by Lauren Raziano, Staff Writer
Students stood around a table with art supplies and posters on the mini quad on Tuesday, Oct. 14 for the creation of art that will be included in an upcoming art installation. Sponsored by the Lasallian Women and Gender Resource Center, students created artworks about themes such as voter engagement, COVID-19, racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Ireland Twiggs, a Manhattan College senior and an intern at LWGRC, is responsible for the bi-weekly session called “grARTtitude”, which she has decided to change up.
“We are shifting kind of the grARTtitude art session to this political front and we will be installing a political art installation,” Twiggs said.
Twiggs said that those three topics were chosen “because we feel like they are on the forefront of everything we see and interact with, whether it’s the news, instagram post, and affecting our daily lives the most.” As a result, students will have the opportunity to form their own opinions on these important contemporary topics.
The event was also co-hosted by Sanctus Artem in hopes of attracting more students to the art-making display.
“Because we found that it’s really hard to find community on campus, it’s hard to figure out who’s around and who’s not, so we wanted to collaborate to bring more people together who may not access the center. Sanctus Artem is a phenomenal organization that does a lot with art so we wanted some pros with us,” Twiggs said.
Rosy Moody, a junior student and vice president of Santus Artem, attended the event and understands the logic for why different campus groups would want to co-sponsor events such as this.
“So the LWGRC was responsible for organizing this event and since it was an art centered event, Sanctus Artem was invited to be a partner on it to reach out to students who enjoy doing art as well as a community that likes activism,” Moody said.
Artistic representation of political topics is an effective form of expression because most of these phenomenons resonate deeply with the average person.
“It’s easy and it’s a universal language so you don’t have to use big words or fancy rhetoric to get your point across,” Moody said. “If you are able to look at a picture and identify, ‘oh its a picture of many people of different groups holding hands’ or its a picture of a ballot, it’s like the saying that comes to mind, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ so that’s why art is so important because it can mean a thousand different things to the people that it reaches.”
Julia Ettere, a senior and an intern at LWGRC, said about the art work she created, “I came to support the event and promote the importance of voting. So for my artwork I included a mask and the importance of voting for my picture.”
The themes the artists decided to focus on have been at the attention of students for months. The beauty of this event is that it gave them a creative outlet for what was on their minds.
“It’s something that, although Manhattan students were home over the summer, it’s something we were all seeing on the news, we see every single day and finally we get to come together as peers and have a conversation about it and express our views as a Manhattan College community instead of just seeing it on the news from wherever we were, we can come together as a community and have discussions and debate,” Moody added.
The installation of the student-created artwork will be hosted on Tuesday, Oct. 20 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the second floor of the Kelly Student Commons.