Senior art majors showed off their work to friends, family and community members at the first of two senior art shows on Sunday.  

The event was held in the Hershberger Art Gallery, where artwork by four students is on display.  

Exhibit One features the artwork of four seniors: Anna Smucker, Leah Kauffman, Andrew Bodden and Jacqueline Efigenio.

Anna Smucker, a graphic design major, presented a zine booklet documenting her SST experience in the Southwest United States in the summer of 2021. The booklet is split into two parts, based in the Navajo and Hopi Reservations she visited. 

Smucker said the most challenging part of her project was “figuring out how to create a unified theme throughout my booklet … While it was really exciting to revisit all of the memories that we made during this time, I struggled a bit in the beginning stages to figure out the structure of my book, because I would have included literally everything that we did during the trip if I could.” 

She finally decided to divide the book into two distinct sections. She communicated the change between the two settings with a shift in the color scheme. For the part based in the Navajo reservation she used red, while she used blue for the Hopi section.

Leah Kauffman, another graphic design major, created a yearbook for her senior project. Kauffman said she loves looking through old yearbooks, so she was disappointed when she found that Goshen College no longer produced yearbooks for students. 

“For a few years now, Denver, Gabi and I have talked about putting a yearbook together our senior year,” Kauffman said. “When it came time for me to decide on a senior project theme, I knew creating something like this would be perfect. The “yearbook” would be made, and I would have something to create for my show.” 

Kauffman’s yearbook features seniors graduating in 2022, and includes “a day in the life” section, superlatives and photographs. 

The third presenter, Andrew Bodden, is a graphic design and communication double major. For his project, he crafted large graphic design prints of cartoons interacting in realistic settings. 

Out of all his finished pieces, Bodden said his favorite is one titled“Skulliosis.” He said, “the purple and blue hues of the sky blend in perfectly with the flames surrounding the skull.” 

Bodden’s work blended reality and fiction. “Like ‘Space Jam,’ I wanted to make it seem as if these characters could actually interact with our world.” 

Efigenio, an art and graphic design double major, used the show to display her photography. She said that she began preparing for the show last spring. 

Efigenio described one of her shoots as “walking by myself with my camera on my hands early in the morning or during cold nights, with my feet freezing just because I wanted to capture the first snow of the season.”

She said she learned a lot from the experience, including photography techniques and editing. But most importantly, she learned to not care what people think. 

“The process of preparing for the exhibit helped me connect with nature in some way, as well as finding a side of myself I didn’t know,” Efigenio said. 

The students’ artwork will be on display in the Hershberger Art Gallery through April 4th for those wanting to see it.  The second art show will be held on April 11.