The Athenaeum hosted an all-day celebration of student creativity centered around a T-shirt design competition and exhibitions from the Crow Museum of Asian Art all day April 25.
Athenaeum student ambassadors planned a diverse series of events to engage students across different majors with the museum’s artwork. Around the Athenaeum, participants partook in craft activities, a scavenger hunt contest, an artificial intelligence technology presentation, student organization performances, a candy-art replication competition, tie-dye creation and sidewalk chalking, allowing individuals to showcase their own creativity in various ways.
The main attraction, though, was the T-shirt design contest, in which students were challenged to design a piece of merchandise based on one of the exhibit’s works. Actuarial science graduate student Lynette Osako won the competition with a design based on “Echoes of the Earth,” and she received a $300 prize. Within the coming months, the design is expected to be sold in the Crow Museum’s gift shop.
Charvi Katikala, neuroscience junior and one of the student ambassadors for the Art-a-thon, said the T-shirt design contest sought to invite students to engage with art in a format often used exclusively for technical majors: the hackathon. Instead of the typical 24-hour program associated with hackathons, the T-shirt design contest lasted only six hours. And rather than employing separate tracks like some hackathons, a single prompt was distributed to all participants, creating a uniting energy through the activity.
“We wanted to do a play on [hackathons] through the museum’s point of view to expand the museum’s reach through an event that is popular at UTD [and] wanted something tangible to involve students in the arts,” Katikala said.
With UTD being a primarily STEM-based school, support for and student awareness of its arts programs can seem minimal compared to its science and technology offerings. Out of UTD’s top ten most popular undergraduate majors, only one — ATEC — is a humanities major, and less than 10% of UTD undergraduates are enrolled in a Bass school major. While UTD hosts hundred-thousand-dollar hackathons, like HackUTD, WEHack and HackAI, there exists no such equivalent for humanities students.
Yet, student ambassador and ATEC junior Sumayya Ali said there is an increasing support for the humanities and artistic awareness at UTD. The opening of the Athenaeum itself represents a multi-million dollar investment into artistic venues of expression. UTD’s SP/N Gallery is also relatively new, having recently opened in fall 2017.
“As an arts student, it’s not as common to see stuff like this at UTD,” Ali said. “I want students to know [the Athenaeum] is an open space. It’s very accessible.”
Organizations like live music club Strings Attached and RadioUTD, performed throughout the day, providing music for the already lively atmosphere. The inclusion of vastly different music performances parallels the building’s own diverse collection of artworks.
Throughout the day students enjoyed free food at events like “Breakfast with Temoc” and a variety of free craft exercises, like tote bag and rock painting. The evening ended with an awards ceremony for contestant winners of all the day’s various activities as well as lantern-making, bringing light once again to both the building and to artistic expression on campus. General sentiment appeared widely favorable; ATEC sophomore Che Almazan-Briones said that similar events should be hosted in the future.
“It’s been more fun than other events on campus,” Almazan-Briones said. “It’s cool that this place exists for students to come and see art.”
Despite having opened less than eight months ago, the Athenaeum has already made headway in both educating students and bolstering an appreciation of the arts. With exhibitions rotating in the fall and projects like the Art-a-thon building student awareness about the space, it is likely to continue gaining momentum as an eventual staple of campus culture.
“I think the general attitude is changing because of things like this,” literature junior Jisung Seo said. “Even if people have different majors, they can still have an appreciation of art. I hope there’s more stuff like this in the future.”
