At a university where the primary focus is STEM, the Florida Tech Art Club is one outlet students use to express their creativity with the visual arts.
The Florida Tech Art Club was established in 2020, and it is hosting its first art gallery in Evans Library.
On March 6, the club set up an art exhibit on the second floor of Evans Library, containing 14 art pieces. The exhibit is still expanding, and the Art Club plans to add another display on the first floor.
Over 20 people showed up to the opening of the art exhibit, many of them a part of the club, but others were there just to see the work that the members of the club submitted.
The display represented a wide range of art, including paintings, photographs and digital art.
Bryan Bermudez, a freshman in software engineering, had four of his pieces in the gallery despite only joining the art club this semester. He doesn’t use traditional mediums like paint and pencil typically associated with art, but instead, he uses Blender, a 3D modeling software.
“My style of artwork utilizes 3D modeling and 3D rendering on the computer, and I tend to go for a pixelated look,” Bermudez said.
Bermudez talked about each of his art pieces and how he utilized a different style in each one. Each of his works looked distinctly different than the others, and he demonstrated a wide range of skills and inspirations in his display.
“I thought about the universe and what it would look like if it were condensed,” Bermudez said when talking about his wire-frame Blender model.
This is the first time the Art Club has put together an exhibit like this, and Liam Sapper, the art club president, is excited about the number of people who were involved and submitted artwork.
“I am very happy with the amount of submissions we got. We were not expecting this many, and we still have more that we need to put up,” Sapper said.
Although this is the first exhibit Sapper has done with the art club, it’s not his first time working with an art gallery. In 2020, he worked for the Foosaner Art Museum in the Eau Gallie Art District, which Florida Tech ran at the time.
There were 14 works displayed at the gallery and more art from students will be added to the display.
The Foosaner Art Museum closed in the summer of 2021, as did the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, which is the art gallery that used to be on Florida Tech’s main campus. The loss of these two museums left a hole the Art Club is trying to fill.
Florida Tech does not currently offer any art classes or programs, so without a club like this, students may lack a community of people who share the same interest in the arts that they do. Art Club uses its general meetings as an opportunity for students to hang out and draw together.
“We have specific events set up now and then. We’ll have some nights to do specific studies like figure drawing and environmental studies,” Sapper said.
The executive board for the Art Club hopes to hold more events like this in the future and continue to be a creative outlet for students who are interested in visual arts. They are already planning to do a similar gallery next semester.
“This isn’t the last time we are doing this,” Sapper said. “We do have plans to do another one of these where people can submit more things during the fall semester.”