Hillsdale art students are returning to compete in The Small College Invitational Art Exhibit. The winners will be announced Sunday, and a cash prize of $1,200 doled out among them.
Students from Siena Heights University, Hillsdale College, and Ohio’s Cedarville University will travel to Spring Arbor University this Sunday for the competition , where awards will be given to the top artists in each category: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and graphic design.
The submitted pieces will remain on display in Spring Arbor’s Ganton Art Gallery for just under a month.
With this consortium of small liberal arts colleges, Spring Arbor hopes to instate a friendly competition among schools that agree on the qualities that make good art. Hillsdale and Spring Arbor started a similar competition of six schools more than 20 years ago, but, over time, encountered a bias toward post-modern and modern expressions in art that they found frustrating.
“We eventually became quite disenchanted … with how other schools had the shows juried,” Professor of Art Sam Knecht said. “Their judges had a decidedly modernist/post-modernist slant, and our students would suffer undeservedly in the judging. We put up with that for a long time and then, about four years ago, decided not to continue with that group.”
Spring Arbor invited its own students and interested students from the three other institutions to submit up to two digital representations of their artwork, along with text explaining each piece, at the end of the fall semester.
“We did our best to get the word out — each one of the respective faculty in their classes,” Knecht said, “But the submission happened pretty much finals week, so that tended to thin the ranks of Hillsdale submissions.”
Still, of those that submitted, ten Hillsdale students were accepted for their work. Two pieces by senior Anders Kiledal made it into the show: a photo and a graphic design piece. Seniors Hannah Ahern and Kristen Carl submitted charcoal drawings, which will appear in the show on Saturday; juniors Elizabeth Davis and Isaac Dell and sophomore Katherine Frank submitted sculptures; sophomore Tori Swanson submitted an oil painting; finally, seniors Katherine Helmick, Rachael Kurtz, and Michelle McAvoy, and sophomore Laura Williamson submitted photographs.
Ahern and Swanson both created their pieces in one of Knecht’s classes last semester. Knecht described Ahern’s charcoal rendering of the Laocoön as faithful to its subjects, yet “transcend[ing] photography.” He spoke of Swanson’s painting of the cemetery north of Hillsdale as “luminous in its radiant qualities of light and color” and “not gloomy at all.”
Swanson, though only a sophomore, has already declared her art major. Her oil painting was the product of her second class on the artform, her first en plein air, or painting done outdoors. The most difficult part of the painting, and the most rewarding according to Swanson, was capturing the light as it appeared on the ground.
“It was challenging because of the light shining through the trees. There were a bunch of shadows from the leaves on the ground, but there were also spots of light,” Swanson said. “That was kind of tricky, getting it to look unified — portraying the grassy hillside with the spots of light accurately.”
