This year was a Thanksgiving like none other in the sense that it didn't really happen for me.

Normally, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I am fully in support of a holiday that is mostly about food and family. It's a real break, time out of your busy routine that doesn't require weeks of advance preparation, like Christmas does. My classmates who aren't from the US sometimes have trouble understanding how big of a deal the holiday is, but they were all very supportive on the day and were sad for me that I didn't have time to celebrate.

The reason I didn't have time was that my first assessed essay, the assignment that would count for 20% of my entire degree, was due the Friday after. The whole History of Art MA program had essays due that day, which meant that around a third of the students at the Courtauld were competing for printer access and emotional space in the library. Stress builds on stress and my whole class was pushing ourselves into this emotional feedback loop. Lottie and I stayed up almost all night the two days before it was due, making final corrections and adjustments, seeking out obscure sources in the British Library. When I emerged from my room at 4am Friday morning to take a shower, she heard my door open and came out in the hall to commiserate together. Thank goodness we all had each other.

I turned in my essay Friday morning, several hours before the actual deadline, because I had a symposium to get to. The Tate was hosting a conference for the 100th anniversary of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, and since my professor was presenting, most of our class attended.



We watched as members of the class joined the group one by one. One girl arrived for the beginning of the symposium, I arrived with another classmate toward the end of the first speaker. Others trickled in just before lunch, around tea time, until finally six of the eight of us had made it.

The symposium gave me a new perspective on Der Blaue Reiter and was a good experience overall, even if a two day conference is not exactly what you would want to follow two days of very little sleep. But my favorite parts of the weekend had less to do with the conference and more with the people.

The final event of the conference was a re-created performance of a Kandinsky opera called The Yellow Sound. Predictably, it was weird, with "giants" who looked like yellow versions of The Silence from the recent season of Doctor Who. But it was held in the East Room at the Tate Modern, a corner room on the north east corner of the building. Going to the windows you could look down and see the Globe theatre, and looking out you could see this:



After the performance we retreated to the cafe, ordered a couple bottles of wine, and did what we always do: talked about art and language and enjoyed the view until they kicked us out of the museum. Even though we were so tired that Anna from Munich kept trying to speak to me in German, and Philipos started calling people by the wrong name, it was a perfect night.