The Department of Art & Design is celebrating its 100-year anniversary with a gallery reception this October, according to Associate Professor and Co-Chair of the Art & Design Department Katherine Fries. This event will take place during Homecoming Week on Oct. 6 from 5-7 p.m., Fries said. An open house is scheduled for the following Sunday from 2-4 p.m., where the department will open newly renovated spaces and studios to guests, according to Fries. There will also be a limited art sale featuring student works during the open house, according to UIndy360. Attendants are requested to register for the Art & Design Gallery Reception, according to UIndy 360, and it will be taking place inside the Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center.
“We’re having [a] gallery reception where we’ll have some speakers, we’ll have the gallery open filled with faculty work, combining all the alumni, all the students, it’s going to be a time for us to commemorate and celebrate these 100 years,” Fries said.
Associate Professor and Co-Chair of the Art & Design Department James Viewegh said that over the past two years the department has added the Art & Design Annex, which increased the department’s space by 11,000 square feet. This allowed the department to renovate the newly-freed up spaces in Christel DeHaan. The department also recently installed a new sculpture on Lilly Hall’s greenhouse wall, according to Viewegh.
“[The department] also provides a lot of artwork for campus and a lot of arts activities.” Viewegh said. “If you have noticed the new sculpture out on the greenhouse wall, that’s out of this department, so that is a project we worked on for seven years. It didn’t just pop up overnight. We started seven years ago with the design stages and then and then it took time over that to work with various students and faculty to get all the elements fabricated and then we were finally able to install it this summer.”
Fries said that she encouraged students, faculty and staff to reflect on the Art & Design Department’s past. Part of celebrating the department’s 100th anniversary was an opportunity to think about its “rich and exciting history,” according to Fries.
“When we think about 100 years, it’s a long time and through this process of getting ready for the reception, we’ve been doing research and looking at our archives and seeing who started the department.” Fries said. “We found that many of our traditions or trips, or our student engagements, they’ve trickled down through the decades.”
Students can involve themselves with the department by taking studio classes, which fulfills the applied fine arts general education requirement in order to graduate, or attending events such as the Art & Design Lecture Series or the 100th anniversary celebrations during Homecoming Week, and according to Veiwegh, there are typically six lectures per semester.
“I’m incredibly proud of our students,” Fries said. “And the fact that the growth that you see that they go through from the time they get here to when they leave is tremendous and very exciting. [It’s] one of the reasons why I love teaching. I’m really proud of our faculty. They work really hard to provide our students with the best education and exciting experiences and transformational opportunities.”
