The University of Central Arkansas Baum Art Gallery held its annual reception to display new exhibitions on Jan. 26.
The on-campus art gallery held the reception to showcase three collections, “Tripletta: A Show of Miniature Works by 46 Artists,” “Magdalena Solé: Mississippi Delta Series” and “Holly Laws: Bellwether.”
The purpose of the event, which was free and open to the public, was to introduce the rst three spring 2017 art collections showing at the gallery.
The reception was attended by students, staff and visitors to the college.
The collection “Tripletta” consists of miniature works in media like paint, photography, drawings, paper and mixed media. The “Mississippi Delta Series” is a photography series that captures real-life moments; it includes pieces titled “Abandoned House, Crowder,” “Blackbirds, Highway 1” and “Cigarette Machine, Clarksdale.” The “Bellwether” exhibit is a mixed-media collection using materials such as arti cial sinew, fragments of a crystal chandelier, hand stitched rawhide, steel hardware, vinyl tubing and sound.
The “Tripletta” collection features miniature portraits, story books, collages and paintings on different subjects created by 46 artists.
The “Mississippi Delta Series” features a variety of subjects, including people, animals, buildings and natural landmarks of the Mississippi Delta region that the collection focuses on. Associate professor of art Holly Laws said the event attracted art students and the art department faculty, but she saw people from all across campus.
“For art students, they gain inspiration, and for anyone else, they can gain insight into different minds, lives and perspectives. They can just have something nice to look at, so I think this reception is just a really good experience for everyone,” junior Christen Danner said.
She attended the event to speak about the “Bellwether” collection.
“My favorite part, but also the most frustrating, was to work with non-traditional materials. I loved getting to form crystals on the cardboard [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania, 1957’] houses with copper sulfate; each house took like an hour, even after we had looked at images from Google Maps,” Laws said.
Laws said she worked with a sound designer and a playwright for the pieces and other older soundbytes.
These exhibitions took up three rooms of the gallery during the reception. The collections will all be on view for the public from Jan. 26 to Feb. 22.
The Baum Gallery will hold artists’ lectures on two of the collections in McCastlain Hall in February. Laws will discuss her collection at 1:40 p.m. on Feb. 16 and the “Mississippi Delta” lecture will be held at 1:40 p.m. on Feb. 7.
The Baum Gallery will hold two more receptions on March 2 for the annual Student Art Competitive and April 6 for the BA/BFA Juried Senior Art Exhibition.
Photo by Lauren Swaim
