On campus, the two art clubs Art Collective and Artists Shouldn’t Starve are starting to draw students in as the semester starts up and are sketching out their plans for the year.
Art Collective is a club focused purely on art projects and crafts, said Senior Grayce Wucik, the president of the club. It is an environment open to anyone, whether it be students looking for something crafty to do on Wednesday nights or for artists to build up their skills with some studio art projects, depending on what the club chooses to do during its weekly meetings.
“One of our big missions is making sure that students who enjoy art as a hobby or just to experiment with don’t feel like it’s something you have to be mastered at,” Wucik said. “None of us are masters, really; we’re all students here, but if you’re not a major in [art], you don’t have to feel overwhelmed that whether you believe you are a great artist or not, that you can just be in here and be able to just have fun with it and just express yourself.”
On the calendar, the club is doing a bleach dye event where students get to bleach dye a t-shirt. Wucik noted that it was a very popular event for the club the previous year for both members of the club and students passing by.
Wucik said she hopes that the club can open up more to collaborations this year, as well as play a role in the Keene community.
Art Collective’s first meeting was on Wednesday, Sept. 10, and Wucik estimated that there were about 50 students who showed up, making the group have to split between two rooms in the MAC.
“We’re going to keep up to date with where we’re going to have the meeting and all based on the showout last night,” Wucik said. “It was more than we anticipated, which we’re very thankful for, but we want to make sure everyone has enough space to be able to do these events and not feel overwhelmed.”
The craft that was planned for the night was journal decorating, but since the journals did not ship until the day after, the club quickly pivoted and had supplies for students to make journals instead. Students were also invited to make collages with leftover magazines and construction paper in room 147.
“It’s always nice to see that people are interested in art related things, and we want to make them feel welcomed and be able to express their creativity,” said Wucik.
Artists Shouldn’t Starve, however, is more focused on the professional side of the art industry. The founding president of the club, senior Logan Nicholson, said it is a club that teaches artists what they are not taught in schools.
“For a lot of our creators, there’s the whole stigma of the starving artist, where our [club] name came from, and we found that for our education, we find a lot of teachers just focus on technical skills,” Nicholson said. “It’s such a competitive field, we felt like there should be an area where we get to learn about the rules of the careers we’re looking at and how we can actually go forward.”
The club focuses on lots of different forms of art, such as photography, fashion design and art education, to name a few.
Part of the club meetings are dedicated to craft times for students to work on projects with help and critique from upperclassmen and with materials provided by the club. The rest of the club time is dedicated to a presentation by a student about a certain field of art to teach what students can do and show with their work and what rules art careers have.
Despite the club starting at the end of the 2025 spring semester, it saw a lot of interest from students this year, said Nicholson. Artists Shouldn’t Starve tried to have its first meeting after the involvement fair on Sept. 5, but because of the short notice, the club rescheduled to September 15 at 7 p.m.
Event-wise, the club hopes to host a showcase in collaboration with other clubs for students of all years to show and promote their work because of the fact that seniors are primarily the only ones with that opportunity, said Nicholson. He added he hopes to have this event take place sometime in November in the student center and continue to have one showcase per semester.
“I’m personally very eager for this year and I’m very excited to see where things go,” Nicholson said.
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
hayley@kscequinox.com
