Fine Art

Blessed and Fruitful

Arabella Miller

University of Tennessee - Chattanooga

Visual Art, collage on canvas.

I’m Bella Miller, a Women’s Studies major in Chattanooga, TN.

I genuinely believe that we were all created to feel and to love, so I tend to create art based on sensual experiences. This piece is meant to reflect a lustrous museum, full of sculptures and paintings and desire. The fire that you feel when you have a crush, and the tingles you feel when your crush likes you back. I sincerely hope you enjoy it, and feel a little more today as a result.

An Unusual View of the Hunter Museum in Ink

Ethan Harvey

University of Tennessee - Chattanooga

Still observation of the world allows an artist to establish a profound connection with their environment, and record this process of spiritual exchange through carefully placed linework on the page. The will of the artist to sit quietly and learn provides them with knowledge otherwise unattainable. Notes on this silent lecture manifest as an observation filtered through the artist’s eye and hand.

Colors of Another

Sophia Varekamp

AKI ArtEZ University of the Arts

There is a journey that everyone must go through in order to discover who they truly are. Who you are today is simply a collection of phases, strange habits and extravagant expressions. You learn from these earlier versions of yourself and those lessons are shown in your philosophies and morals of life. Yet you cannot fully become yourself if you lack the risk and rebellion to express who you really are. The piece depicted shows the earlier versions of myself and the risks they had to take in order to become, and who I am now proud to be.

Highlights from previous editions

Confronting Internalized Transphobia My Own and Society's

Kaci Sullivan

Madison Area Technical College

This series emphatically insists on spectrums in a binary world. While I consciously know there isn’t anything wrong with being transgender—that there’s absolutely no shame in it, this knowledge hasn’t protected me from internalizing all the transphobic messages integrated into every aspect of our “progressive” society. Glittering glass slivers, they dig in deep, prepared to stay a lifetime. So I decided to sit with myself. Naked. In front of a mirror and canvas. I would paint my body until it became one grounded, plein-air-inspired stroke after another. Until I accepted that it’s a perfectly valid body. This journey isn’t mine alone. This series challenges viewers to address their own internalized transphobia. To ask themselves again, “What does it mean to be transgender?” or “What does a normal body even look like?” and most importantly “Maybe I should expand how I think about gender and sex.”

Mixed Media Collection

Jacob Smith

Westminster College

This body of work reflects on the two-dimensionality of visual art, specifically in the realm of illustration, painting, and digital art. The pieces address the increasingly strict guidelines imposed on the artistic community, what it means to be an artist, and how we define art. Furthermore, the body of work questions the temporality of visual art, specifically in a physical form. The work is very important to me as it illustrates much of my world view: people and places exist as different from one another, but have the ability and propensity to blend, interact, and harmonize.

1 in 4

Audrey Miklitsch

University of Denver

The statistic that 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted has been repeated over and over again. I wanted to create a piece that allowed women to react to their experience with sexual assault. Through the Red Tape Project at the University of Denver, as well as my own friends and family, I found a variety of women to participate in the piece. Some participants chose to do it together, while others made their creation in private. Each participant was given six cardboard squares. They were simply told to react to their experience using the squares. They could do anything they wanted to the squares, with the only requirement that at least one shred of cardboard was left. They could add things, build things, take things away, draw, write, paint, whatever they wanted. It was powerful to see the similarity of the women’s reactions. The piece is also interactive when it is displayed. Viewers can pick the pieces up and as each piece is put back down in a different spot, the individual experience becomes woven together.

My Paintings Would Be No Different than a Picture in a Biology Textbook

Andi Kur

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

I find that there are innate balances in life, universal dichotomies that permeate our understanding of the world. My paintings are about a duality such as this that exists between art and science. We are told from youth that these subjects are poles in constant strain, as miscible as oil in water. I spent thirteen years in school believing that I must choose between the two, that it is unnecessary to carry both with me. Drawn between a distinct love of each, I realized how vehemently I disagreed. Everything: every rock to every tree to every person is suspended between the two and therefore requires both to be fully understood.

NCHC & UReCA Information