Op-Ed: 34th Annual ART@Sloane Exhibition, Celebrating Students’ Creativity & Learning
This article was first published on the BU Women’s Guild website on April 11, 2022. Op-Ed by Dana Clancy, Director of CFA School of Visual Arts
Excerpt
Since 2005, Dr. Beverly Brown with Christine Wynne and Karen Leonida have worked with leadership in BU College of Fine Arts’ School of Visual Arts to create and curate important ART@Sloane exhibitions. The twice-yearly program is hosted at Sloane House, the beautiful home of President and Dr. Brown. The vibrant ART@Sloane program has featured more than 500 student drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures over the past 17 years. It is a major BU exhibition program with a real impact on our students, whose work is also now in many local collections due to this program.
Spring 2022 Exhibition
At Sloane House, the work of our students often functions for guests as a catalyst to conversation due to Beverly Brown’s engagement with sharing both the art and the stories behind the work. It is moving to consider how many students have been welcomed directly into the Presidential home to show their work. ART@Sloane alumni go on to international records of exhibition, including Rebecca Ness, BFA 2015, or recent MFA Painting graduate Hana Yilma Godine (2020).On April 11, 2022, the reception for the 34th ART@Sloane exhibition took place. This show features work from the School of Visual Arts’ Foundation year and senior studios in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, to work from the top-ten ranked MFA Painting program – with thesis work on view through April 2 in the MFA Painting and Sculpture thesis exhibition at Stone Gallery. At Sloane House, SVA students spoke about their motivations, processes, and the transformation of material at the heart of their work.
At the Fall 2021 reception, the role of material inquiry in visual art sparked conversations with faculty from Engineering, and helped share information about the call for work for Hidden HERstories – taking conversation into actual cross-university collaboration. Several students from the reception applied and are working on projects.
“Being around artists and their artwork at the Sloane House truly inspired me and shall be an experience that I will never forget.” -Angelica Trujillo (CFA ’22)
Current BFA senior Angelica Trujillo reflected on her ART@Sloane experience last Fall, “I had the opportunity to present my work to peers and faculty from the School of Visual Arts. Viewing my artwork in conversation with others allowed me to recognize the rigorous work ethic that we SVA students tend to have. Being around artists and their artwork at the Sloane House truly inspired me and shall be an experience that I will never forget.” Seeing their work in a new context, through the eyes of a new audience, students gain the chance to step back to see their work and trajectory with fresh eyes, perhaps even reframing the work due to this dialogue.