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As you walk through the ÇÑ×ÓÊÓƵ campus, you’ll notice art everywhere—including outside. Drive from one side of campus to the other under the East Beltline and even on the underpass is that came to be thanks to a proposal submitted by then-student Christine Vermeer ’20. Now, seven years after painting that mural, Vermeer is on staff at ÇÑ×ÓÊÓƵ, where she is continuing to open up space for students to showcase their art.

We recently met Vermeer in the newest exhibition space for student art—the Spoelhof Student Art Gallery—formerly the home of Spoelhof Café. The space came to be after Vermeer put in a proposal for how to use the recently vacated space. With a little bit of reconstruction of the space, the gallery hosted its first official show in October.

What’s the goal for this space?

We see it as a co-curricular opportunity for our students. It’s really great for them to learn how to apply for shows, to put themselves on the line for their work to be juried. For this show specifically, we had all the staff and faculty jury the pieces and decide which pieces got to be in the show, so that’s a great learning opportunity for our students. When they graduate, we hope they are applying to shows and if we want them to do that, we have to show them how to do that first. So, it’s just a good professional development opportunity for our students. 

We also wanted a place for them to showcase their work. There’s Dialogue, of course, and they have their senior show (in the Center Art Gallery) their final year, but what if they don’t get into Dialogue or they want to practice showing their work before their senior show, we wanted another opportunity for them. So that made us think a student gallery would be ideal. So, it really supports the curricular work that we do in our department.

What vision do you have for this space throughout the year?

We have three other shows that will go up this year. After Thanksgiving we’re going to put ceramics work up, so that will be kind of curated by our ceramics professor and I think I’ll help with that. Early spring semester we’ll have another juried show for our art and design students to submit to and then near the second half of the semester we’ll put up work from an off-campus program that our graphic design students are doing. So, they’ll go to London in January and then the second half of that course will be on campus where they’ll make work responding to what they did and learned about in London. That show will go up starting in April and will be up for the rest of the semester. It coincides with the Spring Arts Festival, which is on April 16.

What do you love about the space?

I personally love how iconic Calvin architecture it is, with the pink brick, the kind of warm wood accents with the doors. People might not know this, but this used to be an outdoor walkway and then in the 1970s or 80s, I think they enclosed it to make the Spoelhof Café. That’s why there’s brick on the entire wall because there was an outdoor element. So, I kind of like that it feels a bit like an alley.

My favorite thing about it is the windows. Art and design are housed in the basement of the Spoelhof University Center, which is nice because we have really big spaces and we can do with them what we want and make as big a mess as we need to, but the bad thing about that is there aren’t any windows. So, having a little space to come above ground, show off what we’ve been doing … it’s really my favorite thing about the space.

What was your greatest takeaway from your experience as an art student at Calvin?

Working on the outdoor mural I think was the biggest learning experience for me. I put that proposal together and worked with staff members on campus to kind of make that work. That was a project about learning who to ask for help. I also learned that I could do big projects. I think that being able to do that equipped me to know and understand that I could put together a proposal for something like this and I can support the next generation of Calvin art students coming through. Maybe somebody has a really huge installation idea that they can’t conceive of until they know that we have a student art gallery, and they can say, ‘oh, I can put together a proposal for a specific installation in that space.’ It really excites me to know that I could foster that. And I learned a lot of that through my experience as a student.

What is it like to stand in this space seeing something you drew up come to fruition?

It feels incredible. It’s really exciting. During the reception, it was just so fun to have the students who have their work on display come and be so excited to show their work. That just feels like, first of all, a really professional thing for them to experience and learn, but also a really exciting thing. As artists, we want to show our work; we make it for a reason and that’s to show it to people and hopefully to have our audience experience something. So, it was really exciting that I got to share that with them. And some of the students even invited their parents and grandparents and they invited their friends. It felt like a real community event. I’m just excited for more of that.