The 59th annual Juried Student Art Exhibition had a full house for the awards ceremony, and an extremely diverse art collection.
Viewers gathered at 5 p.m. Thursday in Rowland-Taylor Recital Hall for the awards announcement, then moved to University Art Gallery for the reception.
The art shown ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to a listening station with four records welded together into one.
There were three receptions in different locations after the awards ceremony ended, and the one in Trinity Hall had snacks and drinks for people to enjoy in celebration of the hard work and dedication the students put into their work.
The third-place winner Zephyr Ian Farris created a lithograph print of a sloth, called “Third Wave.”
Second-place winner Marie Collar created a ceramic wall piece, named “Cameo Appearance.”
First-place winner Hayden Senter created a piece called “Marionette” made from screen print, acrylic paint, spray paint and collage work.
The Dean’s Award was given to Ashley Penning, a junior studio arts major.
Her painting Masquerade was created using pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint. The painting features two people facing each other wearing fox masks.
“It’s about identity, just wanting to sometimes maybe take on the identity of something else or hiding behind something,” Penning said. “It’s about how we interact with one another, and how we talk to one another.”
The exhibition featured more than 20 different artists work and each seemed to speak to different parts of the soul.
One painting, named “The Scream,” created by Rebecca Getzinger, shows a woman screaming in a way much like the famous scream painting, but instead of having her anguish be farther away in the painting, it is close up, unable to escape from view.
This exhibit had a wide array of artwork that explored the human condition and showed the complexity and humility of what being human is, said Glen Helfand, guest juror to this exhibition and a professor at both the California College of the Arts and at the San Francisco Arts Institute.
“The human element turns out to be key in this exhibition,” Helfand said.
Veronica Hodur can be reached at [email protected] or @VeronicaHodur on Twitter.
