The Rite of Spring
The Department of Art and Design is proud to present to the community our tenth consecutive annual exhibition devoted to the artworks of our students. In the last decade this initiative has been our presentation to the college, an inclusive dialogue between the creative minds and artistic skills of hundreds of students under the guidance and instruction of dozens of dedicated faculty members, in a conversation that aims to make the public participant.
There have been many changes in our department over the last ten years. Students enter our program, work hard, learn, discuss, create, discuss again, share and move on to other programs to continue their education and their lives. Also, the last ten years have included a renewal of our faculty with the retirement of long standing members like professors Paul Tschinkel, Mike Ritchie and Ken Golden, who dedicated a big portion of their lives to the education of several generations of students. Other faculty and staff members have also left in the last ten years to move on to other educational positions in the country, not without first leaving their mark in our department and on our students. We know Queensborough Community College has left its mark as well and therefore something of all of us spreads and informs other educational communities and artistic environments.
We started coordinating these yearly exhibitions, always held in Spring, not only as a culmination of the great work by our talented students, but also as a continuous act of renewal. One great avatar of Modernism, Igor Stravinsky, said that to continue in the same path is to go backwards. The yearly act of renewal performed in the coordination of these exhibitions, now with the passing of the baton to its third conductor, echoes the revitalizations witnessed within our department in our dedicated faculty and our wonderful students. Our main hope, as faculty, students and artists, is to contribute to the shifting continuum of the Arts and the Humanities.
Drummers of hope, sweet wanderers of relics and ruins, dreamers of all Springs.
Javier Cambre, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Design, 2017