CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Graduating art and design students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign look forward to seeing their work exhibited at Krannert Art Museum each spring in the weeks before graduation. This year, the exhibitions will take place online instead of in the museum galleries.
The School of Art and Design has worked with undergraduate and graduate students to present their work in a digital format, and KAM will share the online Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts exhibitions May 17. The exhibitions will showcase the work of more than 120 BFA and 18 MFA students in art education, art history, graphic design, industrial design, new media, painting, photography and studio, including 2D and 3D work, interactive video projects and essays. The School of Art and Design also will print catalogues of both the BFA and MFA students’ work.
Not being able to exhibit in the galleries at KAM “is a big loss for students. It’s a big professional-development opportunity for them and something they really look forward to as the culmination of their experience in art and design,” said Emmy Lingscheit, a printmaking professor who is overseeing the exhibition for BFA students.
However, she said, the online format allows students to provide a broader context of their work by exhibiting multiple works, and they will be able to link to their personal webpages and social media accounts. The virtual exhibition will be up for longer than the KAM exhibition would have been, as well, lasting for the summer rather than for a single week. In addition, the websites will provide a template for a future online component to the spring exhibitions.
“Being able to document things may take a little ingenuity and adaption from what they intended with the original projects to get them into this online format,” Lingscheit said.
Many students lost access to studio spaces when they left campus, but some have continued to make new projects, working in garages or at kitchen tables, said Laurie Hogin, the director of graduate studies for art and design students who is working with the MFA students exhibiting online. They were free to include past work or new work, she said.
“For purposes of the online show, we gave students complete discretion,” Hogin said. “They had the option of showing work that was ready for the MFA catalog, work they had done digitally or work they’d done since the shutdown of the studios. Anything that represented their MFA thesis work.”
While students won’t get the experience of installing their work in a museum exhibition this spring, Lingscheit and Hogin said they hope students will eventually have the opportunity to show their work in a traditional gallery setting.
“It’s definitely a loss to have to cancel under these terrible circumstances, but we’re trying to see as many silver linings as possible,” Hogin said. “Even though it’s not in person and viewers don’t get the aesthetics of being in the same space as some of these wonderful works, students are taking advantage of what is available in the online space to really show what it is they do.”
Here are some of the students exhibiting their work:
Maria Speck, BFA, painting:
Speck’s paintings are vibrant, imaginative and otherworldly. The fantastical colors and dreamy landscapes are a social criticism of technology, consumerism, media consumption and loneliness.
“The characters are dealing with their own chaos,” Speck said. “I like to think of my work as narratives to dissect. The more time you spend with the story, the more you see the grimness of it.”
Estefany Chavez Ruiz, BFA, industrial design:
Chavez Ruiz is interested in ergonomics and how design can make the use of an object both more comfortable and pleasurable. Her designs include a kitchen knife with a handle made for a user with arthritis and a high-quality drill that is not intimidating for homeowners to use and, at the same time, does not look disposable or “toyish.”
Justin Kim, BFA, industrial design:
Kim designed a fitness watch geared toward people wanting to start strength training. To help beginners train and also know when they need to rest, he integrated technology including a heart rate monitor, a blood oxygenation monitor and a rep counter. His current projects include an automated cold-brew coffee maker and home office products inspired by the design of Aston Martin cars.
Pascale Grant, BFA, graphic design and painting:
Grant’s work is geared toward environmentalism and social justice. It includes an online thrift store brand catering to the Latino population that communicates the benefits of buying secondhand clothing and a project that incorporates paintings of cows with a zine about the impact of animal agriculture. She’s also working on portraits of friends that uses consumption as a metaphor for pressures, fears, vices and sexuality.
Avie Banks, BFA, photography:
Banks’ project “Home” is a series of black-and-white photographs of homes she’s lived in that touch on negative and positive memories. She expanded on the series with photographs of her mother, including scars on her body from gunshot wounds. Banks said the photographs have helped her and her mother talk about insecurities, vulnerability and healing.
Elliott Stokes, MFA, painting and installation art:
Stokes grew up in southeast Louisiana, and his work reflects both reverence for and contempt of the oil industry. He’s been casting 12,000-gallon oil tanks in latex, representing a decommissioned oil refinery. Another project is recreating a large river dock on a one-to-one scale, to underscores the human tendency to seek sanctuary in times of turbulence.
Rachel Melton, MFA, graphic design:
Melton's work relates to rural arts engagement and her background in rural places. She’s created a mural on vinyl depicting buildings and street views of locations where she’s worked on community arts initiatives. Melton said the mural reflects both her research on arts engagement in rural places and her history as an artist.
Rachel Lindsay-Snow, MFA, sculpture, installation and performance art:
Lindsay-Snow is inspired by the fleeting and ephemeral quality of materials and actions, and by perceptions of time and space. One of Lindsay-Snow’s pieces is a sculpture with a sphere of ice melting over time and dripping into another part of the sculpture. Other work includes creative writing and poetry; poetry written alongside artworks will be incorporated into the online exhibition.