Introducing Tia Kramer, Incoming TPR Director!

As an organization dedicated to works in progress and unfinished ideas, The Project Room is interested in the pursuit rather than the final product. But how do you map a landscape that has no landmarks? How do you chart a trajectory that has no investment in end points? We value the exploratory over the concrete, and while this embedded flexibility is what makes us unique, it also creates a singularly interesting ongoing challenge: it is nearly impossible to explain what The Project Room is.

This Fight Club-esque atmosphere is not intentional. It is simply the natural byproduct of operating as a constantly shifting experiment, and our organizational continuity comes in the form of our Big Questions. From 2011-2013, The Project Room asked: Why Do We Make Things? And from 2013-2015, we are asking: How Are We Remembered? These questions function as guiding principles, and all of our programming is based around our Big Questions. It is only though this lens that our little think-tank/event space/literary journal/lab/meeting place/incubator/sure-we-might-occasionally-put-framed-art-on-the-walls-but-we-are-not-an-art-gallery starts to make any measure of cohesive sense.

With our founder Jess Van Nostrand having accepted a position at MoMA, The Project Room is transitioning into a new chapter. At its helm is our new Incoming Director, Tia Kramer. “I’ve been holding off on the question of how to introduce myself,” Tia explains as she pours hot water for tea. She smiles ruefully and shrugs before handing me a mug. “I do so many seemingly unrelated things that I might end up sounding really disjointed.”

For some organizations, it is true that having an impossibly multi-faceted Director might be seen as confusing or detrimental. But for The Project Room, this is a very fitting problem. (Full disclosure: Tia has been one of my closest friends for five years, and as such I am (happily) incapable of writing a dryly-professional introduction for her. Again, this seems apt.)

The solution to the question of how to introduce Tia Kramer is embedded within the organizational structure of the Project Room itself. Yes, Tia’s identity as a curator/educator/traveler/artist/consultant/outdoorswoman/jeweler does indeed defy concise explanation: but it also illustrates why she is the perfect person to take the reins here at The Project Room. These distinct roles are all lines of inquiry in service of Tia’s personal Big Question: What Makes Life Meaningful?

Tia’s versatility is outmatched only by her endless curiosity, and the insightful concentration that she brings to each of her disciplines gives her a broadly open-minded depth of focus that is a delight to behold. She is an artist, designer and curator who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at Macalester College. She has a special interest in collaborative, socially engaged and site-specific arts programming, and has curated exhibitions and art happenings at Bellevue Arts Museum, SOIL Gallery, American Institute of Architects, and Canoe Social Club.

In addition to her object-based works, she has presented public performances at Fort Lawton in Seattle's Discovery Park, Smoke Farm in Arlington, WA, the Bellevue Arts Museum, and downtown Chicago. Recently awarded a 2015 Duwamish Revealed Grant and the 4Culture Historic Site-Specific Collaborative Grant, she is currently collaborating with choreographer Tamin Totzke to produce a durational performance for the Georgetown Steam Plant debuting in the fall of 2015. 

But these are all things that you can learn about Tia if you spend enough time on her website. If you dig deeply enough, you will learn that Tia’s inquisitive nature has pulled her to some very interesting places. You will learn that she spent two seasons working in Antarctica— the first as a vehicle operator, the second as a communications specialist— and has studied traditional West African fibers in Ghana. You will uncover a consistent interest in architecture and utility, in the melding of function and form. You will discover a curiosity for kinesthetics and the mechanical underpinnings of movement. You will be introduced to the varied questions of a fascinatingly searching mind. 

But what you cannot learn from reading about Tia’s career is how deeply she cares about everything that she does. Her website will not show you the beautifully considered intention that she brings to each of her actions. You will not learn that she eats a lot of aged cheddar cheese, or that she has a very friendly dog named Otis. You won’t see her love of the mountains or her appreciation for silence. And you won’t be introduced to her husband, Tim, a physician and woodworker who stands as a quietly understated foundation that always encourages Tia to explore.

I have had the privilege of learning these things about Tia through the course of our friendship, and more so than her impressive professional resume, it is these small details that make me excited to see what she will do in her new role. The Project Room is an unorthodox organization, and it requires unorthodox leadership: our new curator/educator/traveler/artist/consultant/outdoorswoman/jeweler Director couldn’t be more perfect for the job.

Now meet The Project Room's Editor, Tessa Hulls. 

Why Tessa Hulls is Great. Welcoming our New Editor.

Tessa Hulls is a reader, writer, illustrator, painter, public speaker and all-around maker.

Illustration by the multi-talented woman herself, Tessa Hulls.

This presents a problem. The problem lies within describing someone creative who does everything because they could be misrepresented as a hobbyist. It is the curse of the multitalented. So, I very carefully note that Tessa makes work and executes her ideas in a variety of forms, such as illustration, writing, murals, and performance art (I’m not even sure she would call it that, but what else do you call a spoken presentation with drawings that illustrate an idea one is grappling with?). You may have seen Tessa sketching at a TPR event as her way of note-taking, or perhaps you have read her beautiful responses to one of her ambitious solo overseas bicycle trips (yes, she is also good at biking alone in remote places).

What makes perfect sense throughout all of her efforts is the honesty in everything she makes, as she unapologetically interweaves her different creative formats with her personal life in beautiful ways. This is perhaps most noticeable in the outstanding personal essays she has published during her solo travels and her way of explaining how inspiration comes to her from such different sources as Calvin & Hobbes and The Great Gatsby.

Tessa has the perfect open-mindedness of someone who is curious about creativity and is not bothered by the experimental nature of The Project Room. Directing TPR’s online platform for writing and thinking about creativity can only be put in the hands of an editor who knows when to get on the abstract side of an idea and when to just get something direct and understandable on paper- er, online. In other words, the trick to Off Paper is creating a readable collection of essays and images that reflect on TPR’s current themes while grounding them in something anyone can read and enjoy. Tessa Hulls is the perfect person for this challenge.

I am honored by Tessa’s loyalty to TPR since she first offered her skills in 2012, and I cannot wait to see what she makes happen in 2015!

Thanks, Tessa (:

Xoxoxo

Jess

Now meet The Project Room's Director, Tia Kramer

A Single Glorious Thing: Happy New Year From The Project Room

Image from Story of the Roman People by E. M. Tappan 

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.  And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress.  And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon.  Until I learned to be in love with my life again.  Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

On January 10th of the year 49 BC, General Julius Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon River and uttered the phrase “alea iacta est”: the die is cast. In crossing the Rubicon, Caesar knowingly created a point of no return: he catalyzed a civil war in which he would either face execution as a traitor, or become a conquering hero.

Stories of transformation often contain tipping points, fulcrums upon which the narrative shifts and we are suddenly able to split the tale into before and after. But these moments are rarely as clearly defined as the crossing of a literal river, and more often than not, stories of transformation are testaments to the understated power of accumulation. We see progress in retrospect, and it is only when we turn around and look back that we can concretely point and say, “Right there. That is when it started to change.” 

Two weeks ago, The Project Room hosted a conversation with Ahamefule J. Oluo to talk about his recent show Now I’m Fine, a highly personal, genre-spanning pop opera performed at On the Boards. Oluo’s show melded music, standup comedy, and unabashedly intimate storytelling to examine the ways in which we learn to be okay even during those moments at which we are anything but. Oluo joined us to discuss how Now I’m Fine dovetails with The Project Room’s current topic of Transformation. 

The first threads of Now I’m Fine began percolating as Oluo’s life was falling apart. He experienced a death and a divorce that leveled him, and in the midst of this personal low point, he developed a rare disease that caused his skin to literally fall apart. As a lifelong musician, Oluo knew how to find release through making work; but as his skin disintegrated, he could not touch the tools that would allow him some measure of release.

But in the midst of this helplessness and despair, Olou found a beat up old organ out on the street, and he brought it home to his basement apartment. His skin was too fragile to press the keys of a real keyboard, but the cheap plastic keys of this discarded organ were light enough that he could touch them. And so he brought this organ into his closet and lightly stroked the keys with his skinless fingers, making music in the only way that he could. 

And in that small moment, he was fine. 

The title Now I’m Fine can be read in two ways. The first implies a before and after: I was not ok, but now I am. The second is more nuanced: I cannot speak to any larger truth, but within this singular moment, I am ok. It seems to me that this second meaning is more honest: it acknowledges that the resonance of emotional truth always carries within it a fleeting dusting of uncertainty.

Human beings are storytellers. Our capacity for narrative—our ability to define ourselves through self-created mythology—is what makes our species unique. It also makes us melodramatic; we want our stories to be epic. We want our generals to charge across the Rubicon bellowing binary battle cries. But transformation is the accumulation of transitory moments strung together, and it happens with the soothing cadence of walking: we put one foot in front of the other until we can look up to see that the landscape has changed. That we have borne ourselves away to somewhere new. 

So as 2014 draws to a close and we welcome 2015, let us take a moment to pause and reflect on the slowness of one single glorious thing. Let us look not to the flashy reinvention of crossing Rubicon, but instead focus on the small streams that we ford each day. Happy New Year, everyone.