The Student Union Building (SUB) Fine Arts Gallery’s current Objects of Resilience exhibition now is available to tour in-person or virtually.
The exhibition features artwork from students in adjunct art faculty Erin Cunningham’s drawing course.
“In the spring of 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., student lives were abruptly upended and campuses, including our own, changed overnight,” she said.
As students began to interact with their environments in new ways, they were asked to reexamine their interiors and make three drawings. This exhibition celebrates resilience in a period of flux as students process their physical, mental and emotional surroundings.
The virtual tour was created by Manuel Gómez-Navarro to ensure the student work on exhibit could be seen by as large an audience as possible while the SUB is largely closed to the public.
Gómez-Navarro is a member of the adjunct faculty in the world languages department specializing in developing projects for the expression and dissemination of Hispanic culture. Some of his other projects include an Anne Frank Memorial virtual tour, and he currently is working on a digital installation for the Museo Histórico-Arqueológico de Doña Mencía, in Spain.
The virtual tour is available through December 2020 and the in-person exhibition will be on display until Sept. 27, 2020.
Members of the campus community who visit the exhibit in person are able to write or draw their own descriptions of what quarantine has meant for them. Visitors are encouraged to leave their work and these will be collected and archived in the university’s special collections along with some of the student artwork from the exhibit.
“This will become a wonderful repository in the library, which is collecting COVID stories, documenting student resiliency, skill and creativity during the pandemic,” said Fonda Portales, university art curator and collections manager.