1DAY4DU: Art Beyond the Classroom

Every May, 1DAY4DU encourages the DU community to make a difference in the lives of our students. From new faculty-led programs and initiatives that support students to a diverse range of research that impacts the wider world, your help allows us to further broaden the resources we can provide. 

Our goal will always be to care for our immediate and extended communities and for the organizations that mean something to us, individually and collectively, through these projects.

This year CAHSS has four projects that we are excited to include for 1DAY4DU 2022!

Art Beyond the Classroom

The DU ART Board is so excited to unveil the newly named exhibition space within the School of Art and Art History, the Davis Gallery. This space will allow our studio art students to highlight their work in student shows, while providing practical curatorial experience for those in museum studies courses as they design their own exhibitions.

The funds from the 1Day4DU campaign would be used in part to provide curatorial supplies for the Davis Gallery and will also be allocated to enable student travel and experiential learning. From museum admission fees ($20) to art history books for research ($200) to art supplies for making art abroad ($150) to plane tickets for overseas research ($1,200), grant funds ensure that our students are not limited by finances in their pursuit of excellent scholarship and creative practice.

In the past, such funds have been used to help students like the two undergraduates who accompanied Professor Deborah Howard to the opening of the Hung Liu exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington DC. This was especially gratifying because in their painting course they had extensively studied the artist’s work and met her several times via Zoom.

Another graduate student in art history was awarded funds and traveled to Mexico City and Zacatecas to view the work of two artists who are the subject of her Masters thesis. In addition to visiting several museums, she was able to access archival material and rare exhibition catalogues which will allow for a deeper understanding of how these two women artists shaped Mexican abstraction of the second half of the twentieth century.

Such experiences not only help shape academic and industry careers but enrich our students’ well-being and provide them with accomplishments and the confidence they need to go out into the world as emerging professionals. Art-making, solo travel and simply trying something new all require a degree of vulnerability, self-expression and a willingness to embrace new ways of thinking. Our students ultimately come back from these experiences with deeper understandings of other cultures, of other ideas and, ultimately, of themselves.