This past Friday, Rich Stremme came to class to speak to us about what seemed to be his experience with different forms of art in mainly New York, which is quite fitting to our Arts in New York class. I’m typically not a fan of poetry so when I found out that when I went to pick out something of his for class and the only thing left was poetry, I was a little disappointed. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that in this book, Dog City, of what I thought would just be poems were a few short stories. One question that I had to ask Mr. Stremme after reading all of the stories in this book was “are these all real, personal accounts?” because some of the situations just seemed crazy but realistic in a way. I was very happy to find out that they were, in fact, real because I had imagined him in all of these scenarios who wrote about.

Mr. Stremme really showed that it is possible to make a living off of art. Even though he uses lots of different forms of art (i.e. tattooing, poetry, music, etc.) he embraces each of them as a professional artist in all of these fields. Although art isn’t the main part of his life, he still makes time for it because it got him to where he is today. I found it creative that Mr. Stremme used his talents of writing and pursued a career as a professor at Brooklyn College. Out of curiosity, I searched him on ratemyprofessor.com and judging by his grade of 4.9/5 he is very good at his job. On top of that, I thought it was awesome that he is a tattoo artist. I watch tattoo TV shows all of the time and it’s amazing how much time and effort it takes for one tattoo to come out like a piece of art. Mr. Stremme proved to the class that it is possible to be a professional artist and love what you do. He is a truly inspiring and diversified artist as well as a person in general.