Student Led International Exhibition (SLICE)

The Student Led International Exhibition (SLICE) course was a new community-engaged course conceived and built with global community partners at the University of Dundee, Scotland. This course provided a structure for the development and execution of a collaborative exhibition exchange between international cohorts of undergraduate visual arts students, while working to build an ongoing and sustainable international community network of creators, observers, and institutions, with MSU’s students at its center.

This international exhibition showcased the work of students from both Fine Art (Duncan of Jordonstone College of Art and Design) and Art & Design (Montclair State University) in each disparate location.

Meaningful engagement and community building was accomplished through sustained conversations and shared goals and experiences, and this course was designed towards creating a social space and a spark for those types of experiences and conversations to happen through a student led cross Atlantic collective collaboration.

During the COVID pandemic, remote conversations and collaborations, including visual arts exhibitions, became more commonplace and comfortable, and their effectiveness has been demonstrated.

An exhibition is more than the showing of the work created, but also a means by which the visual and social conversations in contemporary art take place. In this class, the complete ownership of the structure and execution of the experience was given to the students.

Twenty artists from New Jersey, USA, and Dundee, Scotland have worked remotely to produce a pair of exhibitions in tandem which explore a collective perception of ‘home’.

SLICE was a project affiliated with the Center for Community Engagement and Christopher Kaczmarek, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Art in the Department of Art and Design is a 2021-2022 Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning Fellow.

The form and purposes embedded in the traditions of the visual arts exhibition are evolving as part of a living global conversation about contemporary culture, and the students have the opportunity to address this reality on their own terms and with their own solutions.