Walking through a traditional museum, each hallway is dedicated to a certain kind of art. Turn left for oil paintings, right for pastels.
But in the Architecture building Thursday night, there were no labels for what kind of art would be shown. Actually, there were no labels to who could submit art at all—the show meshed different types of art together under one roof.
“MESH: Redefining Art at Temple” was held by the Art of Business/Business of Art group, and featured 30 pieces of work from students across seven schools at Temple for each creative outlet their major may need.
“No matter what major you’re in, whether it’s accounting or fine arts or engineering, nursing, whatever it may be, there’s creativity involved somewhere in that,” ABBA president and sophomore art history major Fiona Fackler said. “A lot of majors have a lot of creative influence no matter what you’re doing.”
“It’s more of a mindset than, ‘I’m an artist, I’m creative,’” she added. “It can go into many different ways within your life.”
ABBA meets weekly and has been planning the MESH exhibit since February. Thursday’s event was the second annual installment, and after an overwhelming turnout of more than 200 people last year, Fackler said the student organization aimed to repeat the first year’s success with a greater reach across the schools at Temple.
Students from the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts, Fox School of Business, Tyler School of Art, School of Media and Communication, College of Science and Technology, College of Liberal Arts and Boyer College of Music and Dance had work showcased in the MESH exhibit.
The show had a turnout of about 70 people who had the chance to see the different mediums of spoken word poetry, sketches, hyper-realistic drawings, film screenings, embroidery, Arabic calligraphy, photography, jazz, paintings, jewelry, macrame hang and fiber work.
“I don’t think one needs to be in Tyler School of Art to be considered an artist,” senior metals and jewelry major and MESH contributor Julia Strauss said. “I really truly believe everyone has an artistic side whether they choose to acknowledge it or not on some level. Creativity is not something that’s exclusive.”
Strauss never contributed to ABBA or MESH before, but said she was impressed by the turnout and the overall work from every major.
Web manager and designer for ABBA and junior graphic design major Michele Wiesen said she thought this year’s event had great reach across majors.
“Normally you have a show at Tyler and it’s a graphic design show or a painting show and it’s all very similar work,” Weisen said. “It’s so interesting to see my work and other people’s work up on the same space, same wall. I’m between photography pieces and political pins, while my art is hyper-realistic drawings.”
Sophomore accounting and finance major Andrew Drake attended MESH both years, and he said he thought the event was more lively this year than last year.
“I think when people think of art like this, they think of Tyler alone,” Drake said. “But when you come here, you see people outside of Tyler have artistic ability.”
Jaycee Homsher, a sophomore entrepreneurship innovation management major, doesn’t fit the typical mold of Tyler students as the only artists on Main Campus. Homsher had his oil paintings displayed and he danced throughout the evening.
“The fact that I’m a business student, but I’m also a dancer, and I also paint, that is ‘MESH,’” Homsher said.
“We all have these labels attached to us,” Strauss said. “Metals major, communications major, photography major. At the end of the day, we’re all just creative beings coming together for a night of art.”
Gillian McGoldrick can be reached at gillian.mcgoldrick@temple.edu or on Twitter @gill_mcgoldrick.
Editors note: Members of The Temple News’ Photo department were involved with MESH. They played no role in the editing process of this article.
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