Hoping to alleviate some of the frustration and feelings of helplessness in these unprecedented times, painter and adjunct professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati Benjamin Cook launched the Instagram page @SocialDistanceGallery, an alternative digital space for students to exhibit their work. In an age where so much art is already shared via the medium, the account takes submissions of artworks from thesis shows, which it posts for its audience of nearly 16,000 followers (so far!).
“The general concern [of students] everywhere is that they wasted their time,” Cook said to ArtNews. “They’ve put four years of work in and, over the past couple months, feeling like it was so close and getting really excited, are having it fall apart at the last minute to something they had no control over.”
The account’s inaugural exhibition was an installation by University of New Orleans Master’s student Jane Tardo, who was forced to cancel the opening show featuring her playable, quilted racetrack Snake Tube Adventure Racing on Friday 13. Student artists from the University of Tulsa, Boston Conservatory and Duke University have subsequently been featured, as more and more schools cancel or suspend non-essential operations. Some of the country’s top ranking art schools, including New York’s Pratt Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), are amongst those who have had to call off student exhibitions, with the latter closing its largest ever Bachelor of Fine Arts show in its 154-year history, which only opened last Friday.
SAIC Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate Mia Margita Neumann expressed the disappointment rife in the student artist community: “As an art student, I’ve lost an incredibly valuable resource to cultivate a network of artists. As a graduating senior, I’ve lost countless connections and future job opportunities by being forced out of a community of my peers in this isolated and somber way. As a person, I’ve lost the opportunity for closure, and it’s heartbreaking.”
