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.