2025 NCAA Tournament of Art

 Tonight was the annual selection show for this year's NCAA Division I Men's basketball tournament.  There are officially 64 teams chosen, plus 4 more that have play-in games before the official first round.  It has been my practice to talk about my art schools that made that cut.  My art schools are places I have attended, exhibited at, have art collected by, been published by, or something of that nature.  I have been busy over the past 40 years since I started attending college at a Division I school, so this is typically a few to several.  However, this year I have only one.  I had hoped for more, with a school I have graduated from, exhibited at, and been collected by (and one of a very few that has been around since the start of the tournament without ever being selected) finishing 4th in their conference, but they lost their first round game there, and this is a conference that never gets anything but their automatic qualifying bid.  I do have a few schools of interest, which are related to my art schools, but I don't count those for this tournament- places like SIU-E (I graduated and exhibited at the main campus, as someone from a branch on a local military base once put it) Texas (I went to a week long print function and exhibited at another campus with it's own basketball team), VCU (which was once part of a school I attended, but had separated long before I was there).  So this year just one.

That would be University of Illinois, where I exhibited back in 1994.  This was an exchange exhibition with my own school, Southern Illinois University, where I exhibited my Fourth of July series for the first time.  This year they are a number 6 seed out of the Midwest bracket, a good team, but far from the best in their quarter of the bracket, so not expected to go too far.  However, I will report here what happens after the Sunday night game each weekend, for as long as they last.