Bringing the canvas to the campus

By: Adriana Avila Senior Reporter | Photo by: Rene Thompson

Temporary art is coming to Main campus. Fine Arts instructor Danielle Miller said the Arts Practices I course is creating art that can be shared in unusual places around the community.

While the class does focus on traditional art, it also covers contemporary and specifically forms of temporary art, such as art installations and land proj­ects, which take art out of the classroom and into the community where it can be shared in an unex­pected way.

“Part of what this type of art work tries to do is to put art out into the community in a way that people stumble across it instead of going into a gallery where you know you’re going to see a work of art,” Miller said.

Temporary art is meant to be somewhere for a moment and disap­pear right after. It gives a little bit of art, one piece at a time, to the community so people are surprised when the works are dis­covered, she said.

One of the class assignments was to create an urban canvas around the North building on Main campus by putting small colored pieces of paper around the exterior of the building with tape or icing so that they could easily be removed with no damage, she said.

“The assignment sheet said that it needed to be within walking distance of the classroom. It could’ve been off campus but it just had to be somewhere where we could walk to as a group so we could talk about and look at the art work that the stu­dents created. As long as it didn’t deface any property or block any movement for people,” she said.

Historically, tempo­rary art has been prac­ticed for some time and Miller’s class studies the various types of tempo­rary art in comparison to the more traditional types of art, such as paintings that are meant for gallery viewing, she said.

“It’s something that if you were going to install permanently anywhere as an artist you would want to make sure that you have all of the proper permissions in place. But these little temporary things that people could do are sort of meant to be ephemeral, to be there one minute and to go away the next,” she said.

The artwork that stu­dents in the class create are not in any way acts of graffiti or vandalism but projects focused on the idea of spreading art to those who may not have an opportunity to view art elsewhere, she said.

“At heart, these proj­ects are really meant to be not destructive. They weren’t destructive from the very source, they weren’t meant to be destructive, so if graf­fiti has that sensibility or association of being destructive then that’s not what these pieces are about, at all. I think the pieces were meant to be very playful and the students had an experi­ence of doing something unusual that was really interesting and a really different way to share their art work with the community,” she said.

A protocol for tem­porary art to be placed on campus is in the works, and Miller wel­comes the idea of sharing the art with students for longer than a couple of class meetings, she said.

“I think it would be great if we can make that happen because I think it does allow more people on campus to see the proj­ects and have that experi­ence; so if we can do that eventually, when a proto­col gets made for that, I think that would be great. Students put a lot of time and effort into these so it’s nice if they have the sense that people are able to see them and they don’t have to just put them up and then take them down