The featured artist this week is Daniela Hernandez, a senior. Her self-portrait drawing is representative of more than just herself.

“It represents the oppressed women of Mexico, and more specifically the indigenous women,” said Hernandez.

The quotation that surrounds the portrait is from Subcomandante Marcos, a Chiapas guerrilla leader whose rebel fighters stand up against government discrimination and injustice towards indigenous people.

“I use a dove to represent hope and ideas of peace,” Hernandez said.

The quotation translates as:

“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that Ramona can come and you all can pay attention to what she says? Why is it necessary that Laura, Ana, Maria, Irma, Elisa, Silvia and so, so many indigenous women have to grab a weapon, become soldiers, in place of doctors, graduates, engineers, teachers?”

Although drawing was her medium of choice until this year, Harnish became interested in the color possibilities of oil and canvas for her senior exhibit. “I love the depth that can be achieved through building layers of paint,” Harnish said.

Harnish’s show draws on her time on the Tanzania Study-Service Term in spring 2008. “Creating the work for this show was a way of processing the experiences I had in Tanzania and celebrating the beautiful people I met, especially my incredibly generous host family,” Harnish said.

“Agrey” specifically draws on a painful memory from Harnish’s experience in Tanzania. The painting is based off of a self-portrait photograph taken by her young host brother, Agrey, on the day of his older brother’s funeral.

Agrey’s brother Daudi died of complications from tonsillitis while Harnish was living with the family. “This heartbreaking incident, which shouldn’t have happened,” Harnish said, “opened my eyes to the realities and injustices of life in an under-developed country.”

“‘Agrey’ is the one work I knew all along I would have to keep for myself,” Harnish said. “The story behind it couldn’t be entirely understood by others.”

The featured artist this week is Whitney Philipps, a senior, and her oil painting “madonna not yet with child diptych.” The piece is part of the final senior art gallery of the year, which features the work of Philipps, Joanna Landis, Laura Harnish, Britta Albrecht, and Dirk Leichty, opening this weekend in the Music Center’s Hershberger Art Gallery.

“There’s a lot of beautiful ‘madonna and child’ iconography,” said Philipps, an art major from Clinton, Ill. “I wanted to draw upon the conventions of that tradition to create something that complicated the story.”

“For me, this piece is about Mary’s divinity and womanhood before pregnancy made her famous,” Philipps said. “I love the idea that Jesus came into the world through a woman’s body. That’s so much better than being pulled out of some mystical top-hat.”

A reception with the senior artists will be held at the gallery on Sunday from 1-3 p.m. to commemorate its opening. Philipps’ paintings, along with the four other seniors’ work, will be on display through April 15.

The featured artist this week is Carmen Myers, a senior, whose work, along with fellow senior art majors Daniel Merkt-Blatz, Janell Koch-Cripe, Emily Shantz and Alex Troyer, is currently on display in the Hershberger Art Gallery.

Myers, an art major with a fine art oil painting concentration, spends her time away from school working as a pharmacy assistant, where she received the inspiration for her senior show pieces, including this painting of a bottle.

“The purpose of my art is to help people slow down and realize the beauty of what is around them,” Myers said in her senior statement. “It should illuminate things that normally seem insignificant.”

Myers urged viewers to consider the small ways that beauty can be found in everyday life, including at work or in the daily commute, such as Myers’ own trip from her home in Syracuse to Goshen.

“These subjects are all worth stopping to observe,” Myers said. “Art helps us realize that there are many things in life worthy of our attention.”

The current senior art exhibit will remain on display until April 2.

The featured artist this week is Emily Shantz, a senior from Goshen. Her drawing, “Ollie Squibnose,” was created with a  pen on paper and will be featured alongside her other drawings in the second Senior Art Exhibition of the year, opening this weekend in the Hershberger Art Gallery in Rieth Recital Hall.

Shantz drew the monsters from the fictional point of view of an observer named Charles H. Monroe.

“There’s a whole story behind my show,” said Shantz, an art major with a writing minor.

Shantz was assigned an abstract character piece for her figure drawing class. “I ended up with a monster that I loved so much I named him and gave him a back-story,” Shantz said.

Her work will be displayed alongside art from four other seniors, including Daniel Merkt-Blatz, Janell Koch-Cripe, Carmen Myers and Alex Troyer.

A reception will be held at the Music Center on Sunday from 2-4 p.m. to celebrate the opening.

Abigail Groff, a senior art major from Lancaster, Pa., is this week’s featured artist. Her graphite and watercolor work is currently on display in the Hershberger Art Gallery in the Music Center.

Groff’s piece is part of a series of four 8″ x 8″ figure drawings. Groff began each panel with a graphite line drawing before building the form by adding watercolor washes and additional lines.

“Unlike some of my larger drawings,” Groff said, “the context of the space that the figure is in is less significant. The way the body fills the compressed space is more important.”

The current senior art exhibit, which also features the work of four other senior art majors, is on display from now until March 18. The exhibit is available for viewing as long as the Music Center is open.

This week’s featured artist is Simon Birky-Hartmann, a senior art major with a graphics design focus from Strasbourg, France.

“I ran across a set of broken bulbs a few weeks ago, and I ended up playing with them and creating compositions,” Birky-Hartmann said. “I ended up taking the camera out and started shooting, which gave interesting results.”

After some early explorations, Birky-Hartmann took the bulbs to the Visual Arts building where he experimented with studio lighting to achieve the effect seen in this week’s photograph.

Birky-Hartmann’s work will be featured along with four other seniors in the first Senior Art Exhibit installation at the Music Center’s Hershberger Gallery, opening this Sunday. Lauren Eldridge, Brooke Hutchison, Chet Everett and Abigail Groff will be among the other seniors whose work will be exhibited until Mar. 18.

Photo by Chase Snyder

This week’s featured artist is Dirk Leichty, a senior, with a sample of one of his five life-size zombie figures. As part of the requirements for his senior show in April, Leichty is creating an outdoor installation, applying a comic book format to a three-dimensional space.

“The figures will be layered in deep space in a way that the visibility from any given angle only conveys a limited part of the whole,” Leichty said of the eventual completed project.

Leichty added that it will be “an imperfect translation of a comic book into three dimensions that is analogous to the imperfect animation of a dead corpse into a walking zombie.”

Keep an eye out for more of Leichty’s work and that of other seniors in the Artist’s Corner before their gallery openings over the coming weeks.

Editor’s note: If you have artwork that you would like to be featured in the Artist’s Corner, please contact Ben Noll at benjaminmn@goshen.edu.

The assignment was part of John Blosser’s fall semester painting class where students were asked to paint a train theme with acrylics on a found object. With the help of the Physical Plant and a little dumpster diving, Kraybill decided to use a wooden window frame to support the Plexiglas frame.

“Originally, I painted a train on the front in a more representational manner,” Kraybill said. However, when she saw the back of the object, “I happily discovered the colors were much more vibrant.”

Using additional layers of paint and exploring a scratching method, Kraybill achieved a more abstract, textured piece than she originally intended. “It was fun to find freedom in painting in a new style and on an unusual surface,” Kraybill said.

Editor’s note: If you have artwork that you would like to be featured in the Artist’s Corner, please contact Ben Noll at benjaminmn@goshen.edu.

“We had to create multiple skin tone colors on our palette before we even begun painting,” Smucker said. “There are many layers on this painting, but oil paint is slow drying and each layer has to dry in between session to work. It took a number of class periods.”

Since oil paint is not water based, it requires extensive cleanup. Smucker recalled that students often left the class covered in paint.

Editor’s note: If you have artwork that you would like to be featured in the Artist’s Corner, please contact Ben Noll at benjaminmn@goshen.edu.

The winged figure that dominates the design is actually the outline of Tsigie’s own body but represents any individual. The piece is filled with symbolism, including the image of Africa on the wings which represents Tsigie’s African heritage and conveys group belonging.

The barbed wire symbolizes how an individual can be held down from helping the world and the surrounding words – borrowed from a Citizen Cope song – serve as “catalysts,” according to Tsigie.

The outline of the world map at the bottom, Tsigie said, suggests that one individual does have the power to create change, for good or evil.

Color serves as an important symbol in the original work, too. “The green color surrounding the wings represents life – life coming to the heart of the individual,” Tsigie said. “The red fire with the peace sign in the middle – right on top of my heart – shows that there is still hope for peace and prosperity.”

Edgar Diaz's drawing, entitled "Hope" Photo by Chase Snyder

This week’s featured artwork is “Hope” by Edgar Diaz, a senior business major. Diaz produced this drawing in John Blosser’s Drawing 101 class this past fall semester. It was the first drawing course he had ever taken. Diaz’s inspiration for the piece came from an elderly homeless woman at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, an organization he has connected with through his work with “DanceSport … on the plaza,” a ballroom dancing studio in Mishawaka. According to Diaz, “When asked what she wanted for Christmas, [she] asked for love, happiness and peace. I decided to give her the gift of hope as well. It can be seen reflected in the eyes of the homeless children that the piece centers on.”

Editor’s note: If you have artwork that you would like to be featured in the Artist’s Corner, please contact Ben Noll at benjaminmn@goshen.edu.

A Drawing by Chet Franklin. Photo by Julia Baker.

This week’s featured artist is Chet Franklin, a senior art and American Sign Language double major. His piece, “Connection,” was created as part of John Blosser’s Drawing 101 class this past fall semester. Chet stuck to a black-and-white color palette for this work using inkwash on masonite with newspaper, gesso and string. Franklin said, “I chose to use strictly black and white imagery so that I could connect the drawn images to the newspaper print, as well as to simplify the image as a whole.” Franklin also said that the “simplicity of color correlates to the simplicity of human connection, being where the title ‘Connection’ comes from. Throughout the work there are many different symbols for human connection and empathy, both being main themes in this piece. One example of this is the handwritten words that become symbolic for language as a necessary means of connection for humans.”

Editor’s note: If you have artwork that you would like to be featured in the Artist’s Corner, please contact Ben Noll at benjaminmn@goshen.edu.