Art exhibit to highlight diverse student talent

Artwork celebrating the diversity of Salt Lake Community College students will be on display this week at Taylorsville Redwood Campus.

Student Life and Leadership and the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs will sponsor the ninth annual Multicultural Student Art Exhibit on Feb. 8 and 9 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Doctor Abio Ayeliya, exhibit organizer, says all SLCC students are encouraged to participate, whether they are artists or not.

“This [exhibit] is open to all the students at the college to showcase their creativity that depicts cultural meaning,” Ayeliya says. “Bring your cultural art piece that you’ve created and come and display it because we want that diversity.”

Students who submit artwork can win a cash prize worth up to $300. Ayeliya says he will tally votes from students who come to the exhibit to determine prize winners.

In addition to students, SLCC faculty and staff were also invited to contribute their artwork. Each artist can enter up to three pieces for the exhibit.

Using canvas to convey emotions

SLCC student Phoebe Davenport submitted three watercolor paintings, each representative of herself and her past.

“My pieces are more about — I don’t want to say the struggle — but the challenges that I had throughout my life growing up,” she says. “And I think a lot of those go back to me being a black woman.”

Davenport, a Southern California native, has lived in Utah on and off for ten years. A model, mother and stylist, she describes her paintings as reflections of herself.

Davenport says her piece entitled “The Monsters In My Head” deals with “all the insecurities, all of the issues that come up that are subconscious things that tell you are not good enough.”

To Davenport, the works are both personal and cultural.

“Growing up and being only one of a few black people in Salt Lake … I think it affects all of those aspects of my life,” she says.

The Multicultural Student Art Exhibit will be on display in the Oak Room until Thursday at 3 p.m. The exhibit is free and open to everyone.