Five art students were awarded TruScholar grants to pursue research this summer.  You can see their resulting work in the Atrium Gallery of Ophelia Parrish from Monday, August 30- Friday, September 3.  Below is a summary of each project:

For his TruScholar research, Kameron Clark compared struggles of contemporary wealth inequality with similar themes from the past.  Historical paintings such as “Hard Times” by Hubert von Herkomer (1885) and “Evicted” by Blandford Fletcher (1887) are reimagined in the current United States climate.

Maggie Adams conducted her TruScholars project on the fiber artist Lenore Tawney; her research combined studio art and art historical methodologies. Adams focused on replicating Tawney’s understudied weaving techniques in her body of work “Woven Forms” and its connection to Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s.

Anna Grahlherr’s summer research reclaims the female nude in art from the perspective of female-sexed people.  In this series, she rejects the tradition of the male gaze and explores diverse bodies.

ZuZu Smugala created artwork that explores how people use different coping mechanisms in their daily lives.

Kristen Buck’s project is about documenting her body to create permanence of her self-image. After going through a drastic physical change, her reality has been comprised by her own thoughts. The resulting series of photographs capture her contradictory feelings as well as igniting conversations about what an image is and how it serves to preserve truth.