Exhibit Description

This year’s QCC student show is being held by the Department of Art and Photography in our recently renovated Art Gallery. We are quite pleased to be showcasing the talent of our students. The quality of their creativity in both the 2005 and 2006 shows is providing a firm foundation for the establishment of a tradition of annual student art exhibitions at the Queensborough Gallery venue.

With the strong support of President Eduardo Martí and the expert stewardship of Gallery Director Faustino Quintanilla, the faculty of the Department of Art and Photography have worked together to curate an exhibition that displays Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Ceramics, Photography, Digital Art, and 2-Dimensional Design. Nonetheless, there would not be an exhibition without the talent, hard work and dedication of the students.

QCC has a long history of supporting the arts. Not only does it offer extensive programs to students in the Fine and Performing Arts, but it has active theater, music and gallery exhibition programs as well. Over many decades the Department of Art and Photography has striven to pursue teaching of the visual arts not only as unique creative disciplines, but also as a fundamental and essential component of traditional liberal arts education and an important resource for the life of the greater Queensborough community.

The world has become increasingly technical, and computers and new media technologies have found their way into virtually every aspect of modern life. This is certainly true of the arts as well, and students today find themselves both excited and challenged by these developments. One of the big tests we face in teaching new skills is to integrate the traditional principals of design, expression and technique that have been at the heart of the creative visual arts since people put images of their world on the walls of Spanish caves over 30,000 years ago, with the new digital tools and techniques which enable us now to distribute our imagery instantly, and to an audience of millions across the entire planet. Providing this integration lies at the heart of our teaching philosophy and which, I believe gives the work in this show and catalogue so much of its power, energy and excitement.

As I have looked over the works of art in the exhibition I have been struck over and over again by the originality of our students, by their adventurous desire to explore art styles and media and to master them, to search out parts of New York City and beyond that we do not see or think of often, by their discovery of beauty in nature and in abstraction, by their ability to convey to us through portraiture the people who they care about, by their humor, their sharp eye for the unusual and their excellent understanding of and recognition that they are the heirs to past artists and to the history of art.

Dr. Jo Ann Wein