Last Wednesday, April 18, students and faculty crowded into Little Hall’s Clifford Gallery to enjoy food, conver-sation and, most importantly, the senior projects completed by graduating Art and Art History majors. The Art Histo-ry concentrators’ theses were on display, and represented several different time periods and styles of work; the Studio Art concentrators’ work was equally di-verse, with media ranging from painting to sculpture to mixed-media, video and digital art.

Attendees from both inside and out-side the art department milled about the gallery viewing various works and thumbing through 60-page theses with imposing titles such as “Contextualiz-ing the Architecture of Colonial Latin America: The Jesuit Involvement in Creating a Vernacular Baroque Style” and “Commodifying the Past: Hetero-topia at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.” Other works in-cluded fiberglass mannequins, a large mixed-media sculpture and an hour-long video piece created by and starring students. Around the rest of Little Hall, sketches, paintings and mixed-media works were on display; small screens flashed digital and video art.

“It was great to see people from so many different fields of study come to-gether in support of the student artists,” said sophomore Briana Zeck, a molecu-lar biology major. “I came to the gallery opening because my roommate is in-volved in the art department, but I was really impressed with all the work. I’m so glad I went.”

Indeed, many students were impressed by the high caliber of the fledgling artists’ and art historians’ work.

“I was interested in coming to the thesis art gallery exhibition primarily to visit my sister, an art history major,” said first-year Elsie Widing, “but I thought that the students’ artwork was incred-ibly interesting. The art was more mod-ern and sophisticated than I thought it would be, especially the sculpture.”

Senior Alexander Coco, a studio art major whose video pieces The User and Father & I were on display in the Clifford Gallery’s projection room, spoke highly of his fellow studio artists, stressing their different strengths and bright futures.

“We have many seniors going on to choice graduate schools and getting highly sought-after jobs. Kim Sass was accepted to Penn for architecture, Shan-non Jackson is going to San Francisco Art Institute, Micah Belzberg has a job at an architecture firm in California and I’ll be attending USC film school next year in the fall.” He continued, “Murphy Kean has an acute attention to detail and a del-icacy in her work. Ali Edmark’s work is on the cutting edge of the developing art world. And Gabe Rosen uses simplicity to express very abstract ideas.”

The response to the work was over-whelmingly positive, and many complex ideas are expressed in the artworks and theses, which students have been working on for the whole of their senior year; in-deed, it is impossible to convey both the effort that went into the projects, their messages and the final results in this arti-cle. Be sure to see all of the works in per-son at the Clifford Art Gallery through May 19.

Contact Alanna Weissman at

[email protected].