The Mulvane’s Exhibition Coordinator, Michael Allen, received the Pollak Award in the final year of his undergraduate study in 2012. Allen, who has been working at the museum since he was a student, has organized the Art Student Exhibition for the last eight years. Planning and preparation for the exhibition span the entire academic year and entails training workshops for those students admitted into the show.
“The [exhibition] is important because it gives students an opportunity to participate in a juried event. They learn professional skills, like how to submit their works and how to follow a prospectus, actions required by many artists who submit their work for consideration in exhibitions. It is meant to be learning process—an opportunity to participate. Also, because it is a juried exhibition, it provides the art department an assessment of teaching and artistic practice given by an outside expert,” says Allen.
“For me, personally, as a former Washburn art student, who submitted to, and was accepted into, the Art Student Exhibition, it was the first time that I had actually had my artwork displayed in a public space, in a professional setting. That was a big deal for me. Over the years that I have been involved as an employee, I still meet those students who are exhibiting for the first time for the public. That’s a pretty special part of it for me.”
With each year, and each juror, the annual installation is varied in its theme, or lack of theme, and its scope. Consistently, though, there is what art historian and 2019 Art Student Exhibition juror Bill North identified as “a preponderance of painting,” especially detailed realist painting. The quantity and quality of exhibited painting is no less marked this year with works like Yue Li’s accomplished oil painting, Self Unbound, 2019, and Zandra Sneed-Dawkins luminous, candy-colored still life painting, Mason 171, 2019.
Emma Johns’ drypoint Raised a Jayhawk, 2018 and Gabrielle Rollins’ photograph Market Place, 2019 both poetic renderings of place, transport the viewer from downtown Topeka to the River Market in Kansas City. In contrast, Cody Dannar’s gritty photographs capture the uneasy societal reality of urban anywhere. A still life of a more conceptual nature, Darby Rolf’s ceramic sculpture, Not So Tin Can, 2019, demonstrates how assigning a fluid shimmering surface to a mundane everyday object can make the viewer reconsider its formal qualities entirely.
Typically, early April marks the occasion of the public opening for the annual Art Student Exhibition. This brings a jostling crowd of art faculty and students, their families, and members of the community. Although the current COVID-19 pandemic keeps us from gathering this year, we hope you will visit the exhibition virtually in support of Washburn Art Students and the 96-year-old tradition of exceptional student work at the Mulvane Art Museum.
Rebecca Manning
Collections Manager / Registrar
Mulvane Art Museum
