The annual New Mexico State University Juried Student Art Show opened on March 14 and will continue through April 6 in the University Art Gallery. 

This year’s Juried Student Show, a display of student work, picked by renowned artists, is the last one to be held in The University Art Gallery in D. W. Williams Hall.  

Next year’s JSS will be held in the newly constructed New Mexico State University Art Museum and art building. 

Featuring 41 pieces from NMSU students, the show was juried by artists Andy Arkley and Julie Alpert.  

Arkley and Alpert were recently featured at the UAG with their joint show Light Tricks which ran from January 31 through March 2. The married couple picked all the pieces to be presented in the show. 

Students of several majors, not just art majors, were featured in the show. Freshman Aerospace Engineering major, Maegan Lemon, had an acrylic on canvas piece in the JSS. 

Titled Lone, the painting depicts a small brown owl on a leaf-barren tree at sunset. Hailing from Artesia, New Mexico, Lemon said her piece was showcasing the harshness on the environment caused by oil drilling. 

“After I painted this [owl], him and his family disappeared, and he was living right next to a pump jack…I painted [this] as a memorial to him…because those drillers don’t care a lot about the wildlife and what they’re affecting,” Lemon said. 

Shaunia Grant, who won the Excellence in Creativity and Fabrication Skills in Metals Award, had a wearable piece presented. 

Grant’s necklace on display was made of traditional metalsmithing materials like copper and brass, and more contemporary materials including pig intestines and pills. 

Grant said the pig intestines were easier to acquire than one would think. 

“People get really weirded out by it, but at the same time, people eat sausages…I just buy it from online. I think if we lived in the Northeast where they make and eat a lot of sausage, I could buy it from the grocery store,” Grant said. 

A piece by Ger Xiong is three fiber work magnetic brooches. Each brooch depicts a different scene from a cassette tape recorded in Thailand by Xiong’s father. All the tapes are different folk tales told within the Hmong Culture. 

“My dad passed before I was born, so I never met him, I never heard his voice. So through this process I was kind of understanding who he was and the culture that we came from,” Xiong said. 

It was announced that Xiong’s whole series was purchased by the UAG and put into their permanent collection at the award ceremony on the opening day of the JSS.