ARTSFEST 2021
ARTS SCHOLARS KEEP CREATING!
Even in a pandemic, Arts Scholars found ways to use and share their creative energy. The work below offers a sample of the creative output of our students during the 2020-2021 academic year.
A Year In Review
From poetry slams to embroidery circles, Arts Scholars found many ways to keep the creative energy flowing this year. This gallery showcases some of the events, colloquia, and student work that have kept us engaged, albeit from a distance, over the past year. The many ways we have come together as artists and creators have demonstrated the power of art to help us connect, innovate, and make meaning of our shared experiences.
Art & Activism: First-Year Podcasts
Each year students entering the Arts Scholars community work in teams to create a collaborative artistic project centered on a common theme. This year, freshmen in the Arts program explored the power of art to serve as a mechanism for social change and collaborative meaning-making by creating their own “art & activism” podcasts. Podcasts are tools for disseminating knowledge: they allow you to share your perspective, amplify your voice, and in doing do, sway the perspectives and actions of others. Podcasts are also inherently interdisciplinary incorporating elements of storytelling, music, performance, and cover art. Working in teams of 5-6, students conceptualized, developed and produced podcasts centered on a social issue of their choosing. Collectively, these podcasts explore the questions: How can art create change in the world? How can art help us make sense of the world around us?
Identity Grids
How can we use the objects around us to tell the story of who we are? For this colloquium, guest Artist Alanna Reeves led sophomore Arts Scholars in exploring how visual art can be used as a tool for deconstructing, understanding, and sharing our personal and shared identities. Starting with everyday objects that represented some facet of their identity, students used grids to translate their objects into abstract portraits. In sharing their work with others, they explored the work as metaphor for the imperfect expression of our identities in everyday life: What elements feel frustrating to lose? What would require verbal or written explanation if you were to share your image with others? Are these elements crucial to retain because of your history and memories with them?
Collaborative Poetry
This Fall, guest artists Sami Miranda and José (Pepe) González led Arts freshmen in an interactive spoken word workshop. Blending their skills in poetry, visual art, composition and performance Sami and Pepe guided students in a collaborative poetry exercise where they learned ways to craft and share their unique stories.
Exquisite Corpse Zentangles
The University of Maryland's own Tara Youngborg of StudioA joined our first year colloquium for an evening of art-making in Fall 2020. Students began by creating collaborative and individual zentangles - structured patterns including combinations of dots, lines, curves, and orbs. Zentangles are traditionally non-representational and unplanned so the meditative practice of drawing is a great way to unwind and relax. After creating their own zentangles, students combined their work using the exquisite corpse method. Popularized by surrealists, exquisite corpse arose as a parlor game where participants collectively assemble collections of images, words, or other creative media.
HITO: The Experiment
In summer 2020, Arts Scholars began a partnership with guest artists Adriana Monsalve and Caterina Ragg from Homie House Press to create spaces for students to connect, collaborate, and create. Through a series of summer and fall workshops, both freshmen and sophomore Arts Scholars investigated the meaning of home through shared dialog and art-making. The result is Home in the Other (HITO): a collaborative book-making project using the mediums of photography, writing, drawing, collage, painting, (and anything really!) as a way to explore and express the meaning of "home" during a global pandemic.