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ARTS & CULTURE
bupipedream.com | May 2, 2023
BU student wins SUNY Art Exhibition award Grace Moon has made many strides in the art world. Jason Tang
arts & culture contributor
In the morning, people always struggle to find what hat they are going to wear — what they are going to do and what part of themselves they want to focus on. Grace Moon, a senior majoring in electrical engineering, has a lot of experience trying to find out what hat to wear on a regular basis. While she is an accomplished engineering student, Moon has also achieved a lot of success within the art world of Binghamton, being showcased in the Best of SUNY Art Exhibition for her printmaking piece “Day and Night, I Pick Flowers for You.” Her work has been featured at the H. Carl McCall Building in Albany since December 2022. The Best of SUNY Art Exhibition is a juried art show, with the winners selected from a panel of independent judges. Moon’s piece is one of three winners of the Best of Show award, where she not only won bragging rights but also a $1,000 scholarship. To get to where she is today, Moon took a somewhat unconventional journey. The eldest daughter of immigrants from Korea, she was admitted to Binghamton University in the TRIO program, an educational outreach program for disadvantaged students aimed at bridging the financial gap that gatekeeps higher education. “In kindergarten, I came back with this giant-like Crayola crayon picture of a massive
heart and my family in it, and then my parents saying, ‘this is amazing,’ and me being really proud of it,” Moon said. “I think in high school is where I really buckled down into, ‘Oh, I think I’m actually really good at this.” One of the formative experiences of Moon’s as an artist came as a freshman in high school during a teaching session by Kim Jung Gi, a Korean artist. Moon explained that because she is from a white suburban background, she had not met a lot of people of Asian descent. “Seeing this [person of] Korean [descent] be recognized and be famous and being respected in this art community for drawing really inspired me,” Moon said. “I can do that.” After this teaching session, Moon had a fortuitous conversation with Kim, when he stepped outside to take a smoke break while she was waiting to get picked up by her parents. Although Kim had a very successful career in art, he did not decide to do art until he got to college. “In my heart, I want to do art,” Moon said. “I get this courage, go up and introduce myself in Korean and be like, ‘I’m such a big fan. I love your art.’ We had this really wonderful conversation that kind of inspired me further. That made me fall more in love with art.” Despite Moon’s artistic background prior to college, the strict requirements of the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science at BU led to her being resistant to double-majoring in art and design, or even minoring in it. Even still, Moon, has pieces in the scholars’ gallery, as primarily a painter,
provided by bu department of art and design Grace Moon’s main focus is printmaking, but she continues to diversify her portfolio through her involvement in Binghamton.
which is her work from high school. “I didn’t do art for two years,” Moon said. “In junior year, I was like,’Okay, you know what, I want to take some more art classes,’ so I started to take printmaking randomly, instead of taking painting. It was really random, but then I met one of our professors, Colin Lyons. He’s amazing. He’s really great.” This advisor-student relationship ended up being fruitful for Moon, who learned the art of printmaking from Lyons, who has a master’s degree from the University of Alberta in printmaking. The intricate process, which involves technique-driven methods such as linocut, etching and layering.
The Best of SUNY Art award is not the end of Moon’s journey as an artist, however. “My professor wants me to make a lot of extra editions so that I can send them out to galleries and museums and begin my professional career,” Moon said. “That’s currently my focus. Right after college I am applying to a lot of engineering roles, but I am open to whatever art opportunities come my way. I’m also applying to a bunch of art residencies and seeing where that goes.” Moon’s current work is mainly in printmaking, but like any other creative, she does not want to be one-dimensional. On top of Moon’s work as an artist, for example, she is also the
publishing and layout director of the fashion magazine RENA at BU, which recently had a heavily-attended fashion show. “I don’t want to just be a photocopy machine,” Moon said. “I want to paint, I want to express myself with art. It’s beautiful. It’s calming. I think it’s very emotional. It’s evocative. It’s very feminine, and it’s very patterned and colorful. And I think that’s very representative of myself. Every single one of my pieces at the moment, I model for them, so you can see a bit of me in the figures, which I think is fun.” When looking at Moon’s art, it is easy to see the influences of her teacher, Lyons, in her art, especially how it tries to push
the envelope in developing art to have a life of its own. Moon herself looks toward Kim and Gustav Klimt as her influences in becoming the artist she is today. As for personal influences, Moon wanted to thank her parents, her professors Andrea Kastner and Lyons and her friends at RENA magazine. “The RENA people helped me bring that creativity back into my life when I wasn’t really doing much with it,” Moon said. “They are all very ambitious people, and that ambitiousness is very infectious.” Grace Moon’s art Instagram is @moon.e.grace.
2023 BFA seniors showcase their art The show celebrates the wide expertise of 11 talented seniors. Alexis Yang
arts & culture contributor
Artistic mastery, hard work and a passion for everything creative — these qualities characterize 11 seniors whose work is featured in Binghamton University’s 2023 BFA thesis exhibition. Located in the Elsie B. Rosefsky Memorial Art Gallery, “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” showcases the work of 11 seniors graduating with a bachelor’s of fine arts (BFA). With works ranging from oil on canvas to a digital projection, the multimedia exhibition illustrates the
diversity of experiences and interests among the seniors. After its reveal on April 13, the exhibition has been open for visitors to experience the culmination of four years of undergraduate study and practice. Visitors are greeted with a booklet at the entrance containing artist statements from each senior, explaining their thought processes behind their work and their relationship with art. The art pieces themselves occupy their own unique spaces in the gallery, each telling their own story — oil paintings display landscapes and abstract imagery, while more three-dimensional works include a modified bookshelf, a pair of painted teal sneakers and a circular pool lit by a
digital projection, among other pieces. Evan Lau, a senior majoring in graphic design, described the intent of “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” and what it means to them as an artist. “The senior BFA show is a culmination of BFA students’ progress,” Lau wrote in an email. “It’s a celebration of the work we make and our capabilities as artists. For me, it represents the next step in our careers as artists and creatives, whether it be going into visual arts, marketing or other creative outlets.” Sophie Cassetta-Unrath, a senior majoring in painting, wrote about the experience of having her work showcased at the end of her undergraduate career.
The BFA thesis exhibition features a culmination of students’ hard work and their relationship to art.
“It was a bittersweet experience but with all the preparation that went into it, we were all very glad to finally be able to experience the product of our hard work,” Cassetta-Unrath wrote in an email. “It was incredibly rewarding to see the support of our fellow students and teachers at the opening, and it really opened my eyes to what I want my future as an artist to be.” In addition to representing the students’ undergraduate successes and future artistic careers, the pieces convey each artist’s individual thinking and method of creating art. Cassetta-Unrath described her thinking behind her paintings titled “Flowers for Yulia,” “Stop Looking At Me”
and “Le Cygne.” “After focusing on realism for most of my painting experience, I decided to venture into abstract art in an effort to let go of my perfectionism and tendency to over-plan,” Cassetta-Unrath wrote. “I found a sense of freedom and peace as a result and have been experimenting with abstraction, impressionism and texture since.” Kayla Cartier, a senior majoring in graphic design, discussed her experience behind creating “Stargirl,” one of her personal favorite paintings that allowed her to experiment beyond her typical medium of graphic design. “It taught me a lot about the practice, but also taught me how to explore multimedia
divya gottiparthy staff photographer
and use it to my advantage,” Cartier wrote in an email. For Miriam Suissa, a senior double-majoring in graphic design and art history, creating art for “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” allowed her to call upon feelings of nostalgia and explore a diversity of artistic styles. “One of the works included in the exhibition was my needlepoint, which was my most personal and experimental project,” Suissa wrote in an email. “This one was a needlepoint representation of a photo of my grandmother coming to Israel from Morocco. This meant a lot to me to make since I grew up watching her needlepoint and crochet, so I wanted to commemorate her and create works that included textiles and a medium that she was utilizing all the time.” “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” captures the artistic experience of 11 multi-talented seniors at BU, encapsulating their journeys from their first encounters with art to their education at the University and beyond. Their passion for art shines through from their thoughtprovoking work and the artist statements that accompany the pieces. “I love to learn new things, and the beauty of art to me is that you never need to stop learning,” Cartier wrote. “Art is like a warm bed I can come to after an unforgivingly cold day. It has always been there for me since I was born, and I do believe it will always be there for me for the rest of my future because my love for it is endless.” “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” will remain on display in the Elsie B. Rosefsky Memorial Art Gallery until Friday, April 28 at 4 p.m.