Feature image courtesy of Visitpanamacitybeach.com website.
I did my Campus Event project on the Made in Greece X Art Exhibit in the Amelia Tapper Center. I decided to go with this event because I have always loved Greece, from its history to its mythology, so I figured learning more about its art would be a good place to start. All the art gallery pieces submitted by students were inspired by an actual trip to Greece that they took. They visited museums to view ceramics and potteries, which are some of the few surviving pieces of Greek History. As Anna Parsons says best, “Greece is really known for its pottery because it’s the only art that has really survived.” Without that pottery and other ceramic arts that have survived, we would know far less about Ancient Greece than we do now. That’s part of what makes it so important. An entire civilization’s history was rediscovered from those surviving pieces. Similar to Egypt’s history with the Rosetta stone, these pottery pieces were the key to unlocking and understanding those stories.
One of my sources, once again Anna Parsons, submitted her piece of a small house with furniture. She was inspired by actual Greek Houses that she visited on her trip to Greece, on the island of Skopelos. She also took inspiration from Etruscan hut urns, which were made to resemble the house of the deceased stored in that urn. While her actual project looked very little like an urn, she helped show her inspiration for it by keeping the natural clay colors. Her project looked more like a doll house or trinket box of some sort, but it still managed to capture the feeling of home, and how its memory can transcend time and space. Overall, I think she did a good job of capturing that feeling. So while she didn’t use any specific work from Greece like some other students did, she still managed to capture a piece of history and make her own work from it, which is something very hard to do indeed.
My other source was Kelly Page. She submitted multiple pieces, including but not limited to The Grief of Demeter, Good Mourning, Fog at the Monastery, and Let the Light in. While her favorite pieces were the photography she did, because they truly captured the beauty of Greece, the piece she’s most proud of was Good Mourning, because she had to use a lot of unfamiliar skill sets and it was the most vulnerable piece she had created, and likely one of the most challenging she’s done so far. Her pictures managed to infuse each one with feeling, as a good photograph should. A picture says a thousand words. She found it fulfilling to capture those scenes and try to infuse them with meaning through her work.
All in all, there were some incredibly impressive pieces of art submitted to the Made in Greece Art Gallery, and they all stand out in their own way. These are just some of the pieces that you could view, so it’s worth checking out for the limited time they are available.
Tyler Kendall
Student Writer - Fall 2024
This was written for DIG 2151: Writing for Media.
