Imagine receiving a phone call from an old friend, who at that moment is a contestant on the hit TV show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” You’re his only phone call, what the show calls a “lifeline.” Anxiously, he reads you his question: “Who was history’s most prolific self-portraitist?”
Van Gogh? Michelangelo is another choice. However, the 22 years you spent in school, the other five years spent in museum curatorship—and your gut—tell you the answer must be Rembrandt. After all, he did paint more than 60 self-portraits over the course of his lifetime.
Host Regis Philbin asks, “Is that your final answer?”
“Yes,” your friend replies.
It’s quiet on the set for what seems like an eternity.
“That is correct!” Philbin booms.
City College art professor Valerie Kidrick, 51, never imagined she would end up as someone’s “lifeline” on a TV trivia game show when she made the decision to pursue art history as a career in the late 1970s. Just as she fondly recalls that phone call, she also remembers the day she told her father what she wanted to do with her life.
“I can even remember where he was standing in the house when I said this to him,” she says. “He literally looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you go into something smart, like computers?’ And my response to him was, and I still remember it to this day, ‘If I have to do something for 50 years of my life, it’s going to be something I love.’”
Neurological (Nerve and Brain Disorder)- You cialis on line regencygrandenursing.com cannot achieve or maintain sufficient erection for deeper penetration. This romantic comedy was highly appreciated by the movie buffs. see this generic cialis online Since they increase blood supply and regulate circulation while balancing the body out for sex, they naturally help you generico levitra on line get faster and better results. Penis pumps are viagra uk buy regencygrandenursing.com increasingly becoming popular among men these days. Over the course of her career, Kidrick has taught at 11 different schools since 1989. For her, teaching at City College is not a job; it’s where she wants to be. She is proud to call herself a member of the art department, which once housed notable alumni, like artists Gregory Kondos and Wayne Theibaud; designer and architect Ray Eames; pop artist Mel Ramos; photographer Kurt Edward Fishback and more.
Kidrick sits back in her chair smiling. Her office on campus is small and concrete from floor to ceiling, as if a hole has been cut into the building with the sole purpose of shoving her within. There are no windows, but the high ceilings and open door make it feel she has collected from students and staff members, like the framed charcoal nude on the floor.
Student Nikk Cervantes took her Modern Art class during the spring 2013 semester.
“She’s a very well-informed, very eccentric teacher—very, very powerful and very intelligent,” Cervantes says. “It’s very incredible to experience what she does here.”
Kidrick isn’t a tall woman, yet when she teaches she stands before her students and speaks with a boldness that makes her seem larger than life. She often declares to her students, “I live to defy authority.” As if her body language didn’t articulate it enough already. She speaks about art with a feverishness and charm that envelops anyone sitting in on a lecture, nearly daring them to take interest in the significance of each work and the dead artist who made it.
“Her teaching style is so potentially beneficial to any of her students who listen,” says Lael Whetstone, a former student in Kidrick’s Renaissance Art class.
Kidrick wants students to know that bigger isn’t always better, and that price isn’t always equivalent to worth. If there’s anything she’s learned in her experience, it’s that everything works out the way it should.
“If you do what you love, the money will follow. I’m kind of karmic like that,” she says.