The seventh annual MU Gallery and Museum Crawl consisted of nine museums and galleries around MU. Students and people from the community discussed everything from history to politics to insects — all somehow related to the pieces of art seen that day.
Art-i-fact, the organization that puts on Museum Crawl every year, wants students to experience art at MU, said Kelsey Hammond, Craft Studio coordinator and Art-i-fact co-chairwoman.
“We want people to have experiential learning rather than just academic, in-the-classroom learning,” she said.
The coordinators of each museum make up the Art-i-Fact board. Though members gave different answers as to what the ultimate goal of Museum Crawl was, several said it was to let people know the galleries and museums are there.
This year’s event was different than the past six. Student musicians were stationed outside some of the museums, offering yet another form of art at the MU Gallery and Museum Crawl. A scavenger hunt also took place in which attendees could get answers to different questions at each location and could enter a raffle at the end.
“All of that hopefully gives a sense that something’s happening even though these things are all inside,” George Caleb Bingham Gallery director Hannah Reeves said. “We want almost a festival feel.”
Another goal of Art-i-Fact is to bring art and science together, Reeves said.
For example, both live and framed insects were on display at the Enns Entomology Museum in the Physics Building, as well as live hissing cockroaches and a praying mantis.
The event also featured student and alumni work, including that of alumna Sidney Stretz, which is hung in the Craft Studio.
“I work a lot with really banal spaces and the significance of the outside décor of a building not really explaining the things that happen on the inside, so they’re all containers for living that are really boring and banal,” Stretz said.
In the Laws Observatory, the ambiance was set with incense and dark scented candles. Attendees could view a student painting of a dying star, poster boards displaying NASA’s history, campus during sunset and sunspots from a telescope upstairs.
The MU Gallery and Museum Crawl gave participants a chance to enter the Chancellor’s Residence. Because it is not always open, this was a popular destination for many attendees. Walking into the house, one could smell tea and cookies and hear a student playing classical piano. A combination of student and faculty works was displayed in the house.
The entomology exhibit in the Physics Building featured graduate students displaying insects and letting observers hold them.
At the State Historical Society of Missouri Gallery in Ellis Library, old political cartoons and explanations of the political donkey and elephant were displayed on the wall. The exhibit also included more modern and gory paintings from Thomas Hart Benton’s series from World War II, “Year of Peril.”
The museums and galleries exposed students to the different kinds of art on campus.
“I really loved having the opportunity to go to Museum Crawl because I had no idea that we have so much art and diverse artifacts from the past right here on campus,” freshman Emma Fountain said.