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 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.

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.

Born in 1948 in Changchun, China during the time of the communist Mao Zedong regime, Hung was sent to work in the rice fields for four years as a high school senior.

Ordered to paint art glorifying the Mao regime, Hung found a correlation between the hopeless faces of present-day Chinese women workers and the old photographs of past Emperors and their wives, inserting challenging references in the propaganda she painted.

Hung studied art and earned her bachelor’s of fine arts in education from Beijing’s Teachers College. She then taught art at the elite Jing Shan School and began a children’s television program, “How to Draw and Paint.”

Hung earned a graduate degree in mural painting from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1975 and a master’s in visual arts from UCLA in 1986. She has been awarded multiple grants and awards, and has shown her work in major galleries and museums around the world.

Hung’s art is infused with Chinese history and symbols, both contemporary and ancient. The prints displayed in the Hershberger Gallery place Chinese women toiling in labor among lyrical images from classic Chinese paintings — birds, flowers and fish.

Colorful drips and traditional Chinese painting motifs partially obscure images of peasants. Circles appear throughout her paintings, Hung’s own signature mark and an ancient Chinese symbol of the universe.

Hung Liu will present a free, public lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 15 in Rieth Recital Hall.

The Hershberger Gallery is located in the Goshen College Music Center and will feature Hung’s exhibit until Mar. 3.

The exhibit opened in November and will continue through Jan. 18. Glick and Binder will give their Topics and Issues talk on Sunday, Jan. 18, at 1:30 p.m. in the gallery and will discuss their work in the process of creating.

According to Judy Wenig-Horswell, associate professor of art, Glick, a former student, was actually an interdisciplinary major with a concentration in art, specifically jewelry. After serving in Bolivia with her husband, Glick returned to Goshen College as a resident director of junior and senior housing. During that time, she took the opportunity to gain experience in a different medium and began to work with enamel.

Glick attended East Carolina University and received her master’s degree in metal design in 2007. Now she will be sharing more about her exhibit entitled, “Invitation. Stillness. Movement,” which includes an intriguing collection of her jewelry pieces, enamel panels and prints.

In addition, Binder, executive director of Studio Arts Center of South Bend, will discuss her work with calligraphy and how she layers poetry, color and designs onto canvas, in an exhibit of multiple tapestry-like pieces entitled, “Beyond Words.”

The exhibit is free of charge and open to the public during the week from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m,  from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sundays.