The Senior Undergraduate Thesis Show Opened This Week

By
Audrey Deng
December 06, 2019

On December 5th, the undergraduate senior thesis exhibition held a reception celebrating the show’s opening. This show marks the midway point in the seniors’ final year at Columbia University. Works by these visual arts majors are on display in the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Dodge Hall from December 5-18, 2019.

Professor Emily Henretta and Professor Tomas Vu-Daniel were both involved in the show’s creation.

Professor Henretta said that the purpose of this show was to showcase what Visual Arts majors were working on so far in the year. In a statement to the university, she said, “We put on a Fall Thesis exhibition every year to showcase the fantastic work of our Visual Arts Majors. The students work independently to develop a significant body of work over the course of the academic year. The Fall show is a marker of our halfway point and introduces the students to public presentation of their work. We have students making work in a diverse range of media including ceramics, painting and drawing, installation, sculpture, printmaking and video.”

At the Dec. 5 reception, Visual Arts and Anthropology major Renata Del Riego said that this fall show was a way to show progress over the year. Del Riego, at the show, is working on Caretaker II, which is made of dried cornhusks woven together. “There is a Caretaker I,” she said, “which is a part of Caretaker II. It started out as dried cornhusks which I turned into a rope; the first piece exists in the second.”

Her classmate Flora Noring’s piece Dreams as Lies I’ve Told was made of ceramic. “As a kid I used to lie about dreams, and I wanted to use ceramic because it will last for a long time. They are incubators for dreams.”

Isabella Norris, who studies Visual Arts and Architecture, thinks about the architectural applications of art In her piece Star Mobile, for example, she connects cut-out stars at each of their points, and doing so creates a sphere. Norris explained, “The limitations of art interest me--how a work can go from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. I want my work to be spatial and playful.”

There will be a second show in the spring to celebrate the end of these students’ undergraduate time at Columbia University.