Art, Art, and More Art!

As an art student, I’m pretty much around art all the time, but the last two weekends have been especially art-filled. A lot of this has to do with the end of the semester being just around the corner. For example, last weekend was the USF Art department’s annual Arthouse open-house event in which the general public is welcome to check out our studios and the art that we students have been working on this past year. This year I had a couple of photographs and a couple of videos on display. One of my videos, a short film I made for a class last semester that featured Chuck attempting to interacts with a few of my friends, was also accepted into Arthouse’s Juried Film and Video Festival. Though the festival was admittedly a pretty modest affair, it was a big honor to have a work selected to appear in any type of juried exhibition (a first for me) not to mention that it was cool to see a film I had made projected on a big outdoor screen. It was also a lot of fun to have some friends along so I could share a bit of what my fellow art students and I actually do with them. ("Hey!" to any of you who may be reading this.)

This past weekend was also art-intensive as my brother and I made a trip to The Ringling Museum down in Sarasota for a class of mine. One perk of an art history class is that sometimes museums will give you a free admission into museums for the purpose of research if you have a relevant assignment. The only downside is that you actually have to write the paper you research for, but since this particular one’s only two pages that won’t be due until the last week of class the benefit far outweighs the cost. I had been to Ringling once at least a decade ago, but it was even cooler now having gone through so many art history courses to get a good look at works created by some of the artists or students of artists who I’ve since learned about over the years. However, there’s so much art in the museum that by about halfway through I know I started to get overwhelmed and even artistically fatigued to the point actually had to force myself to finish going through the galleries (which I’m glad I did because I would have missed some great stuff). I still don’t know how Ringling could have made so much money off the circus to afford all that art or his opulent mansion that is also located on the museum’s ground, but apparently he did. There was also a Circus museum there too. I only went to the circus once as a young kid and over the years had forgotten how creepy I though the circus was. However, the museum served as a pretty good reminder of that. If it’s any indication, I spent much more time in the art museum than the circus one. 

Overall, both Arthouse and my field trip to the Ringling Museum were a a lot of fun, but I think after the experience of seeing all that art coupled all my art-related finals I could use a little break from the art scene. At least for a weekend or two.