by Troy Farah on April 23, 2009 at 4:00 am under A&E
Shawn Skabelund, a professor of Figure Drawing, stands in his Flagstaff home with an art piece from a 2004 project titled “Drawing On Nature.” On Saturday, Skabelund had a new art piece placed near the Communication building. - Seth Eisner/ The Lumberjack
Professor Shawn Skabelund is perhaps NAU’s most controversial artist. His installation pieces (a type of sculpture art) are large, intricate and invoke a lot of symbolism. For example, “The Gift From Joseph Beuys,” a stuffed coyote in a box, was threatened with censorship during last year’s Faculty Art Show.
“Whenever you use materials like that, people want to censor you,” Skabelund said. “It can get to that point, because they don’t understand what the art is.”
Annette McGivney, a journalism professor, became friends with Skabelund because their sons went to the same school.
“As an artist Shawn is very committed to exposing truth, whether people like it or not,” McGivney said.
Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., is the whole package. She’s got enough fashion sense to match Lady Gaga without looking trashy and bends more genres into one song than some can fit into an entire discography. M.I.A.’s latest mishmash album, MAYA, is a step up from 2007’s Kala, with 53 minutes of irritating, catchy samples and hooks that will either infect the mind or aggravate the senses.
Squared and I were lost and strayed into random back alleys until we came upon a pile of discarded VHS tapes and old SNES games. We took as many as we could carry, found our way home and later in the year, would drink and watch whatever we popped in. One video, “Debbie Family History” was especially intriguing but only when the gears started turning did we realize what we discovered.
Last spring, I interviewed two people who have sold drugs in the past — psilocybin mushrooms and Adderall respectively — for my capstone project, which you can learn more about here. What follows is my attempt at imitating This American Life with some music that I hope I don’t get sued over. Enjoy.
The RV was the covered wagon of the 20th century, the head of a caravan cutting through the same arid landscape of Manifested settlers. Their foreheads swathed in familiar sweat, both the Modern and the Industrial man knew this expansion was justified and inevitable. Nowhere but Arizona holds fervent dogma like this, even to this day. Whether true or not, this land is my land, this land was always my land, this land was never your land.
At the first of the year, I took a little crazy adventure to the south of California and tripped over the border to Tijuana. When relating this story to people, most are surprised or confused, so I’m cementing this tale in writing for anyone wanting to know how bizarre and terrifying Mexico’s streets are during the hours of darkness.
