The eighth annual Art-i-Fact MU Art Gallery and Museum Crawl event was held Thursday evening at venues across campus, providing a showcase for 11 of the artistic, cultural and scientific facilities and organizations based at the university.

Those who visited the event were able to tour the galleries and exhibitions on display and learn more about the opportunities and programming offered.

“The Art Gallery and Museum Crawl is an opportunity for all of the venues on campus that have art and have culture to open up and let people into their spaces,” Craft Studio Student Manager Karen Rodriguez said. “There are all these venues that are part of Art-i-Fact, which is a group on campus that unites of all these spaces which are dedicated to art and culture.”

Nine of the 11 organizations that participated in Thursday’s event were Art-i-Fact members. These included the Museum of Anthropology, the Enns Entemology Museum, the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Residence on Francis Quadrangle, the Museum of Art and Archaeology, the George Caleb Bingham Art Gallery, the Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Collection and the Laws Observatory, in addition to the Craft Studio and Gallery. New additions to the this year’s crawl were the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center.

“For all students, but especially freshmen, this event provides a great opportunity to learn about some unique things the MU campus has to offer and ways to get involved with them,” Rodriguez said. “Campus is more than just classes and students should get to know it.”

While the number of visitors varied among the different venues, those staffing the event expressed satisfaction about the number of people who visited one or more of the venues participating in the event. Upward of 360 people visited the Craft Studio while 250 individuals had already passed through the Museum of Art and Archaeology two hours into the four-hour event, according to Benton Kidd, the museum’s associate curator of ancient art.

Among those who participated in the crawl were senior Alfie Cox. Cox said he had last attended the event during his freshman year and wanted to come back to see and enjoy more of the art on campus.

“I think it’s a really good event to go to if you are interested in seeing good art,” Cox said. “I particularly liked the exhibits on display in the State Historical Society of Missouri Gallery in Ellis Library because it showed a lot of Missouri’s history, which is a history all of us, but especially college students, need to know.”

This year’s crawl provided one of the last opportunities for the public to visit the Museum of Art and Archaeology at its current location in Pickard Hall on Francis Quadrangle. The museum is moving to the former Ellis Fischel Cancer Center hospital building, which has been renamed Mizzou North, on Business Loop 70.

The museum will move to this new location because Pickard Hall contains residual radiation from experiments that were conducted from 1900-1930 when Pickard Hall housed the chemistry department, Kidd said. Ultimately, the Museum of Art and Archaeology hopes to return to campus.