During the beginning of the 2022 year, I was planning and working on a lot of personal projects. Eventually I started brainstorming ideas on what to do with the Art Club during the second semester of school. I really wanted to have the Art Club complete a lot of projects this year, and also raise money for more opportunities next year. I came to the idea of creating an event, where everyone's art can be displayed to the public in person, and to give artists the opportunity to socialize and network with their peers. The main idea I wanted to stick to was having the event be open to all mediums and art forms. I wanted this to be a yearly event that the Art Club organizes, and that all creative students look forward to at the end of the year. This event would later be monetized through donations or an admissions cost, and would fundraise money for the Art Club.

The planning process of this event started at the bare basics, where, when, what time, and how. I revised our date to be on Friday, May 6th, as that would be early enough from graduation parties. I decided on having the event late enough in the evening, but not too late, so we decided on 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM. It was difficult to decide how long the event should be, so I chose the in between 1-2 hours, and made the gallery an hour and a half long. Finally we decided on having the gallery in the high school commons, as the gym could be too much space to try and fill.

Now I had to plan the rest of the gallery, and how to make it possible. The biggest issue that was prevalent was that our club does not have any funds or way to properly display art. Traditional art galleries use display panels, but a single panel could cost hundreds of dollars. As well as this, I was worried about whether we would receive enough attention or traction, so I wanted our club to be active on social media to promote the event. These issues were something I tried to find solutions to for the next couple of months.

This portion of the project had some complications as there were plans that fell through, and there were some issues that still needed to be resolved.

In the "Plan of Action" stage, I got the idea of having live music play during the event just to make it more personal. I thought it would be great to give student bands the opportunity to show their skill, and to perform some background music during the event. Sadly one band never replied to us, and the other student band was going to be busy the day of the gallery. So with sadness, I decided to drop the idea and bring up this concern at our next Art Club meeting. The members there helped come up with the idea of just bringing out a piano, and letting a member play piano music. We decided to plan on arranging that instead, but hopefully next year we can have a student band play at the gallery.

During this part of the planning process, I was a little hesitant about not charging an admission fee. Our creative director and I came to an agreement that it would be best to get as many people as we can in the doors, as this is our first year of holding the event. Hopefully we would be able to make a decent amount of money through donations.

At this time, the Education Foundation accepted our request, and we had 15, 7 foot tall panels ordered! Now we had a reliable way to display all of our art, which solved our biggest issue.

Our biggest job to do now was to collect and record all of the submissions to the gallery. We created a spreadsheet to record the names, grades, titles, and mediums of each piece, so we could print this information on name tags attached to the work. To make sure we could display all of our students' skill, we selected works from each grade and art class to be displayed at the gallery.

We also wanted to give a proper send off to our senior artists in our grade, so we began trying to plan some sort of recognition for them. We set one of our officers, Ayla Rech in charge of these plans.

Our Creative Director also came up with the idea that we should have a Personal Choice Award at our first gallery! This means that whatever work is voted the most as someone's "favorite work," they would receive an award. I brought up this idea to our second-to-last Art Club meeting, and it was a tough decision to make if we were going to have medium categories for the Personal Choice Award. Sadly because this is our first year of holding the event, we decided we should simplify things and only do an overall award.

I created a brochure and program on Canvas, and I went through a couple of different design ideas. Originally I was thinking of just printing the program on a single piece of paper, but I thought we should make the program a bit more interesting. So I decided to make a design that would be a 3 sided accordion fold, that way we could also fit a lot more information and have a nice professional feel. With the new information of us now giving awards at the gallery, I had to create a voting ballot for the public to vote. I thought it would be easier to keep the voting ballot inside the program, so I designed some ballots that would loosely fit perfectly in the brochure. With all of these designs made, I had 100 brochures printed. I folded all of these brochures and cut voting ballots for each, and set them loosely inside each folded up program.