coffee drawing, 1999-2000 school year

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. I usually drew on the handouts and agendas we got, and were based on the subjects under discussion or the classrooms we rotated through. Most drawings contained a cup of coffee, the frequent metaphor for my desperate need for stimulation under adverse conditions.

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. For some reason, my colleagues put up with my drawing: I think they knew that it pacified me, and prevented me from yelling or throwing things.

At the end of one school year, I took slides of the drawings, and gave a tongue-in-cheek art history slide lecture (I taught art/art history) 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 get the context, and were part of this bizarre community.