Senior Preview Exhibition showing graduating students’ art, advancing profession-based learning

Eleven senior students at Northwest Missouri State University are showing their creative work this month in the Senior Preview Exhibition as they prepare to graduate from the University and launch their careers in a variety of artistic fields.

Tom LaPann, an assistant professor of art, organized the exhibit with this spring’s graduating art majors. Each student was asked to contribute artwork from their upcoming senior exhibits for the preview.

“This is one of the coolest shows, where you get a cross-section of all the different work being made, and it’s a culminating event,” LaPann said. “All the work is from seniors and it’s some of their best work as they’re about to leave.”

Olivia Dorman, a studio art major, who hails from Kansas City, Missouri, prepared animal-themed sculptures for the preview.

“The amount of work that is in our show is more impressive because everybody has their own unique style and contributes something different than previous shows,” Dorman said.

Shay Rohn, a studio art major from Bowling Green, Missouri, is showing her artwork, titled “Maneuvering Around Mankind,” which combines photography with acrylic paint. After graduating from Northwest she hopes to teach at a university while continuing work as an artist.

“Once I came (to Northwest), I needed to find a style, so I kind of started pushing into the natural elements,” Rohn said. “My sculpture teacher, Tom, really pushed me to find a narrative and a story to it. I kind of landed on showing connecting nature to the human world.”

Logan Oliver, a studio art major from Savannah, Missouri, produced an oil and acrylic painting for the exhibition, titled “Glossolalia – Tilly.”

Although she had experience with acrylic paint, Oliver said her Northwest experience helped her build an appreciation for oil paints and conveying feelings through artwork.

Oliver also appreciates the opportunities Northwest provides for artists to gain profession-based learning experience by exhibiting their work. After graduating from Northwest, she hopes to begin her career in graphic design.

“Armin (Muhsam, a professor of art) really got me on to oil paints, and the colors are just different,” Oliver said. “You can work with it a lot longer, and he really helped me focus on finding my purpose, how to market yourself as an artist, what you need to have prepared when you get out into the real world and realize it’s gonna be tough, but you have to own it.”

The exhibit also includes a series of boxes encasing discarded milk jugs – artwork created by Luke Kral, a graphic design student from Conception, Missouri.

“I’m fusing modern-day plastic consumption and the medieval time with the religious art form of the reliquary, where something like a box is ornately decorated,” Kral said, explaining that a reliquary often contains something of value to the person it honors. Kral’s artwork highlights “what someone somewhere used as part of their life – sustenance, milk – taking a piece of that, and taking what’s insignificant and giving it more meaning.”

Kral said he enjoys the social aspects of art. He has submitted his artwork for exhibition at local galleries, including Mosaic Life Care Center and Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri.

“It means validation,” Kral said. “It means that someone else, like a juror, thinks their work is speaking to what’s ‘good art,’ or is trying to say something new and also maybe a good work as far as craftsmanship, aesthetic, relevancy to the times.”

The Senior Preview Exhibition is open through March 14 in the Olive DeLuce Art Gallery at the Olive DeLuce Fine Arts Building. It is free and open to the public.

The art gallery’s 2024-25 schedule concludes with an Artaxis Ceramics Exhibition March 24 through April 18 and then a final exhibit featuring work created by Northwest art students through May 2.

The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday, 1 to 7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 1 pm Friday. For more information about the gallery, call 660.562.1326 or email fparts@nwmissouri.edu.