As we begin to transition into the season of giving and receiving, The Galleries at Moore gave the public an opportunity to prepare for this transition as they hosted the first-ever Free Art Exchange.
The two-day celebration, October 11-12, allowed people to explore personal art-making and communal exchange by inviting artists of all abilities to contribute their own artwork or collect someone else’s. Anyone without art to bring could stop at the event’s art-making stations to create something on the spot before participating in the exchange.
Throughout both days, a series of discussions and performances helped fuel participants’ creative energies. This included a panel talk moderated by Logan Cryer '19 called “Valuing Arts: Alternative Models of Sharing”. The panel featured Sarah Kim, Joy Xian and Briyana Clarel, who all discussed various non-monetary ways art could be exchanged.
The ultimate goal of the event was to emphasize all peoples’ creative capacities and identities as artists, while exploring new systems for valuing art. During the first day of the exchange a group of high schoolers, who happened to be on a tour of the college, stopped by to create painted rocks that they exchanged for silk-screened prints from a few Moore undergraduates. Both the undergraduate and high school students discussed their artworks and ended up exchanging one another’s Instagram pages, as well as some cool pieces to take home. Ultimately the art exchange was a wonderful chance to build community while exploring one’s potential for creativity.
