Art Schooled: A Year among Prodigies, Rebels, and Visionaries at a World-Class Art College

8. Exhibitmania

[ 8 ] exhibitmania n a few more days, the clocks will be turned back, and nightfall will envelop the campus soon after students reach their 4:00 p.m. classes. They’ll emerge to see a full moon over the Brown Center, which glows from within at night, revealing its steel skeleton and glass skin. Halloween is around the corner. Everyone is back from fall break, and for mica’s freshmen, it has been their first chance to evaluate where they stand. This has been the time of mid-term evaluations for all students, a time when warning slips go out if anyone is slipping behind in a class. For freshmen, however, the first midterm is designed to be merciful (they’ll have other opportunities to get warning slips the rest of their years at mica). Tonight is Thursday, a time to relax and make the art scene. Even at an art school, that means schmoozing at an opening reception for an art gallery show. At the centrally located Fox Building, the sound of jazz and r&b standards wafts from the lobby. At both ends of the lobby are the campus’s main galleries, the Decker and the Meyerhoff. (In addition to having the galleries, the Fox Building is the most multi-use on campus—painting, drawing, illustration, general fine arts, art education, community arts, and environmental design). Tonight the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries are host to a reception for the largest competitive student art show of the year. It’s called the Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, and it’s the opportunity for a select few to feel like the chosen few. Of 1,700 undergraduates, just 234 submitted works to the jury, some encouraged by teachers, but most responding to posters around campus or to an e-mail alert. Finally, 118 students are featured in the show, what the school calls “the best of the best.” Not every student saw it coming, too busy to read the signs or hear the announcements. As usual, there is a bit of regret or jealousy. Not for Nora Truskey, of course. She has joined the Haunted House Club, which is racing to finish its haunted walkthrough at the Gateway’s BBox Theater, two fun-filled sessions of “the I Exhibitmania [ 127 ] coolest most frightening things to experience in the universe.” (That is, it “will scare every part of your disgusting peasant self and then feed you to the worms. haunted house will offend you. It will make you cry and vomit at the same time.”) Plus, Halloween night comes in a few days. There’s nothing at an art school—in terms of bizarre costumes and publicity posters—like Halloween . The pageant of costumes will come down the grand stairway at the Main Building. The Undergraduate Juried Exhibition has a different aesthetic from Halloween, naturally enough. The reception draws a large crowd, which knots around two cloth-draped reception tables. The students pick at fruit, crackers, and cheese. The Geoff Rohrbach Trio of piano, bass, and drums heads into its two-hour set. The gallery scene at Fox tonight is not that different from the art world in general, whether it’s an opening at a prestigious New York gallery or a beer-and-chips gathering at an “alternative space” around Baltimore. Mostly, there are white walls hung with art and people holding refreshments . In Baltimore, like any art city, the gallery spaces have names that The Brown Center aglow in fall. [ 128 ] a r t w o r l d s are hard to keep track of. If the spaces last over time, the names become mainstays. (Only the art historians know all the details, such as that surrealism had its first American outlet at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, “happenings” got started at the Reuben Gallery in 1959, or “neo-geo” began at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1986). In the city of Baltimore, gallery spaces have names like Area 405, Load of Fun, Windup Space, the h&h Building galleries, the Creative Alliance galleries at the old Patterson Theater, Maryland Art Place, or the city-funded School 33 Art Center. At art schools, galleries usually bear the names of donors, and that is everywhere the case at mica. At the Fox galleries tonight, the music rises and the food supplies diminish . For the undergraduates, it’s an early taste of the competitive art world. They are also learning how art history is...