The Mulvane Student Advisory Board and Mulvane Art Museum hosted the WUmester artmaking popup at Memorial Union April 23.

WUmester is the university-wide conversation that Washburn has on central topics relating to social justice every spring. This semester it is community and belonging. Sara Stepp is the academic curator at the Mulvane. She talks more about WUmester.

“We are thinking about the different ways that people experience community, what belonging feels like to them and just asking people to reflect on that and share their experiences with it,” Stepp said.

The artmaking popup focused on collage making where magazine cutouts, papers and stationeries were provided for the students.

“From the creative and art making perspective of it, we thought collaging was a nice kind of reflection of that theme,” said Stacy Ash, education coordinator at the Mulvane Art Museum. “…because it is something where you can get together, you are looking at a bunch of images —by looking at a bunch of images, you are thinking about how those images interact together very much like a community.”

Mulvane Art Museum has a lot of opportunities for students of any major at Washburn. The student organization that is working with Mulvane for the event is the Mulvane Student Advisory Board.

“We [Mulvane Student Advisory Board] meet once a month; the students sort of advise us on all kinds of different topics,” Stepp said. “They help us make collection decisions, they organize activities for Washburn students that activate our collection.”

Students can reach out to know on-going events at Mulvane on their Instagram page. They borrow traveling exhibitions and put up all kinds of events.

“The Mulvane Student Advisory Board does all kinds of stuff —WUmester just presented a good opportunity for us to connect with other sorts of institutions and organizations and people around campus,” Stepp said.

This is the third artmaking-popup event at Washburn. Cori Singleton, senior anthropology major, shares her past experience on this event.

“We did one last semester at the end of or beginning of December; I think it was during Success Week so it was like a relaxation, calm down,” Singleton said. “We made penguins out of pine cones and knobbly bits; we made Christmas ornaments out of wire and beads and fake green stuff…take a chill pill, turn your brain off for a second and just do something creative.”

Ash disclosed that Mulvane Art Museum, which has been closed since June due to construction, is going to reopen to the public May 14.

“Our entire space is basically reopening in May and throughout the summer to where we will be fully open by the beginning of the next fall semester with our lab and everything,” Ash said. “Since we are kind of opening over the summer and the students will be gone essentially, we are doing a grand opening on September 7 in the fall.”

The Mulvane Art Museum is planning for future activities with its reopening such as gallery activities, scavenger hunt and many more.

Edited by Jeremy Ford Jayme Thompson