You know the feeling: You’ve moved all your stuff into a new place, and you’ve unpacked the boxes and put away your clothes, and there’s food in the fridge and sheets on the bed—but you don’t feel at home until there are pictures on the walls.
Now the newly renovated Talley Student Union has that homey feeling, thanks to some talented NC State student artists whose work adorns the new building’s walls.
“People who’ve been working in the building since before we hung the art have stopped me in the hallways to tell me they can’t believe how much the art brings the building to life,” says Amy Sawyers, coordinator of arts outreach for Arts NC State (ANCS).
The art hanging on Talley’s walls was purchased by ANCS through its student art purchase program. ANCS keeps some of its purchased student art in a collection held in storage; much of the rest of it is on display in Talley.
Student art was first displayed in the old Talley building beginning in 2001 when Alex Miller, then the vice provost of ANCS, decided there was a need for a visible legacy of student art that any student could contribute to and that all of campus could enjoy. That decision led to the creation of the ANCS student art purchase, an annual event in which students are given one day in the spring to submit their artwork for possible purchase by ANCS to add to its collection.
Students drop their work off at a central location in the morning; that afternoon, a selection committee evaluates the art, and in the evening the submitting artists are notified which pieces have been chosen for purchase. Many of the works purchased by ANCS will hang on the walls inside Talley.
Since the program began, ANCS has purchased 129 pieces of student art, 55 of which now are hanging in the student union. More than 50 other pieces purchased through the program are on display at other student centers on campus, including Witherspoon and the Crafts Center.
When the renovation of Talley began, the art had to be taken down and placed in storage, which made a new problem apparent to Sawyers: If ANCS kept purchasing six to 12 pieces of student art per year, as it had done since the program was launched, soon they would run out of places to hang or store the artworks.
“Also, we’d been getting inquiries from faculty and staff asking if they could be allowed to purchase student art too,” she says.
In light of those considerations, in 2015 the decision was made to open the student art purchase to the entire community for the first time.
“We ran the 2015 purchase event like a pop-up gallery in Talley phase I, which had just opened up,” Sawyers says. “We had good attendance, and the artists sold [more than] $3,000 worth of art that day.”
Patrons of the program buy the art directly from the artist, so 100 percent of the purchase price goes straight into the student’s pocket.
ANCS will continue making the annual student art purchase open to the whole community. For the next event, which will take place in April 2016, ANCS plans to make photographs of all the items available online so customers can evaluate the works before they go to the sale location. The days and hours of the event will also be expanded so more customers can attend.
“Arts NC State can only buy so many artworks per year, but a member of the public might come along and see something we couldn’t buy and decide they really want it,” Sawyers says. “We want them to have that opportunity, and we want the student to have the opportunity to sell their art and see it go out in the world.”
In the run-up to the opening of Talley phase II this year, Sawyers asked the facilities committee of the Student Centers board of directors to evaluate all the artworks in the ANCS collection and choose which pieces they wanted to take out of storage to hang in the new Talley. When phase II opened in June, Sawyers worked with student interns and professional art installers to get the chosen works up onto the walls.
“One thing we learned right away when the art went up is that this building supports art being hung on the walls so much more than the old Talley did,” Sawyers says. “People who had seen the pieces before in the old Talley say they almost seem like new pieces of art now. The walls here almost act as a sort of canvas or frame for the art. Art can breathe in this space.”
ANCS is planning to invite all the student artists whose art is hanging in the new Talley to return to campus over homecoming weekend this fall for a reception in their honor, to be held in the renovated student union.
One of those who’ll be invited back is alumna Alyssa Hinton, who sold a photo composite print to the ANCS student art purchase program when she was studying fiber arts in the College of Design. “I wanted the piece to portray the sense of movement, syncopation and rhythm of this dancer who is an old friend of mine,” Hinton says. “I’m now a digital media teacher in Durham Public Schools, and I’ll actually be using this piece as a template to inspire my students to do a music-related digital collage.”
It’s not just students in design and the arts who sell artworks through the ANCS program, Sawyers says.
“Our mantra is ‘the arts are for everyone,’” she says, “so we reach out to let all students on campus know about this.”
Jonathan Young, a freshman philosophy major who switched to mechanical engineering before graduating from NC State, was one of those non-arts students who contributed to the student art purchase program. While still a freshman, he sold a photograph to the program.
“It was one of the first photographs I took where I felt a real sense of accomplishment,” Young says. He now serves as operations coordinator for the Community Empowerment Fund.
The next time you head to Talley for lunch, coffee, a meeting or an event, take a moment to slow down and ponder the artworks hanging on the walls as you pass by them.
“It’s been a joy to watch staffers and students peering around the corners and discovering the art as it goes up, or to see a student standing in front of a painting, staring at it, engaging with it,” Sawyers says.
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