by Michael Richards
On Thursday, Mar. 10, three separate art programs presented their work in a gallery hosted at the beautiful Evergreen Arts Annex. For the first time in a long while, students and people in the Olympia community were encouraged to experience the handiwork of Evergreen’s extremely talented collection of art students.
In the main building there was a presentation of visual artworks accompanied by narrative pieces created in the program “Ampersand: Hybridity in Narrative and Visual Art” which featured work from former CPJ artist features, Parker Wong and Paige Nakagawara. The work of all the students was built off of the theme of hybridity, or blending different mediums of experience and interpretation.
Accompanying the “Ampersand” program in the arts annex was ceramic work done in the program “Exploring the Role of the Object.” Each piece was made as a representation of another object that could be found in everyday life, including a ceramic birthday cake with an excellent glaze that I had to resist licking, and a fountain crafted from what seemed to be ceramic Muppet faces that had me transfixed for about ten minutes questioning what I had previously believed to be possible in a water feature.
This year’s “Foundational Studio Arts” program displayed their work in the showroom at the top of Sem II which, though an amazing place for a display, is extremely difficult to locate while wandering through the brutalist maze that is our Sem buildings. The metalwork was exquisite, featuring a cricket ring that bent with your finger and looked as though it was crawling, and a metal cigarette holder with a saw-cut tree of life that made me glad to see nicotine-based art making a comeback.
Overall, the day was quite a breath of energy. The crowd was very large but did a great job of distancing and wearing masks while inside of the confined spaces. There was also an air of relief flowing through the space; people were happy to just get an opportunity to go and look at some new art that wasn’t forced into their retinas through LEDs.
While wandering through the exhibits I found myself getting visibly excited on many occasions, and felt like this was an excellent showcase of what having a strong arts program at a liberal arts college can do. I was lucky enough to be a part of the “Ampersand” program, and through it I showed my visual art to an engaged audience for the first time in my educational career.
I saw people experimenting with forms they had never tried and creating things that not only engaged the audience, but made the artists happy as well. I saw artists get the opportunity to show their work to somebody that they have never met before and explain the hours of work it took to do one little piece. I saw what the power of teaching people what they are capable of doing, instead of what they should be doing, can create.
This kind of exhibition is why many of our students choose to go to Evergreen, and the amount of people from the community that chose to attend is a testament to what they desire in their little middle-of-the-woods hippie college.
