Visual Arts on Campus Teach and Inspire
March 22, 2011
Although Washington, DC boasts some of the nation’s finest art collections, Georgetown College’s Department of Art and Art History ensures that students can find artistic inspiration without ever leaving the Hilltop.
A few minutes spent with Gallery Director and Visiting Assistant Professor Evan Reed reveals that the visual arts can be found all over campus—from the Lucille M. and Richard F.X. Spagnuolo Gallery in the Walsh Building, to the Gelardin New Media Center in Lauinger Library, to the College Dean’s Office in the Bunn Intercultural Center. Hundreds of student works are also digitally displayed on LCD screens across the university as part of the Napolitano Virtual Art Gallery Project. Taken as a whole, these campus spaces play host to a range of professional-grade shows, including traveling exhibitions, visiting artists, student projects, personal collections, and faculty work.
While the university benefits from the proliferation of fine art on campus, many are unaware of the extended preparation that goes into planning and executing these shows. Professor Reed and a faculty team design the exhibition calendar several years in advance, paying careful attention to how exhibitions compliment the curriculum and expose students both to working artists and the process of public exhibition. “I’m two years ahead, at least,” Reed noted of the planning process. “That gives me the opportunity to really think about what kinds of shows I’d like to do [and] makes it easier to anticipate what’s coming up.” In addition to planning the exhibitions, Reed also prepares artwork for installation, installs the show, and advertises it across campus.
While the public exhibition spaces in Gelardin and the Dean’s Office primarily showcase student work, the Spagnuolo Gallery is both an exhibition space and a teaching gallery. Not only does it host shows by regional artists or exhibiting faculty, but professors in both visual art and art history bring their classes in to discuss the work in context. The shows that students interact with are comparable to those found in the off-campus, Washington, DC gallery scene. “We’ve gotten written up in the City Paper and the Washington Post for exhibitions a couple of times in the past two years,” Reed explained. “People are looking at us to see what we’re doing.”
However, the top priority for the department is exhibiting student work as part of a visual arts education. “Exhibiting work is an integral part of art making and of teaching art, because of the presentation of your ideas and the critical discussion that occurs when it is put on display,” Department Chair and Associate Professor John Morell explained. “So we’ve always considered it an important part of our educational mission to have that here at Georgetown.”
The greatest challenge to that goal is space: while the department exercises its creativity in exhibiting art across campus, a designated exhibition space would put more student work on display, and expand the presentation of artwork into areas like 3-D design and sculpture. Morrell explained, “With 350 – 400 students taking art classes [each semester], all of them should have the opportunity as part of their education to actually be presenting an exhibiting work. It’s really sort of the endgame, like getting up and giving a presentation in a class, or…discussing the term papers you’ve written.”
Yet, what students learn from visual art classes, Reed explained, also begins much earlier than the final show. “[An art class] teaches you a process of developing an idea, rather than having the thing come out of your head perfectly at the very first.” He continued, “In a lot of our classes you actually have time to perfect what the assignment was. That’s the only way to understand what it was about and what the ideas were behind it.”
At the same time, Reed notes that on many levels everyone benefits from exposure to the visual arts on campus. “For no other reason, just to give you a different perspective on the things that are going on around you,” he said. “The students are working in ways that are about their time, [and] doing it in a visual way rather than writing about it.” With exhibitions across the university, creators and spectators can share in the creative experience.
--Jessica Beckman
View a slideshow of campus art below. Photos by Yovcho Yovchev.
