Department of Visual Arts

VA Students Take Part in “Foolin' Around Provo”

By Daniel Ng

Answer this trivia question if you can.

What Utah city has 113,000 people, 30,000 homes and covers 39 square miles? Here’s a hint: It starts with a “P” and ends in an “O”.

Okay, that probably gave it away. The answer is obviously, Provo ─ a city which 32,000 Brigham Young University students call home annually.

Although many students reside in Provo during the fall and winter months (and occasionally the summer), “home” mainly consists of the small section of town confined to campus and the surrounding areas.

For some, the fact that Provo has two golf courses or more than one high school comes as a surprise.

Seeing an opportunity to help students expand their understanding of Provo and what it has to offer, the Visual Arts Student Advisory Council (which consists of two students from each visual arts program in the department) recently organized what was known as the, “Foolin' Around Provo” project.

The idea to create a project initially began as a request from visual arts students themselves.

“After we had the annual student meeting last semester, some of the feedback we received was that students wanted some sort of activity to do in the next semester,” said council member, Adam Borgia, who is an illustration major.

From there, possible project ideas were thrown around and mentioned by committee members ─ including one idea that the city of St. Louis had tried out.

Called, D’ Art St. Louis, the collaborative project included artists picking out a block or section of St. Louis to represent and recreate through artwork according to their own artistic interpretations of the various blocks.

After the works were compiled, they were organized and displayed for the whole city to view.

“They actually threw darts at a map of St. Louis to pick their sections,” Borgia said. “It was interesting because you had a group of artists that were coming together with the one thing that united them all: the fact that they lived in the same city. We wanted to mimic their idea.”

Going further, council member and graphic design student, Robert Cowan, explained the significance of the committee’s decision to mimic D’ Art St. Louis.

“We basically talked about how there are a lot of stereotypes in Provo and that a lot of people just assume it’s made up of campus and south of campus,” Cowan said. “There are a lot of unique parts of Provo that many of us don’t ever explore. We wanted to give people the opportunity to feel out areas of Provo that they hadn’t been too.”

Christine Armbruster, another council member who is currently studying photography, expressed the same desire to explore the city beyond campus.

“A lot of us that go to BYU aren’t from Provo, let alone Utah,” Armbruster said. “Sometimes we get stuck in the BYU bubble. There are really cool people and some really great things out there but we don’t pay attention to them because we think of campus as the entirety of Provo. There is more to it.”

After spreading the word through classes and e-mailing students about the project, a kick-off event was held in order to divvy out the various sections of the city.

“We got a copy of a Provo City map from the library and went through, picking different sections and numbering them,” Borgia said. “We had 32 different squares. We knew we didn’t want to do darts. So for the kickoff-party, we had a grid and the numbers (1 thru 32) laid out. People threw hacky sacks and whichever square they landed in, they were assigned the area which corresponded to the number.”

According to Cowan, students were then sent to scope out their areas with just one restriction─ a weight requirement for their works.

“The art couldn’t weigh more than 50 pounds,” Cowan said. “But other than that, dimensions could be whatever.”

Danyell Woodall, a photography student who participated in the project, felt the experience helped her realize how diverse Provo is as she spent time photographing various neighborhoods running alongside North State Street.

“It was fun to go and see different homes and to study the area, imagining what kind of lives people have around here,” Woodall said.

At first, Woodall attempted to choose one photograph out of her batch that portrayed the entire block before she realized that it would be impossible to narrow her choices down to a single image.

“I ended up putting lots of different photos together as one image,” Woodall said. “I included things like: a playground, a church, a home and even an orchard. I just tried to portray different aspects of their lives.”

All the works turned in for the project will be displayed at Provo Towne Square, located at 55 North University Avenue, beginning April 1.

The committee is hoping that the off-campus exposure of the students’ works will help in connecting the Provo community to the project and also give the student body a better appreciation of the historic building.

“It’s right in the center of Provo and it’s a big historical building that is very important to Provo,” Armbruster said of Provo Towne Square. “The more students that can go to it, the more students we’ll have who realize how important this building is to the city itself. It’s just one more aspect that makes this project a community event. It brings BYU art and people in the community together.”

Since this is the inaugural year of the project, Armbruster said the committee has no expectations as to the number of works that will actually be turned in although they hope the idea will catch on and become popular in future years.

“We’re hoping that it will be a big success and that we can continue doing it until it becomes a tradition,” Armbruster said. “We’re hoping that students will have a positive enough experience that they will want to try again next year. If enough people enjoy it, they can keep participating and make it a bigger event each year.”

If nothing else, Borgia said the experience will at least give students who participated something to look back on whenever they reminisce about their college days.

“I don’t know what is going to happen or how this will finally turn out,” Borgia said. “But I hope it will become something people will one day look back fondly on.”