and even celebrity cameos are displayed to conjure the magic and madness of this time. Rather than despair, the classes’ acts of making and doing create joy and articulate something beyond the void – a space for possibility, reflection and community."  – Brian Bauman