3 minute read
Shannon Price
From Community Art to Exclusive Art and Back
PRICE SHANNON
Shannon Price has always been surrounded by creatives. Her parents were art students and then artists, so she grew up roaming the halls of art schools. These experiences gave her a sense of the common language of art and design. Her understanding of the creative personality and how to balance artistic output with operational needs made her the perfect fit for her current role as dean of Cilker School of Art and Design at West Valley College.
As a teen, she was a dancer and made costumes for renaissance fairs. She spent the 1990s in the San Francisco music scene. As the musicians’ friend-turned-business-partner, she started the record label Prawn Song that put out Primus’ first record. She was tour manager for Mr. Bungle, Melvins, and Godflesh, and she styled music videos for Primus, Green Day, and INXS. Even as the only girl in a boys’ club, she described it as an “exciting way to spend your twenties,” working hard, “running around, and staying up all night with your friends,” with a lot of NSFW stories.
Concert tours took her all over the US, Canada, and Mexico, where she showed up at banks to make deposits as a “scruffy, punky girl with thousands in cash in a Halliburton case.”
The design work she did for music videos connected her to the academic piece around fashion history, art history, and research, and prompted her to get her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley.
“As a Mexican-Italian-Irish single child of a single mom who grew up with no family wealth, nobody was paying for my college or giving me advice,” she explained, which is why she worked the entire time she was a student.
The only place in the United States to get a graduate degree in costume or fashion history at the time was NYU. The program was a partnership with the esteemed Metropolitan Museum of Art, “so it seemed like a no brainer” to Shannon. She moved across the country to study and supported herself with student loans and retail clothing jobs. She recalls that “all work experience is valuable…Most people couldn’t afford it, and I couldn’t afford it, but I was just willing to live” hand-to-mouth with student loans.
After graduating, she joined the Costume Institute at the Met as a full-time employee. Her biggest obstacle was joining that world as an outsider. This was evident when her first boss’s “best advice” for Shannon was that she marry rich.
Shannon gained industry experience and realized that the pace of the costume department was much faster than other museum departments. One of the last shows she did was the
