2023 Bachelor of Arts Exhibition

Best in Show: Kelly Banfield `24, "Sisterhood of the Traveling Spoons"

“I go to spoon carving almost every week with Jon Andelson and Chris Bair. I started last year in the fall, and it’s just a really nice community there. But every break I go home, I always bring my spoons with me. Even though there’s no use to me bringing them home, they just travel back and forth. So, I was thinking about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. And I was like, ‘Oh, that would be a funny name,’ because I wanted to submit my spoons. It’s kind of off the cuff, but I think it’s a fun name, and it does kind of get at the community of spoon carving here.”

Banfield said he used reclaimed wood from the 2020 derecho’s fallen trees found in Grinnell. Spoon carving club is on Fridays from 3 to 5 p.m. in the white church located a block east of south campus at 1127 Elm St.

Sculpture:

Clare Newman `23, “LOOK! PLEASE TOUCH!”

“When I was a kid, my mom would take us to art museums, and she really liked them. But I was six years old, and I didn’t know what I was looking at. I thought it was boring and smelled weird. So she turned it into a scavenger hunt for us ... I wanted it to evoke that. I wanted it to be a scavenger hunt,” said Newman. “Even if you don’t know how to look at art, you can still find something to enjoy in it.”

Luca Blankenship`23, “Späti sitzen”

“Actually, all of these are from my time in Germany, which I was really fortunate to be able to do ... This is a photo of my good friend. This is kind of like after a night of being out, and having fun and doing stuff. A lot of the time with these nights out, we would end in front of a späti, which is a 24-hour deli type thing. Just like drinking, laughing, smoking, stuff like that. And I took this photo.”

Third-Year Art Prize: Fourth-Year Art Prize:

Stella Lowery `24 Andrew Thompson `23

“In BAX, these are all different collagraph prints. I was focusing on using two figures in this space to explore relationships that women have with each other and relationships that can become exploitative or hostile. So I was trying to go for a more subdued color palette than some of the other works in my portfolio, and using sort of baby-looking animals, and always using two figures in the foreground and experimenting with mark-making.”

“My work in this exhibit and my work, generally, is — with the exception of my film work — is all printmaking. I’m very interested in the layers through which we perceive the world around us. And for myself, layers such as anxiousness, disassociation and the mask that we put on to talk to other people. I find that very fascinating — capturing those emotions and my pieces, but then also reflecting those layers in the process of printmaking.”