The Art-i-Fact MU Campus Gallery and Museum Crawl will be back for its eighth year Thursday from 4-8 p.m. and will have an “Around the World, Around Campus” theme.
The event will offer art, food, live music and chances for attendees to win prizes.
“We all feel that, today, students live in a much more global environment than (they did) previously, and to be successful, they need a broad base of understanding in other cultures and their histories,” says Christine Montgomery, arts and humanities grant writer for the Office of Research. “Plus, the crawl is popular with a large number of international students, who will be able to see things directly tied to their own culture.”
The event will allow visitors to see six continents, dispersed through many locations. New this year are the Gaines-Oldham Black Culture Center, which will display an exhibition curated by artist Byron Smith, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute Gallery, which hosts work from photographers around the globe.
“Culture and the arts are important and set the tone for a community,” Craft Studio director Kelsey Hammond says. “It is one of the few opportunities on the MU campus for the arts community comes together and provide an out-of-class experience that will stay with you for years to come.”
Art-i-Fact sponsors the event, which started in 2005 with five organizations: the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Museum of Art and Archaeology, The Craft Studio, the Museum of Anthropology and Bingham Gallery.
“There are currently nine museums and galleries, including the Laws Observatory,” Montgomery says. “We also have organizations, like the School of Music and the Mizzou Botanic Garden that participate but are not a specific location. The School of Music provides live music at three outdoor locations and inside some of the galleries during the crawl.”
Some unique pieces this year includes an imperial guard uniform from China’s Qing Dynasty, butterflies, Madagascar hissing cockroaches and small water gardens outside Jesse Hall.
“Each year, we have had a postcard map,” Montgomery says. “Participants can get a stamp at each location to show that they were there and are eligible to win prizes. Now that there are so many organizations involved, we only require people to get their card stamped at five locations if they want to be in the drawing.”
This event will be the last chance to see the Museum of Art and Archaeology before its moves in November to the former Ellis Fischel Cancer Center building on Business Loop 70. It will most likely be the museum’s last year participating in the event, due to the new location’s distance from campus.
Despite the impending relocation, the Museum of Art and Archaeology’s academic coordinator, Arthur Mehrhoff, is looking forward to the big event, as he does every year.
“The Campus Gallery Crawl always reminds me that fall, my favorite time of year, is (arriving),” Mehrhoff says. “It’s just fun to see so many people exploring their campus more widely than usual, maybe discovering a place that can change them in subtle, or even big, ways. It’s an amazing event.”