The Year-Long Adventures of the Blue Shoes & Their Friends

Book excerpt: While participating in a Teacher Workshop organized by Georgina Valverde at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, Michael Hill began a one-year artistic and pedagogical odyssey making original images (always featuring some aspect of one or more athletic shoes) and posting them daily to a visual blog he created to help kick-start writing projects among the many student athletes he tutored at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He started the year self-identifying as "scholar/teacher," but at year's end Michael looked in the mirror and said, OK, still "scholar/ teacher," but also "artist." Here are the workshop organizer's foreword, the scholar's introduction, the teacher's formal lesson plan, 52 plates from the artist's blog, and a proxy example of student work.