The Keene State Art Collective is back and ready for a new semester of creativity and connection.
According to Art Collective’s president, junior Ava Morgan, the club is open to any students. “A lot of people sometimes think that it’s maybe just for art students, but we do a lot of arts and crafts,” Morgan said. “It’s open to anyone who wants to come join, and we just have fun and create at meetings.”
Morgan said the club’s meetings involve a wide variety of art activities. “We do all kinds of things,” she said. “We’ve had watercolor nights, we do Bob Ross paintings sometimes, which is always a pretty fun one. We’ve had still life sketches.”
“But we also do a lot more craft kind of stuff,” she added. “Our first meeting this year was air dry clay. We did sketchbook decorating. We do jewelry making. We’re going to try and do macrame [and] slime making. So all kinds of creative stuff.”
Morgan said the club will be doing their popular bleach-dying event, along with tabling at other school events. “We do Pumpkin Palooza, we do the Student Involvement Fair, we’ll do the Winter Celebration,” she said. “Solar Fest in the spring, we’re always at everything.”
Morgan said the Art Collective’s first meeting was extremely successful, with around 60 students attending. “Which we were not expecting at all, but it was amazing,” she said. “It was so cool to see everyone there and enjoying themselves.”
Morgan said that she originally joined Art Collective her first year at Keene State as a creative outlet. “I’m a psych major, so I don’t really get to do a lot of art-related stuff, but that’s something that’s so important to me,” she said. “So seeing a club that was doing art, but it was open to everyone, and it was such a welcoming community, that just made me want to stay there.”
“It was really the community and getting the ability to pursue art when I maybe wasn’t able to with classes and stuff, or just to get to play around with stuff I don’t usually get to do,” she added.
Morgan’s advice for anyone thinking about joining Art Collective is to just jump right in. “It’s terrifying to go to a meeting where you don’t know anyone, but even if you don’t know anyone, you gotta just do it,” she said. “You gotta jump in, you gotta try new things, because some of my best friends have come out of being on the e-board and being in this club, so I know firsthand that it’s really scary, but it’s so worth it.”
Art Collective meets Tuesdays at 6 p.m. in the Madison Street Lounge.
Emily Sloane can be contacted at
esloane@kscequinox.com
