Monday, September 15, 2008
Bad luck leads to invaluable internship with celebrated artist
 Sometimes, good luck comes of bad luck. Ask USI student Daryl Booth.Booth, a senior art major, was involved in a serious car accident in February. Around midnight on a Friday night, Booth’s car slid from an icy road. He wound up in the ICU with collapsed lungs, a lacerated liver, three broken ribs, two fractured vertebrae, a broken arm, bruised organs, and a laceration on the back of his head. Booth has a full-time job and works part-time while pursuing a degree in art with a double emphasis in graphic design and woodworking, so he’s accustomed to being busy. He struggled with the enforced bed rest despite his injuries. “I hate lying around, and after a week and a half I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he said. After only two weeks he had permission to return to USI, but it would be two months before he could go back to his job at a home improvement store, so he had plenty of time on his hands when John David Mooney, a celebrated artist and urban designer, came to campus as artist-in-residence. When Rob Millard Mendez, assistant professor of art, asked students to assist Mooney in creating an art installation on the USI Quadrangle, Booth volunteered to help every day. Before long, he was on call for the artist, who dubbed him project architect for the installation, a 1,740-foot spiral made of sawdust and multi-hued flags. “I worked for him all day and got to know him well,” Booth said. “He had me oversee everything.” A month after Mooney left, Booth received a phone call from the artist offering him a summer internship. “It was completely out of the blue,” Booth said. “Here’s a world class artist calling me on my cell phone.” For three weeks Booth lived and worked at the John David Mooney Foundation housed in a historic six-story building in downtown Chicago. The internship provided him with hands-on experience in a professional artist’s studio, free room and board, educational and cultural activities, and invaluable networking opportunities. It included a wide variety of responsibilities. He helped design and build models of sculptures, used a computer program to scale them, and dropped them in prospective environments so clients could see the result. He met with metal fabricators and discussed prices, finishes, and engineering. He attended board meetings of Mooney’s foundation, and pitched in as a handyman for the old building. “I’d start at six or seven in the morning. Sometimes I’d go out and come back and work until midnight or one,” he said. Three other interns worked on various projects and graduate students shared the studio space. Mooney encouraged Booth’s cultural education. He introduced him to artists and their work, taking Booth to a private opening for the influential British artist David Hockney. Booth said, “He’d give me names of artists who were influential and make me go look at their work and come back and tell him why I think it’s important.” In the evenings Mooney would send his intern to free arts events. In retrospect, Booth calls his car accident a blessing. “That’s why I was able to spend so much time working with John David. Otherwise, I would have been at work every day and wouldn’t have had a chance to get to know him.” After he graduates from USI in December, Booth will return to Chicago to serve as an apprentice in Mooney’s studio. Wendy Knipe Bredhold News & Information Services wkbredhold@usi.edu or 812/461-5259 |
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