Art-o-Mat is way-o-cool

I had fully intended to resume blogging upon my return from the CERF board meeting. Unfortunately, I got sick. I’m not going to go into the details, but it über-sucked.

As I mentioned in this post, the CERF board meeting was in San Antonio, Texas. We were hosted by the Southwest School of Art & Craft. The school is just beautiful. Definitely on my list of places to take classes in the future. I plan to talk about my visit to the Paper & Book Arts department in my next post.

While taking a tour of the campus, we walked through the Navarro campus, home of the Russell Hill Rogers Gallery. Just down the hall, I discovered an Art-o-Mat. The Art-o-Mat was developed in 1997 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina by Clark Whittington. Clark rehabs cigarette vending machines into art-dispensers, with pieces costing only $5.00. The Art-o-Mat at the Southwest School contains the work of 20 artists, many of them local to the school. To see other Art-o-Mats that have been released in the wild, click here.

I was enamored with the contraption. Then I noticed that there were handmade books for sale. Now I had to buy something. Off I went to get my token.

Here’s what I got:

So now I have a sweet little book made by P.J. Waldrop. The weird thing is that the book has a website printed on the back, but it isn’t active. Bummer.

I’m thinking that I might try to create some work to sell in the Art-o-Mats. There are lots of rules and you don’t earn much, but I don’t care. I want my work in a vending machine. Maybe in another life I was a candy bar…