CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition, opening this weekend at Krannert Art Museum, allows seniors to show the best of their work as they prepare to graduate.
An opening reception for the exhibition is 5 to 7 p.m. May 6, and the exhibition closes May 14 with a reception for students and parents after the College of Fine and Applied Arts convocation. One hundred sixteen students in all programs in the School of Art and Design will show their work. Illinois offers a unique opportunity for graduating seniors to have their work exhibited in the second-largest general fine arts museum in the state.
“To have it in the museum gives students a taste of what it’s like to have a professional exhibition opportunity,” said Jorge Lucero, the chair of the art education program. “Because we have so many programs running out of the School of Art and Design, and they are all so different in their own ways, it’s a great opportunity to see how all of that fits together. We get to see the works in conversation with each other.”
Lucero and painting professor Patrick Hammie are the faculty advisers for the show.
“Student projects each represent a particular project that has been the focus of a student’s senior year, and are wide-ranging in scope,” Hammie said. “Watching these students evolve from freshmen and make steps into the professional world is always exciting and inspiring.”
Painting major Chloe Torri makes paintings that explore how telecommunications affect our relationships and perceptions of ourselves.
Chloe Torri, a painting major and art education minor, has a collection with nine individual pieces in the show. She described her work as theatrical and conceptual, and created with the theme of exploring the impact of telecommunications on identity and relationships. Her work includes images of gestures, language and iconography, including a recent piece that uses emojis.
Torri previously worked as a student guard at Krannert Art Museum and is excited to see her work displayed on the museum walls.
“Seeing all the behind-the-scenes work, seeing all the artists come in, it’s pretty prestigious. It’s a big honor,” she said.
Joshua Johnson, a painting major whose work is mostly oil paintings or photographs of himself or close friends, has four paintings and two photographs in the exhibition.
Johnson said he is fascinated with how people present themselves and with the influence of fashion photography on how we interpret how we or others look. Johnson said he carefully considers the colors he uses, the poses of his subjects and how he paints or photographs them. He wants viewers to see his work as well-done, and then linger to look at it more carefully and think about it more deeply.
Graphic design students Grace Sullivan and Robert Marohn have individual work in the show, and they also designed the catalog, poster and graphics for the exhibition. They used a field guide for their theme and images of indigenous species of animals and plants.
Graphic design students Grace Sullivan and Robert Marohn designed the catalog and poster and a wall display for the exhibition.
They chose a vintage typeface and searched the University Library’s Main Stacks for the catalog cover’s image, along with folios from a BFA art exhibition catalog from 50 years ago.
“The entire book seemed kind of timeless, so that’s why we used it,” Marohn said.
They reorganized the catalog so student work appears categorized by major rather than alphabetically by student name. Each category of education is represented by an indigenous animal or plant, and the key in the catalog mimics that of a field guide.
In addition to the screenprinted poster, the printed catalog and a graphic wall display in the museum, the two designed a website for the exhibition, at bfa.art.illinois.edu.
“It feels like a real-world project. We had to go through and find typefaces, and really fine-tune all our decisions,” Sullivan said. “It felt like something meaningful for the class.”
“This was an opportunity that not all students get, and we couldn’t be more excited to see it live May 6,” Marohn said.
Editor’s note: More information about the School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition is available online or by contacting Julia Kelly at jkell@illinois.edu.
