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Fall cafe live: our first art show
October 22, 2007

We hosted a cool program a few days back--Shift: A Fall Show.  We hope it will become the first of a new series of artsy library events.

For a long time we filled our library with student work, especially student art.  I've always loved the sense of student ownership.  This year, we installed a student gallery in our quiet reading area. Because we wanted our student artists to get a truer sense of the professional side of being an artist, we hosted our first gallery opening.

Student Council jumped onboard, providing the marketing, food, and generally helped to run the show.  Students musicians jammed unplugged the entire night.  The 120 visitors included parents and administrators.  Students mingled in ways I hadn't seen before.  People looked--really looked--at the art and chatted seriously with the artists.
On the tech side, we ran a slide show of the Flickr version of the gallery on a large screen.  It looped and ran itself. We ran another version of the show on the catalog look-up station and encouraged comments--a sort of guest book approach.

I was hoping for just a bit more online interaction. We didn't get as many comments as I wished and the student artists were so rushed putting up the physical show, we really didn't have enough time for them to include their own artists' statements online.  Please feel free to interact with our online gallery.  Leave comment for our artists. 

Pics of the event itself are posted on our Springfield Clip Art gallery.

It was all very cool and very replicable.  Our students are already planning the Winter Café Live.

Posted by Joyce Valenza on October 22, 2007 | Comments (1)