With Their Spring Showcase at Alma Gallery in Downtown Provo, Art Students Gained Valuable Real World Knowledge About What it Takes to Put on a Show
At a packed opening night in downtown Provo’s new Alma Gallery, BYU art students had the opportunity to share their show with the public after more than a semester’s worth of hard work. Owned by Tyler Alexander, the Alma Gallery opened last November and hosts a new artist or group show each month.
Students worked on various teams to make the show happen, working alongside Alexander and BYU art professor Madeline Rupard. Students were more involved in all aspects of the showcase than in a typical campus show and worked on teams dedicated to promotion, installation and more.
“It’s primarily been student led, with insights from the curator Tyler Alexander, including writing their own artist statement, promoting each other’s work online, preparing their work for installation and deinstallation, and negotiating setting prices for their work,” said Rupard. “I hope the students started to see and contextualize their work in a gallery space, thinking about how they might navigate professional opportunities in the future.”
“We all worked together to organize all the different moving parts, from hanging to promoting the show,” said art student Jeremiah Parkin. “It has been good real world experience to meet the gallerist, Tyler Alexander, work alongside him and see all the different components that go into putting on a show,” said Parkin.
Art student Aria Osguthorpe displayed two pieces called “Yearning” and “Resilience.” “Both are a mix of illuminated manuscript and painting/drawing,” said Osguthorpe. “They definitely felt representative of my style and interests, and it was incredibly validating to see them accepted into a gallery space.”
Parkin displayed his piece “Iterations of a Cinder Block” at the show. “I made four cinder blocks out of clay and altered the forms and textures — almost like alternate reality cinder blocks,” he said. “I was interested in the idea of highlighting something mundane and putting it in an art setting.”
Student Kenzie Douphin felt well prepared for this experience because of the gallery practices class she took last semester, in which students help run the Weight Room gallery at West Campus. Preparing for the Alma Gallery show helped her make new artistic discoveries as she painted 15 panels of varying sizes.
Douphin found artistic growth as she explored more nuanced color for this particular body of work. “I am someone who needs a lot of immediacy in my mark making, and so I will use whatever is the fastest way to get pigment down,” she said. “With my pieces for this show, I tried to branch out with more nuanced colors.”
At the beginning of her time as an undergraduate student, Douphin says that the idea of getting involved in art shows off campus was intimidating to her, but over time these experiences have become a valuable part of her experience as an artist and student. “The past few years, I have been trying to get increasingly involved in the community and show my art in different places in Provo,” Douphin said. “Each one of those experiences has really helped me feel more confident as an artist.”
Douphin encourages other students who felt like she did to seek out these kinds of experiences, saying that each one is “a little drop in your confidence bucket.”
