Semester Reflections

Semester 4

The parts of my ePortfolio that demonstrate my growth in presenting my ideas is my new resume and Capstone. I recently redesigned my resume as I have begun applying for jobs and attending career fairs. As I am a design student, I thought that I needed a resume that demonstrated my design background. I stuck to a purple and yellow color scheme and updated the information on my resume with the new organizations that I was a part of. The design of my resume was affected as it caught many people’s attention at the visual career fair that I attended. Through this process of redesigning my resume, I learned more about better marketing for myself and being my own self advocate. Additionally, through the development of my capstone project I learned how to make art that best conveys the central message of my project. I had a lot of different parts in my project and I realised that not all of them helped to strengthen my pieces so I had to kill my darlings. 

During ArtsFest, I realized that people don’t have the same perception of art as I do. If it wasn’t for me engaging with the people passing by my art exhibition, less people would have gotten to experience and understand my work. As someone who understands and learns about art as it’s my hobby and major, I take my time looking at pieces and trying to understand. However, it seems that it is more common for people to quickly glance at art and not try to understand the full meaning of it. As attention spans are becoming shorter, we as artists must learn how to engage our audience either by talking with them or adding immersive elements to our work like augment reality. 

My capstone drew upon what I had learned from the past two years of how art can be a tool for communicating important ideas and topics. I first learned this in the workshop that I attended during the spring semester of my freshman year called Craftivism. In this workshop, I learned how cross-stitching, embroidery, quilting, and crochet have been used to protest and spread positivity. I drew from this concept and used the time management techniques that were taught to me in CPSA250 to execute my project in a timely manner. I often procrastinate, but using techniques like the pomodoro timer and time blocking help with my productivity and my anxiety. 

I have deepened my existing artistic talents and interests through my capstone by combining two dimensional and three-dimensional mediums. As a Studio Art and Immersive Media Design major, I don’t often get the chance to combine what I am learning together from both of my majors. I also explored using my crocheting hobby as a way to make fine art, when crochet is often thought to be a women’s hobby. I also learned how to make an AR image tracker that could overlay images over my tapestries. This added an immersive experience to my work and took my entire piece to the next level. I hope that in the future I can continue exploring combining opposite mediums that audiences can experience. 

I feel that I have demonstrated an ability to collaborate effectively with those holding diverse artistic perspectives, interests, and abilities through CPSA250 as we all developed our own capstone project that all had different perspectives and meanings. I not only learned a lot about women objectification through my project but also what it means to be a second-generation from Val, and the history of African American artists from Andrew (just a view examples). It was really cool to see how they developed their pieces and for them to give me advice on my pieces and for me to help with their projects. 

Being in the ArtScholars program has taught me a lot, so much that it would be hard to type it all out. I think that the biggest thing that I learned from this program is how important art is, especially in the current political climate that we are living in that wants to silence the arts. I’ve seen the importance of art from every field trip and especially at ArtsFest. Art is often used as a tool to convey important messages like for social issues, political issues, environmental issues, and many more. But it is also an important  tool in building community. There are many different art communities just on campus like ArtScholars, MSOM, GSO, and many others. Each one is a place for people who need it and art allows people to feel like they belong somewhere. 

Thank you to ArtScholars for being one of those places for me.