By Maxwell Wilkens
Members of the UC Santa Barbara community flocked to the Art building in early February to attend the Honors Open Studios exhibition. This annual, student-organized event gave a glimpse into the workspaces of 10 honors graduate art students, whose specialties range from painting to illustration to photography.
The Art department’s Honors Program is a year-long course of study where developing artists attend critique classes, rigorous seminars, and studio tours, all while receiving personal instruction from a faculty mentor. The Honors Open Studio showed the fruit of their labors so far.
Visitors asked the artists at the event about the inspirations and logistics behind their projects, and interacted with several of the art pieces. At one studio, viewers contributed to an eclectic canvas of doodles, sketches, and thoughts. Another studio displayed a collection of transparent photographs, which visitors stacked on top of each other to create completely new images.
Works by Bailey Shogrin, Owen Jenkins, Finley Mullen, Alice Madrigal, and Lucy Holley, in order of appearance.
In Episode 4 of ‘HFA Speaks: The Podcast,’ you can listen to UCSB communication student Maxwell Wilkens interview Trieu Nguyen, a conceptual photographer whose studio was featured at the event. Click below to hear them discuss the photographer’s influences and creative processes, his transition from painting to photography, and his perspectives on the world of photography.
Maxwell Wilkens is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication and Music Studies. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.