What: Spring 2018 Student Show and Senior Exhibition

When: Opens 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, May 4, with a reception and runs through June 1.

Where: The Juanita Harvey Art Gallery, Foyer Gallery and Pit Gallery, Fain Fine Arts Building, Midwestern State University. 3411 Taft Blvd.

Admission: Free

Information: (940) 397-4369

The three art galleries in the Fain Fine Arts building at Midwestern State University will host a series of major student art shows beginning next Friday.

The Spring 2018 Student Show and Senior Exhibition will be held in the Juanita Harvey Art Gallery, the Foyer Gallery and Pit Gallery in the Fain Fine Arts Building, beginning at 6 to 8 p.m. May 4, said art advisor Gary Goldberg, MSU professor of art.

“A diverse set of nine graduating seniors will exhibit a diverse body of work, including photography, painting, graphic design and sculpture, in conjunction with the annual student show,” said Goldberg.

The separate student show in the Juanita Harvey Art Gallery will feature some 200 works curated by TCU Gallery Manager Sara-Jayne Parsons. 

The MSU senior show includes “Sentience” by Erin Murray Harmon who studied print making and drawing. “My show focuses on animal rights and the human impact on certain animals and how the affects the environment.”

Harmon’s show will feature 6 to 8 prints, and the artist begins a tattoo apprenticeship May 16.

Photography and ceramics student Holly Schuman’s show, “Freak,” will feature a series of posters employing digital photography and graphic design. “They’re self portraits done as a cross between new freak show posters and those from PT Barnum’s turn of the century circus posters.”

She would like to eventually do a masters degree and work in the gaming industry

For Selena Mize’s show, “Personna,” she painted six people whom she knew. “I use color theory for the backgrounds, which emulate emotions and their personality and play a part with the character’s facial expression(s).”

Mize’s friends have yet to see the finished work. She hopes to go to graduate school in a year to continue her painting studies.

Raised in New York, Kevin Appiah-Kubi’s parents are from Ghana. He studied photography and drawing and employed painting for his senior show.

Appiah-Kubi’s five paintings foreground African American figures over colorful Kente cloth backgrounds (from Ghana textiles). He would like to do a photography internship

Graphic design and ceramics student Emily Allen will present a 22 page comic book, “Downstairs,” which she and a friend created. Allen will also display a 22 by 28 inch print of the cover and four 17” by 24” character images.

“It’s about a lesbian couple in college dealing with supernatural forces and a larger supernatural war,” Allen said. “It’s the first in a huge series that we’ve been working on three years.”

Kelsey Tidwell, a graphic design and photography student, will display 10 posters and prints in a series she may possibly call “Tentacles.”

“They focus on mental illness like suicide awareness, depression, anxiety. I want viewers to relate to it however they can relate to it,” Tidwell said. She photographed and interviewed 15 people and added design elements to the figures.   

“Each piece can work by itself, but the pieces make more sense together,” Tidwell said. She is interested in doing a tattoo apprenticeship.

 Sculpture and printmaking student Ethan Parker’s project is titled

 “Deconstructing Masculinity” and includes screen prints, bronze casting and fabricated steel sculptures.

“My show will reference toxic masculinities, and how I am deconstructing them through using the nude male figure,” he said.  He is applying for grad school and will continue to produce art.

Artist Even Peterson focused on graphic design and photography, and his show is a series of technical drawings laid over NASA pictures of Martian landscapes.

The technical drawings relate to a talk by British philosopher Alan Watts about a dandelion thistle. “Humans need to take a more inclusive and complex perspective of earth and life on it. The earth is finite,” Peterson said.

 Peterson is currently doing content work for Dexter Learning that just moved into Big Blue.

The ninth senior artist to show is watercolorist Emma Griffiths.

The artwork will feature many contemporary themes, Goldberg said, some of which are provocative and will be labeled as such. Viewer discretion is advised for some of the work.