Tour of
Offices
From the artistic to the zany, these are some of the coolest offices on campus. Words by Lydia Hansen Photos by Sophie Warrick
Allison Baker Step inside her office in the Studio C building, behind the Drew Fine Arts Center, and notice the generous splotches of hot pink and green paint on the floor and the litter of bright blue and pink swatches of fabric. A half-finished, handmade vest is draped over a chair, there’s a giant inflatable cactus on top of a shelf in one corner, and her sagging green and red plaid couch is overstuffed with art magazines and lost pens. Although it’s technically a large office, between the paint cans and the six-foot steel and paper putty structure dominating the middle of the room, the space feels exceptionally cluttered. But that mess is the natural product of Allison Baker’s creative process. As an assisstant professor of studio arts and sculpture, Baker’s office doubles as her studio, and when she’s not teaching, she’s there creating new work. The studio is “weirdly clean” at the moment because Baker recently installed a large volume of work at a show in Mankato, but she said there’s usually “10,000 SuperAmerica coffee cups and just trash and garbage everywhere. My students tell me it’s a disgusting cesspit.” Mostly, though, her office is a space for collecting the weird, which abounds on the shelves lining one wall where Baker stores materials she may some day use in sculptures. Sometimes organized in boxes and sometimes 12 | Canvas
scattered higgledy-piggledy, these materials run the gambit from molds of ears and noses to fish tank gravel to an entire box of plastic snakes. “I keep promising myself I’m going to do something with them,” Baker said. “If things sit around long enough they tend to get used up.” There’s no telling how long it will take for Baker’s studio to cycle through a new batch of oddities, but Baker says having the space is vital to her artistic output. “I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without this space,” she said. “It really makes my work and my life here possible.”