CO-OP Q&A:

Dennie Eagleson ’71 Associate Professor of Photography

interviewed by Samantha (Williams) Eckenrode ’83

• The Jewish Community Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the first time I had ever lived alone, in my own apartment. The couple in the apartment next door played a country song called "Your Cheatin' Heart" constantly.
• My next co-op as a government office secretary almost killed me except I read a lot of D. H. Lawrence on the bus to work. I almost left that co-op to go to work for Students for a Democratic Society (I had met an organizer who invited me to go to work for the organization in 1968 or 9). My co-op advisor, Dorothy Scott talked me out of it, which in retrospect may have been a very good thing.
• I worked at the Penninsula School in Menlo Park, California and lived in San Francisco with a number of other (older) Antioch students and worked with the 5th and 6th grades. LOVED the place and the job. We went on an overnight trip sailing around Catalina Island on a 3-masted schooner. Rode back in a van singing "Hey Jude." LOVED living in San Francisco. This was 1969.
• Boy, then the BEST job: own plans, discovered Project, Inc., an after-school experimental art school for kids in Cambridge, Massachusetts inspired by the Bauhaus movement. I learned so much about the adventure of teaching and became confident in my own drawing abilities by taking a class with a woman from Los Angeles. It changed my life. I stayed an additional quarter, and later went to study with that same woman (Detta Lange) in Los Angeles. She taught Drawing from the Left side of the Brain long before the book was published. Met a blues drummer, and my co-ops became more "own-plans:” working in a candle factory in Wellfleet, Massachusetts; spending time in San Antonio; and then returning to campus to manage a food co-op on campus in Birch Space, followed by working as a co-op in the clay studio.
• When I graduated, I worked in treatment centers/group homes/therapeutic communities with teenagers for about 6 years, which was great work, but hard to sustain. Both my partner and I (also an Antioch grad) were compelled to pursue lives as artists and craftspeople. I taught myself photography and started a business doing free-lance video and photography, and exhibiting my own work.
• Then I started teaching at Antioch part-time, and realized that I loved teaching. I love designing structures for people to learn the craft, and gain fluency in describing who they are in the world, what it is they care about, and translating that concern to a visual medium. Through the two of my Antioch co-ops that involved teaching—the Penninsula School, and the experimental art school in Cambridge. I got to witness the power of creating open-ended structures, access to stimulating materials, and seeing how children were able to come to their own unique solutions to visual problems, through play.