Student Initiatives

MOCA CLEVELAND

In 2010, Students from graphic design and studio art worked with faculty mentor Matthew Kolodziej for student team competition between Myers School of Art, Kent State, Oberlin, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State.  Students responded to Vivid Astro Focus exhibtion at MOCA Cleveland with theme of water and science in winning entry.

Winning collage measuring 12′ x 6′ focused on ideas of water and pollution.  Jimmy Hagan of the The Oberlin review wrote:

Akron turned the buzzing complexity of AVAF’s work into a public service announcement on the need to “break our dependence on unclean and unsafe energy sources.” They even threw in a four-foot painted fish for kicks. Despite this pedestrian nature, little can be taken away from the aesthetic superiority of a vulgar aquatic fill.

Quite simply, it was a stellar, multilayered and technically complex event that included fish scales, wavy painted oil splotches and a gently lit gaping hole in the top half of the work. It was likely the compositional success of the gap that shot Akron to the top of the pile. Lykins Reich explained the jury’s decision: “Akron was bold in leaving a large portion of the wall exposed, emphasized only by colored lighting.”

Cabinets of Curiosity, Cummings Center for the History of Psychology

During a Spring 2022 semester-long [Un]Class, students from a variety of majors collaborated to uncover the natural history mysteries hidden for decades in some of the University of Akron’s closets and cabinets. Through a combination of detective work, biology, archives, art, and education/outreach, they worked collaboratively to prepare a collection of taxidermied birds donated to UA by the Rhodes family in the early 1900s for public access and exhibition. Students had the opportunity to learn from leading experts regarding the historical significance of biological collections, proper preservation protocols, digitizing and archival practices, and the urgency of science education and communication for a public audience. This exhibition is a culmination of interdisciplinary and experiential learning processes that include critical and abstract thinking, exploration, and cultivating curiosity. As part of the process of research and collaboration, students at the Myers School of Art were invited to respond to the [Un]Class projects and their work is incorporated into the exhibition. More than a century later, our wish is to bring the university’s original, and forgotten, “Museum of Zoology” to a new audience and to inspire future generations. This project and exhibition have been a collaboration between The University of Akron’s Department of Biology, Lebron James Family Foundation School of Education, Cummings Center’s Institute for Human Science and Culture, Mary Schiller Myers School of Art, and the Akron Summit County Public Library.

Intermediate Drawing, Mapping Downtown

Students in the intermediate drawing class were challenged to collect and reimagine how to visualize the Downtown Landscape. The images shown here were from a large scale project in which the student visited the city planning office to find graphic imagery of the infrastructure. He then made stencils to develop elaborate layered images. The final images were installed permanently in the downtown Akron city planning offices in collaboration with a summer program with Akron public school students.