Idyllwild Arts Academy Visual Arts student theme show opens

Editor’s note: This story is taken from a press release.

The finest Visual Arts creations by Idyllwild Arts Academy students are on display at https://www.idyllwildartsgallery.org/dreams-2021-theme-show from Friday, Nov. 12 to Friday, Dec. 9, with the quality of the work for this themed show guaranteed by a distinguished outside juror, Becky Alley.

The student theme show is an annual event. Every year, each piece included in the exhibit is new, having been created since the beginning of the school year in response to a prompt chosen by the students themselves. This year the students decided the theme would be Dreams.

The Exhibition Statement crafted by Lea Lee, JiHwan Park and Guazhi Wang, all members of the Class of 2022, is eloquent in explaining the appropriateness of the theme to a time of global crisis, during which, after “nearly two years of isolation, pain and disconnection from the endlessly prolonged pandemic,” Idyllwild Arts students, like young people everywhere ,“have felt our dreams abandoned.”

The Dreams artists, if they do not take direct aim at the possibilities of global transformation, remind us that a dream often “captures the moment when we catch a glimpse of the essence of human nature and ourselves.”

The dream-driven work of Lee, Park and Wang, and some two dozen other extraordinary student artists, was chosen for display by Alley, director of Bolivar Art Gallery at the University of Kentucky, whose own award-winning art often draws on traditional craft media and commonly recognized objects. Regarding a piece displayed in 2018, she wrote of gravitating “toward materials that are common in everyday domestic life: matches, clothes pins, fabric, needles and thread” (https://www.artfieldssc.org/galleries/art/2018/burn/809916).

Themes of enduring fascination for Alley’s exhibited work include ritual, legacy, empathy, decay and loss, and she takes particular interest in expanding the roles of self-reflection and meaning in everyday life. She earned her bachelor’s in fine art in printmaking and drawing from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000, and her master’s in fine art in studio art from the University of Kansas in 2005. Her work has been enriched by a number of research travel grants.

Alley assessed all the work submitted to her without knowledge of the artists’ identities. Given the caliber of the art Idyllwild Arts Academy students created, leaving much of the work sent to her out of this show, cannot have been easy.

The academy’s Visual Arts Chair Linda Lucía Santana points out that “the process of creating work with a theme,” not of the individual artist’s choosing, provides “firsthand involvement and insight as to how juried exhibitions work: some may have their work accepted into the show, others may not, but all of them learn and grow from the experience.”

Visit https://www.idyllwildartsgallery.org/dreams-2021-theme-show to enjoy Alley’s selection of work that in each instance, as Lee, Park and Wang write, “makes us think again about our profound existence.”