Last Thursday, April 17, the Department of Art and Art History and the Bucknell Arts Council collaborated to host a new version of their respective Annual Student Art Exhibition and Arts Gathering events in the campus Samek Museum. The Annual Student Art Exhibition is held in partnership with the Samek, and celebrates the visual arts productions from students at Bucknell. The Annual Arts Gathering presents the Carmen Gillespie Award for Arts Citizenship to its next recipient; the remainder of the event is dedicated to honoring students and faculty who have received grants from the arts council.
Joe Scapellato, director of the Bucknell Arts Council, offered the first remarks of the event to the crowd, describing the 49 Arts and Creativity Grants awarded to students and the 16 grants supporting “arts-based scholarship and classroom experiences” awarded to faculty by the Council. In presenting the Carmen Gillespie Award for Arts Citizenship, named for founding Council member and staunch advocate for the arts, Scapellato detailed the “artistic skill, conceptual depth and seriousness of purpose” in winner Zoha Nadeer’s ’25 character and work. Nadeer’s “leadership in the South Asian Student Association Dance Group, her choreography and her dance performance” as well as her oversight for “hair and makeup for theatre productions” reflect her level of “engage[ment] across the arts and our community.”
Associate Professor of Art and Art History and organizer behind the Annual Student Art Exhibition, Eddy Lopez, views the Exhibition as “a great time to celebrate the visual arts at Bucknell,” with “amazing turnout, as students want to celebrate each other’s artistic achievements.” Lopez personally looks forward to seeing student artists “creating work that bridges the multiple disciplines that make Bucknell a liberal arts university,” and keeps an eye out for “ambitious projects” that students tackle in campus studios inspired by academic or local themes.
Previous years of the Exhibition have also been in collaboration with the Samek, like this one, but this was the first year that the Exhibition presented awards to the best works in the show: the Peter Bevis Awards, supported by the endowment of their namesake Bevis ’75, in honor of his life dedicated to the arts through sculpture and benefactorship of “many community arts projects.” The awards’ recipients — Mia Ranello ’25 (Best in Show), Mary Livingood ’25 (Second Place) and Zoha Nadeer (Third Place) — were selected by artist and Susquehanna University professor of studio art Ann Piper.
Choosing to have a guest juror “award these three ‘prizes’” was, in Professor Anna Kell’s eyes, “a big hit.” It provided the event with a “kind of format that created a lot of energy and excitement and is more reflective of what happens in practice — outside the University — in big group exhibitions.” Kell and her colleagues are incredibly grateful for the bequest of Bevis, and “look forward to honoring his legacy through this new tradition for years to come.”
At Bucknell, as with any other university, students are “dealing with complex themes of identity, politics, representation and the range of human feelings and dilemmas,” and those issues are expressed artistically through a lot of students’ work, despite Bucknell not particularly being known as “a real hotspot of artistic creation and expression,” Kell says. The annual Exhibition changes that perception among attendees and contributors. “Beyond that,” a sense of “pride” and “credibility” is attributed to students and their experiences through their features at this event.
The artwork featured at the Exhibition is selected by professors in the art department from the pool of art created for any of their classes over the course of the academic year. As a result, Samek Art Museum Director Richard Rinehart explains, “a wide variety of students” are spotlit in the show: “Art majors, but also Econ majors, Psych majors, MIDE and others.” Because the Samek does not curate the Exhibition as they do “most shows” that come through their space, Rinehart looks forward to “being surprised” each year — he enjoys the “diversity” of “student artists, styles and subjects” portrayed across the event. Rinehart believes that “we all exercise our aesthetic sensibilities in everyday life” and hopes students across campus will follow the example of the students featured in the Exhibition to “engage in their full self through art” at any point in their lives, regardless of major or career.
Ranello, who received Best in Show for her piece, “A cautionary tale of this artist’s attachment to her material reality #2,” wanted to use her art to execute a “thought experiment” about what the passing of time would do to parts of her childhood home if she inhabited it for a thousand years. Conceptually tied to ideas of “sentimentality” and “dangerous ties to material reality,” the three-dimensional woodwork and sculptural piece depicts a never-cleaned staircase (an effect achieved by topping the structure with artificial hair), with a “less dense path” down the middle where she’d “walk up and down everyday” in the hypothetical of her scenario. Hair, which is “excessive” in the piece and “elicits a visceral reaction” in many observers, was her chosen medium to strikingly “caution against physical attachment and instilling false meaning in material objects.” Ranello herself is a very sentimental person, so many of her other pieces explore this same idea; though she’s been making art her “entire life,” a project of this medium and meaning is a new exploration for her. She is grateful to Professor Joseph Meiser and Art Assistant Kaz Brittenburg for their guidance on her projects.
Livingood, the second place recipient, wanted to “capture the space between wakefulness and dreaming” with her piece, “Golden Slumbers,” an oil painting on canvas. Her layering of translucent but cumulative color reflects her lifelong fascination with the “subconscious shap[ing] who we are, especially in moments of exhaustion.” Recreating the feeling of moving in and out of the subconscious in the work through thin layers and “soft lighting,” Livingood explores the way “sleep deprivation warps everything — perception, time and even our sense of self,” and the identity that forms during the “third of our lives” we spend asleep. Painting is, in a lot of ways, an “escape” for Livingood, who utilizes the activity to “step out of [her] routine and tune out normal distractions.”
Daniel Mihaylovich ’28 received an honorary mention at the Exhibition for his work, “Grandma’s Cottage,” an oil painting featuring “objects that resembled [what] you would find in a grandmother’s home” and painted using “muted tones” to create a “damp, aged feeling.” Most of Mihaylovich’s work is centered around portraiture, but he’s been “experimenting” with “portraying people in a more indirect way,” and this piece is representative of that investigation. He was encouraged to submit his work to the Exhibition by Professor Kell and is “grateful that [he] had the opportunity” to take a painting class with her and move “outside” his “comfort zone.”
The Student Art Exhibition will be available for viewing during the Samek’s regular hours through Sunday, May 18.