Studio art seniors (re)construct final exhibition

The senior juried exhibition in St. Kate’s Catherine G. Murphy gallery is one of the many culminating traditions that has taken new form this year. Changes necessitated by the COVID-19 campus shutdown have proven to be especially trying for seniors who would typically be using this time to celebrate their achievements at St. Kate’s. For Studio Art majors, this normally means exhibiting work in the senior juried exhibition.

“The significance of the senior juried exhibition is to celebrate the accomplishments of students who are graduating from our studio art program,” said Catherine G. Murphy Gallery Director Nicole M. Watson.

The show includes artwork that the students have created during their time at St. Kate’s as well as a final capstone project that they have been developing throughout the year. This project, said Watson, “reveals their technical, aesthetic and conceptual growth as emerging artists.”

The senior juried exhibition is also important because students take an active role in coordinating and presenting it. “The exhibition becomes a valuable process for learning professional skills they can apply after graduation,” said Watson.

“Our senior art exhibition is a time where we display our artist level and the skills we've honed and achieved since the start of our program,” said Emelin Ventura Gonzalez ‘20 (Studio Art). “It's also a time to validate our own practice in art and share it with everyone else.”

The work presented in the senior exhibition is very important to students as individuals and also to the St. Kate’s community as a whole. “Because St. Kate's is so mission-oriented, much of the artwork in the senior show deals with issues of social justice, identity and community,” said Watson. “I think viewers will find this year's cohort of art majors to be particularly successful in making work that is thoughtful, meaningful and visually engaging.”

This year’s exhibition, which opened on May 1, is titled Re:constructed. The theme is oddly prognostic of Spring semester 2020, as nearly every member of the St. Kate’s community has had to reconstruct their way of being. For the Art Department, this meant moving the senior exhibition online.

“For all the seniors, moving home and losing access to the space, tools and community of the Visual Arts Building deeply impacted their art practices, so the most valuable aspects of preparing for this show have been more time to finish the artwork, and fostering the creativity, connection and support that comes from being part of an artistic cohort,” said Watson.

The exhibition was originally supposed to open on April 18 but was delayed so that the artists could reconvene virtually. “[…] we began meeting virtually once a week via Google Hangouts,” said Watson. “We used this time to discuss how the pandemic is affecting our lives, our art-making, our jobs and our families. The students also used this time to solicit and offer feedback to one another on their artworks in progress.”

The Studio Art seniors had to adapt quickly to show their work online. Watson shares that they “worked through any challenges that come with moving the exhibition to an online format. For example, the students had to photograph their work at home, without access to proper backdrops or lighting. We shared YouTube videos to learn how to document artwork using an iPhone and free photo editing apps.”

“I got a chance to think about ways that my digital work can be easily formatted to service an online platform, but how my audience interacts with it would be different,” said Ventura Gonzalez.

“It is not the same for every artist. During this time I've learned how to work with what I've got. Being more mobile and minimal has been something that I wanted to explore in my artwork, I just didn't think it would [happen] as quickly as it did.”

The sudden change had an impact on the individual creative processes of the artists as well as the exhibition as a whole. “When I'm in the thinking process I also take into account space and what space I'll be taking up - whether my artwork is on a flat surface, on the wall, or off the wall,” said Ventura Gonzalez. “When I first started working on the artwork that would be a part of this exhibition, I did not take into account that we would be under a pandemic. This pandemic disturbed the creative process that an artist takes in the thinking process and putting up their work for an exhibition.”

You can view Re:constructed on the gallery’s website. Visitors can sign the online guestbook to show their support of the artists. In addition, students can follow the gallery on both Facebook and Instagram (@stkatesgallery), where the senior exhibition will be highlighted through the end of May.