As part of Georgetown University’s second annual Arts Week, student artwork submissions will be on display in the Healey Family Student Center this Sunday night.
Artwork was submitted by 15 different students and ranges from a portrait made on a wood panel with old makeup to large paintings and ink drawings.
The richness and diversity of the works is found in both technique and choice of subject. Themes include a celebration of firefighters and their role in society, as well as an exploration of cultural identity and influences that have shaped it. Many pieces portray the human figure in some form or another on a spectrum of realistic interpretation.
These 15 artists are not only visual arts majors. They come from diverse background and represent everyone from freshmen to graduate students to alumni and three of the four undergraduate schools: the College, the School of Foreign Service, and the McDonough School of Business.
All of the submissions were accepted without any selection process that evaluated or rejected artworks. “We wanted to open this opportunity to all students on campus—artists as well as people who love to sketch and fool around with a pen and paper or with any sort of objects,” wrote Arianna Calabrese (SFS ‘17), visual arts coordinator of Arts Week 2015, in an email to the Voice.
Students submitted for a variety of reasons. “I wanted to be part of Art Week to encourage myself to be a better artist,” Krishna Sharma (COL ‘16), one of the student artists, wrote in an email to the Voice. “Having your work for exhibition is an exhilarating feeling.”
Other students who submitted artwork also expressed this sense of exhilaration. “I’m so excited for Arts Week, not only to show my work, but also to discover all of the incredibly talented artists hidden on campus,” artist Robert Cortes (COL ‘18) added. “Maybe if Georgetown was more artsy, students would feel more comfortable being honest about their emotions. In a place where everyone is doing a million things at once and still ‘fine,’ artistic and emotional expression is vital.”
Many other students revealed that they were bothered by the lack of visibility of visual art on campus and most shared an appreciation for the visibility that Arts Week is trying to bring to the arts on Georgetown’s campus. Georgetown’s “arts community on campus is hard to see sometimes beneath the business and political sides of things,” artist Taylor Bond (COL ‘18) said.
The artworks to be displayed in the HFSC shine a light on the hidden talent and immense creativity of Georgetown students that often goes unnoticed.
Arts Week Visual Art Displays
Healey Family Student Center
April 13-17
Photo: Sabrina Kayser
