Arts Festival back from the deluge
Anyone searching for proof of artists’ flexibility would do well to take a peek inside the Studio Arts Building. The art that hangs there is a visual representation of adaptation. The UI student artists responsible for these pieces prove through different media that a drastic change in scenery from their usual art buildings can’t stop creativity.
The School of Art and Art History will present the Arts Festival Friday from 4-8 p.m. The Studio Arts Building — known to many as the former Menards — will host the free event. More than 300 students chosen from each of the school’s departments will display, demonstrate, and perform their art. As the Iowa City community feasts upon creativity with its eyes, Oasis Falafel will offer tastes for stomachs, and local band Replacing the Robots will play tunes to satisfy ears.
Last semester, art Associate Professor Isabel Barbuzza launched the event on a smaller scale, as an open house. Despite its size, the event was well-attended, said Ryan Ainsworth, the festival’s executive director. Afterwards, Ainsworth, who is also a graphic-design undergraduate, proposed that the art school celebrate the first year after the flood with a student-run festival.
“This is the first time that it’s considered a festival, and it is student-produced,” he said. “We’re making sure that in the future it’s always going to be student-produced.”
Graduate students and professors are responsible for selecting which artists will be featured in the festival. Among them is graduate student and teaching assistant Chris Mortenson, who hopes to include a piece from each of his students.
“We had quite a bit of work up last time,” he said. “I sort of envision us going a bit further and having every bit of wall space, not necessarily every inch, but there were walls that were blank last time, and I would like to see them full.”
Mortenson is also working with other graduates and instructors to decide which M.F.A. students will represent the graduate galleries. There will be two students from each program selected, he said.
In addition to an array of completed pieces for audiences to view, Ainsworth said there will also be interactive demonstrations from each department.
“People who come will be able to come to see how a pot is thrown or, for metals, learn how to do some welding,” he said.
The Studio Arts Building is a remarkable place. Nearly all of the departments are represented in what once held housewares and hardware, with giant sound-proof partitions to block off each area. From sculptures to paintings and graphic designs to costume creations, student artwork remains a focal point throughout the entire space.
Both Ainsworth and Mortenson admitted they resisted the art school’s change in location after the flood. It was a lot for students to handle, Ainsworth said. He originally planned to do an independent study to avoid trekking to the old Menards. But the first semester’s open house changed his mind about the new location.
“Since then, it has become so amazing,” Ainsworth said. “I think everyone loves it because for the first time ever, all the departments are under one roof. The facility management is amazing, and there are all these new features that we didn’t have before. I feel like now it is just really exciting, and people love it, and it’s kind of a new home with a lot of new potential.”
This is Mortenson’s second year as a UI graduate student — he received a B.F.A. from the University of South Dakota — and like Ainsworth, he wasn’t thrilled about being moved to Highway 1.
“I think last semester, along with a lot of the students out here, I think I was upset about the situation and upset about being in the Menards building,” he said. “[But] things are getting better, and honestly, it was the open house that fully changed my attitudes toward this place.”
Former UI art student Matt Steele also spoke about the difficulty of trying to salvage a strong program during post-flood reconstruction.
“I think there’s a lot to celebrate this year,” he said. “It’s the end of a very difficult year, flood-recovery-wise. A lot of the students maybe just arrived in the fall, and their first experience with the art department was having to construct tables and chairs and having to construct a studio, and now here we are, only two semesters later, we’ve got all this. It’s really amazing.”
The Arts Festival has also integrated social networking into its advertising, using Twitter and Facebook to keep people updated.
“Nowadays, it needs to happen,” Ainsworth said. “It would just be silly not to use them. So they do help. I don’t think it’s the main thing, [but] I’m glad that we did it.”
Despite having to take a bus to get to the Studio Arts Building, Ainsworth and Mortenson both said it is not a complicated system at all, and they hope it won’t discourage people from attending the Arts Festival.
“We understand that it might be kind of a chore getting out here, but anybody who is interested in art in any sense should definitely make the trip out here in any form they can,” Ainsworth said. “It’s really going to be a good event, and it’s just nice to see what other people are doing. It’s going to be a fun time, and we have a lot planned.”
comments powered by Disqus
