Work from local student artists will be on display near work from the icons who inspire them in the exhibit “4 Art: Student Art from Bowling Green State University, Lourdes University, Owens Community College and the University of Toledo” opening Oct. 21 at the Toledo Museum of Art. The exhibit will display nearly 100 works in the Community Gallery until Jan. 12.

“The concept of being in an exhibit to represent the college is an honor in itself,” Lourdes student Christina Young said. “To think about it being in a museum in the same building as Picasso, Roethlisberger and O’Keeffe, that’s the stuff dreams are made of.”

Young is a senior at Lourdes majoring in fine art. She plans to start graduate school next fall.

“It’s all I know how to do,” she said. “I fell into it. I’m blessed with a natural talent, and I’m here to learn why I do what I do. Lourdes is awesome. They keep making it better and I keep wanting to learn more.”

She enjoys watercolor, acrylics and ceramics, but Young is mostly an oil painter.

“I like the color and intensity of oils and the fact that you can push it around,” she said. “It’s amazing what you can do with some of it.”

'Mirrored Perspective' by Lourdes student Melinda Hallenbeck.

Young, a realist, will have two oil paintings in the art museum. One is a landscape and the other is from a black-and-white photograph of an abandoned house. She is one of five Lourdes students in the exhibit.

“It’s exciting, because it’s going to be a busy time for the museum,” said Lourdes art department chairperson Erin Palmer Szavuly. “It gives us an opportunity to have people see what we’re doing over here, because we are kind of a secret.”

BGSU also has alumni entered in the exhibit, including ceramic artist Greg Pugh, who is employed by the university.

Pugh developed an interest in art during high school and quickly gravitated toward ceramics.

“When I was 17, I took a couple of clay classes,” he said. “I had an opportunity to go to Alfred in New York because my grandma went there. It was a really good ceramics program. Since then I’ve been interested in ceramics.”

Pugh graduated from BGSU in 2010 with a degree in 3-D art. He now works there as a research technician on a 3-D mastering project. He and his colleagues are working to make a high-temperature ceramic body that can be adapted to a powder-based, rapid-prototyping platform.

“It’s basically taking a digital file and taking it through a digital scan splicer,” Pugh said. “It’s a 3-D printing program that will slice it into a thousand layers. Each layer is 0.04 centimeters thick. The machine will stack those layers on top of each other, gluing them together to form a 3-D object. Ours is a powder-based system. Powder is spread in hundreds of layers and glued together. It’s like a highly-modified inkjet printer.”

The piece Pugh entered in the exhibit is a pot he designed on an iPad with an app called iDough.

“I modeled it on my iPad, exported it and printed it on a ceramic 3-D printer,” he said. “I modeled a little pot. It took me almost four hours to model that little tiny thing on the iPad. It’s kind of a rudimentary process, and it’s not very accurate. These were the first ceramic prints from an iPad. No one has done that.”

Pugh is excited to have his creation on display at the museum.

“A lot of artists, you end up showing at shows that just other artists end up seeing,” Pugh said. “Being in a museum is a really great honor, because a wider range of people get to see it. That interests me more as an artist getting it out there to nonartists.”

TMA will host an opening reception Oct. 21 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. College students with a valid ID receive a free parking token and admission to The Egypt Experience. TMA is located at 2445 Monroe St.

“That’s the party part about what we do,” Young said. “I’m excited to see the responses. We put stuff together and make a statement, and that’s our voice. When people see it, that’s where we’re heard. To see that received is going to be pretty cool.”

Tags: Bowling Green State University, Lourdes University, Owens Community College, Toledo Museum of Art, University of Toledo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 9:58 am and is filed under Exhibits, Star, Toledo Museum of Art.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.