COFFEE DRAWINGS
2000-2004

The Coffee Drawings started during my first year of teaching high school. The weekly 2-hour-long all-faculty meetings were truly awful, and I had no known role at them other than to be a warm body in a seat. One afternoon, as a joke, I doodled a cup of coffee, and slipped it to another colleague in desperate need of stimulation.

Over 4 years of staff meetings, I made over 150 drawings, most of which included coffee in some form. The drawings were made on staff handouts and agendas, and were informed by the subjects under discussion or the classrooms we rotated through each week. The meetings improved over the years: I actually enjoyed some of them. In retrospect, however, it’s easy to chart which ones were done during excessively tedious sessions, or when I was particularly aggrieved by the proceedings.

At the end of one school year, I took slides of the drawings, and gave a tongue-in-cheek art history slide lecture to staff and students based on the Coffee Drawings. I addressed the school’s context, history and melodramas, the inherent oppression of the “staff meeting” model, and how transgressive actions and dissent manifest through the act of drawing.

The Coffee Drawings live in a big binder that gets passed around to former colleagues and students who are the only people who truly appreciate the context, and were part of this bizarre community.