Candlesticks. A painted altarpiece. Charcoal sketches. These are the pieces a viewer was met with upon entering Alondra Gomez’s senior art exhibition “The Art of Living.” Each of these was handcrafted, each arranged and strategically placed.
The space was a fruit of labor and of love, a fact evident in the proud smile on Gomez’s face as she looked around her full show opening in the McCarthy Gallery of Art.
The process to open an exhibition can take days to weeks at each stage. Behind the scenes of every show, a busy spring of industrious activity, inspiration, creativity and camaraderie is happening.
From start to finish, the making of a student’s art exhibition takes months. Typically, in the spring of their junior year, students start choosing a message that their curation, as well as their senior artist talk, will center on. Their proposals are due at the beginning of the summer, but Professor Bryan Park, the current teacher for the Senior Art Capstone class, jokes “…then they all come back from summer break and all of their ideas are totally different.”
Some students pull from pieces that they have already created, while other artists will create an entirely new body of work both in and outside of class. In a mix of mediums and open conversations, the artist curates their show. They draw creative inspiration from all around them – life experience, people, student life, faith and more.
As the talk and exhibition opening gets closer, life becomes busier for the artist: there are invitations to be sent, marketing materials to be made, practical matters to be considered such as matting and framing the work, lighting to be put up and much more. Other art majors lend a helping hand, as well as the art professors. Park says sometimes a student will simply “find someone walking around,” and ask for a few minutes of help.
But eventually, after months of effort, the day finally arrives, and the artist gets to present their work and its message at long last.
For Gomez, this message was about the artistry in properly living and dying. To be an artist, she said in her talk, is a lonely vocation: it demands time and isolation. But it is also a vocation of wonderful observation, and as an artist she attempted to capture the God-given beauty of life and death in her pieces. For many Benedictine art students, this passion is an observation not only of the world, but also the divine.
This reflection of art in worship of the divine is internalized and identified in their vocation. It becomes a part of the process in meticulously making each work and finding meditation in every aspect of it. The opening of an art exhibition reflects an artist’s vocation and inspired voice.
Student artists give a talk and open an exhibition rather than take a typical senior comp test. There is no official rubric, but instead, a set of expectations to meet. Emma Moorhead, whose show will be opening later this semester, believes “the opportunity to have a gallery exhibition allows the student to understand that being an artist is something you either are or are not. If you are an artist, you need to create art unashamedly and give it to the world and to God. Putting on your own exhibition allows you to own your vocation as an artist.”
It also demands that the student artist be a true part of the Benedictine community of artists. By working together and depending on each other, they practice artistic management and respect for their peers’ time and creativity. Ultimately this teamwork leaves the artists’ bubble and is shared with the Benedictine community at large.
For the professors of the department, it is a happy thing to be involved in the seniors’ process. After working with the students throughout their college career, this final showcase of their artistry is a “final statement of what the [exhibition] is, sort of like reading the final draft of a paper,” says Park. It is the culmination of a coaching relationship.
To Emma, it is a proclamation of the “independence, confidence, and…vision” that an exhibition requires. To each artist, their senior art exhibition is the proclamation of their artistry, and a message to leave their Benedictine career on.
The McCarthy Gallery of Art will next hold the Annual Student Art Show, opening Feb. 17.
