Fresh Work: College of Charleston Alumni Exhibition, 1994-2004
Oct - Dec, 2004
To create an exhibit drawn from works by Studio Art graduates may seem to be a daunting task; faced with so many choices, the result could become merely arbitrary or too disparate to cohere as an exhibition. But in fact, my experience was quite the contrary. All artists have at least one thing in common—they all have influences. And for all of these artists, one of their most influential experiences was the time they spent as Studio Art students at the College of Charleston.
In this exhibit, I see the influences as well as the individual accomplishments of artists who studied here at the College. Whether faintly or pronounced, the impressions of their Studio Art professors resonate in these works. The goal, however, of myself and Dr. Marian Mazzone was to choose a select group of Studio Art alumni whose works have continued to develop, becoming their own unique creations and contributions. By limiting the selection to Studio Art graduates of the past ten years, we were able to look at the work of artists who are still developing their sense of “self” in the art world, while also still having some identity with the College.
Our second goal was to choose the best works from various media, reflecting the types of media taught and studied here at the College. It was not a priority to equally display the various media, since our main focus was to collaboratively choose the most distinguished works, however we did want to exhibit an array of work within the context of these “alumni artists”.
Artists engage and disengage with the fundamental challenges of art, with personal struggles, and quite clearly, with the world around us. Collaboratively, these elements fuel artists to create – again and again. This exhibit proudly displays recent, or “fresh”, works by an exemplary group of artists who have continued to create and to evolve beyond their experiences here at the College of Charleston. The return of these artists’ works to this building for the arts presents a symbolic relationship between past, present and future. It also presents the distinguishing characteristics of this particular Studio Art department – intimate and small in many ways, while far-reaching and vast in others. While it is the Studio Art professors who have impressed themselves on these artists, it is what these artists utilize for themselves to create their own work that makes them stand apart.
