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The show must go on

Art Department partnered with Bakersfield Museum of Art for senior art showcase

By California State University, Bakersfield

March 2^nd, 2021

Many events were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, including the senior art showcase at California State University, Bakersfield, which should have taken place earlier in the year.

“We had been in conversation with Bakersfield Museum’s Rachel Magnus about doing a collaborative project with our students, which we agreed would be great for everybody,” said Jedediah Caesar, CSUB Department of Art and Todd Madigan Gallery curator.

The showcase is part of a year-long professional practices course in the Art Department. Throughout the year, students work with various professors, learning how to hone their artist statements, how to do a professional curriculum vitae and reference their work

“The goal of the class is for the students to create a new body of work. We think that’s ambitious, but we also feel that it should be, for the completion of their degree,” said Caesar.

The gallery showcase is normally held in the Todd Madigan Gallery, adjacent to the Doré Theatre, but the department knew they’d been outgrowing it for some time.

In 2020, the Art Department partnered with the Bakersfield Museum of Art to display a gallery downtown.

“This exhibition is the culmination of their degree, but also of a one-year process, a set of professional practice classes taught by our faculty. So, the idea of it being in a museum is also modeling what they hope to accomplish after graduation,” added Caesar.

The main idea behind the gallery is to give the art students exposure with their work.

As everyone knows, just when the event should have been taking place, life was put on hold, with businesses, public spaces and classes on campus being shut down.

“At the same time that we got the news that the campus was going to close, the museum made the same decision about their space. And we did what we've had to do with a lot of projects, we just put it on pause while we tried to figure out what was going on. The students had been working on this for about nine months, so that was a difficult but necessary decision. Luckily, we had a great partner in the museum and we kept the conversation going about how and when we could make this happen,” added Caesar.

Nearly a year had passed, and the show was pushed further out, but Caesar said they felt like they needed to do it, so the students could have closure, since a few were already on to grad school and others moved away to other states.

“Regardless of where the student exhibition is held, it should look essentially like a museum presentation. We follow standard practices, which is another thing we teach the students — the protocols of handling, shipping and hanging work. In this case we couldn’t do that. Usually, I install it with the students collaboratively as my team, which is an exciting process, because they're handling their own work, but also their peers' work,” said Caesar of the process.

“Their participation gives them a sense of control over the process, and the confidence to know that if they need to pack a painting, to move it across town or to ship it to someone who's collected it, then they have the skills to do that,” Caesar added.

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, students weren’t able to get the full effect, as it was only Caesar and one other person, wearing masks, to put the exhibit together at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.

Throughout it all, the students, like everyone else, have tried to adjust and make the best of the situation.

The group of students in 2020 included many impressive artists.

“I had so much great work to choose from, more work than we could use, and I had to do some editing, and make some hard choices in that process. I think there are just a lot of extraordinary projects,” said Caesar.

The pieces demonstrated by students tend to tell a unified message or theme that tie together.

“If you know anything about CSUB, is that our students come from really diverse backgrounds. We have a lot of first-generation students … students who are the first in their family to attend college. We have students who are working in very personal ways to understand experiences that are often portrayed in simplistic terms in the media and the political arena. But these are really personal conversations that our students are having in their lives, and that often enter their artwork. For example, some of these young artists address the immigrant experience in the United States, thinking about ideas of origins and how generational shifts are experienced within families,” said Caesar.

“Rather than the flattening of these cultural conversations we’ve become accustomed to, in these works the methods and metaphors in the works are as varied as the experiences. That points to something interesting about what artwork does, because it's such a direct, communicative method,” Caesar added.

The following students are just a few who participated in the senior art showcase.

Lorena Cazares

Lorena Cazares was drawn to the Art Department because of the faculty and sense of community. She always looked forward to the Visiting Artists Lecture Series before deciding to become an art major, because it exposed her to so many artists she might not have heard about otherwise.

As the others on campus, including Cazares’ classmates, she also experienced a challenge with shifting and wondering whether the art showcase would come to fruition.

“Adjusting to online classes and having an uncertain plan for the future made it difficult to imagine the possibility of a show with enough safety and health precautions. By the time, the semester was over, our professors stayed committed to the idea of having a show at the Bakersfield Museum of Art and extended this conversation with us throughout the summer and the fall,” said art alumnus Cazares of her piece for the art show.

Since the show gave them more time to work on their projects, Cazares was interested in seeing new work from her classmates.

“Being able to individually see our class’s efforts all in one collective space was a very fulfilling experience and I am very thankful to have been a part of it,” said Cazares.

“My work displayed in the senior show was a collaborative series with my grandmother. With these works, I layered my graphite drawings over brightly colored crochet squares that were passed down to me,” she added.

Cazares began working on the piece in February 2020 and finished eight of them during the pandemic.

“It was a way for me to connect both of our individual crafts while being separated both geographically and generationally. Her crochet squares acted as borders for my drawings of photographs of my family before migrating to the United States,” Cazares explained of her work.

Since graduating from CSUB, she has been focusing her time on building her portfolio and working graduate school applications. She hopes to be part of an MFA program by fall 2021.

Deanna Barahona

Deanna Barahona had always been interested in art but thought she would be a liberal arts major when she got to college.

After taking an art class with Jesse Sugarmann at CSUB, she changed her major to art.

“I don’t regret it at all,” said Barahona.

Barahona’s piece is called “No Comprendo – No Habla Español.”

“It represents not necessarily being able to understand a language that I feel like I’m supposed to be speaking, especially when people speak to me,” said Barahona.

The piece was made of fabric, along with letters strung together.

“I had a great time at CSUB,” said Barahona about the professors and the Art Department. “They really encourage students to keep going, even after college, or getting our bachelor’s degrees.”

Since graduating from CSUB, she has been working on various art styles, including working with fabric, learning how to embroider and has been getting back into painting.

Barahona has also applied to seven schools for her master’s degree and is awaiting a response for that.

Jared Padilla-Elliott

Jared Padilla-Elliott was always interested in art throughout elementary and middle school. But it wasn’t until he got to Humboldt State that he realized he was spending more time drawing than paying attention in his classes as a forestry major.

“[I] let me myself be free to do something I was really interested in,” said Padilla-Elliott.

Padilla-Elliott was president of the art club, which allowed for him to help coordinate and plan a variety of art shows, as well as a trip to San Francisco to support one of the department’s professors.

“Normally the whole senior class fits in the Todd Madigan Gallery,” said Padilla-Elliott, adding that this year had 36 students and had outgrown the space.

“Everyone was super excited about it and kept it hush-hush for most of the year,” he added.

Padilla-Elliott’s piece used recyclable materials, which he gained an interest for while attending Humboldt State.

For his project, Padilla-Elliott experimented with the recyclable materials that some of his dad’s medical supplies came in.

The piece was a reference to the Bob Dylan song, “Buckets of Rain,” in which he talks about “buckets of moonbeams.” He started thinking about what that meant and felt it was the perfect metaphor for negative thoughts or thoughts associated with mental illness.

Not being able to see the show in person was a bittersweet experience for Padilla-Elliott.

“But to see a photo of my work in a museum was so rewarding,” said Padilla-Elliott.

Since graduation, Padilla-Elliott moved to San Diego with his wife, where he started teaching at an after-school program for one of the districts in that area.

This April, another large group of seniors will present their projects.

“In normal times, the gallery is a place where a lot of alumni show up for openings, to reconnect with professors or reconnect with each other. We don't have all those things right now, but we are still trying to find ways to keep the emphasis on community, because that really is something at the center of a lot of the other things you need to be able to live and work as artists,” said Caesar.

“We want any of these students that are interested in pursuing this part of their life, of communicating through art, to be able to build that support in the world outside of school. And we're part of that. We want to stay in touch with them, and be there for them,” said Caesar.

For more information on the latest events, showcases and work in the Art Department, visit the Art Department website. To view the online gallery for the 2020 senior art showcase, visit the Todd Madigan Gallery website.