Poster by Eric Lee (BFA ’20) and I
For once in the semester, all students dressed up in order to exhibit our semester’s work in the Palazzo. The Palazzo itself was dressed up, too. Flower bouquets decorated the lecture room surrounded by tons of delicious Italian finger food, a never-ending supply of wine and coke, and walls filled with artworks and architecture plots. Desks were cleared out to make way for models or displays.
Annalisa and Anna Rita serves hungry students cake; catered Italian finger foods fill the table.
It was a little heartbreaking to see how many students went travelling during this time so they missed their own exhibit, but for those who stayed, it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to showcase what we’ve been creating throughout the course of four short months (I still can’t believe it’s over). We don’t get this opportunity in Ithaca, since after final reviews we’re pretty much done. At least not in such a setting as this palazzo!
 Exhibition student organizer Chloe Tong arranging architecture models.
Art students exhibited work mainly in the art studios but some spilled out into the library, storage room, cornered-off hallway, staircase, and even in the courtyard. Architecture drawings were pinned up in the architecture studios, organized by what part of Rome their project was located in. Foundations in Architecture students displayed their drawings, collages and models in their room, and photographers in the seminar room. The drawing studio got the huge walls of the lecture hall.
Emma Vecchione (Liberal Studies)’s stop-motion animation for Luca Padroni’s Drawing class.
We’ve all seen each other work on our projects, but not the final product, so it was all very exciting. My personal highlight was Emma Vecchione’s stop-motion animation.
Luca Padroni and guests admiring Eric Lee (BFA ’20)’s triptych on the life of Jesus Christ, superimposed digitally to express changing attitudes towards viewing art with the internet age.
Here, art studio instructor Luca Padroni gives guests an introduction to Eric Lee’s work. I may be biased, but I really enjoyed his triptych, about how we view art with the advent of the internet. 50 images of Madonna and Child are superimposed on one another to create a beautiful, hazy collage in the first; 400 colors are sampled in 50 different images of the “Crucifix” and stretched out to a satisfying abstract graphic; and varying sizes of Piero della Francesca’s “Resurrection of Christ” are layered on one another drawing the eye inward. All three artworks were ones we visited over the course of the semester in varying parts of Italy.
Vivian Lin (BFA ’20) with her animation about a ravioli and a dumpling by the spiral staircase.
Vivian created a hand-drawn animation that ties Chinese culinary culture (dumplings) with Italian culture (ravioli). This draws from her experience of going to Chinese restaurants in Rome and always seeing dumplings written in the menu as ‘raviolis’, which was quite of a culture shock. Like Vivian and Eric’s work, many of the works (or perhaps all) are influenced by the months spent in Italy.
The night is incomplete without a round of Monopoly Deal, Roman version. Esproprio!
Thank you to those who helped put the exhibit together, especially Chloe Tong and Lucas Warfield that set-up until the very last minute. And of course a very special thank you to Annalisa for her hard work and patience with us. For me, it’ll always be a night to remember.
I do wish we didn’t have exams to worry about and this was the finale of our semester, but time to start reviewing…
by Ami Kurosaki