Helen S. Smith Art Gallery: A Great Place To Check Out Student Art

The Helen S. Smith Gallery showcases the great talent that our students and local community have to offer.

The gallery is located in the Holman Library on the Green River Campus. It serves as an academic resource for our campus community, highlighting the media of the Fine Arts Division, and providing a catalyst twice per year for art students to engage with their first audience.  The gallery also functions to culturally enrich our students, staff, faculty, alumni and surrounding community.

The gallery is a community resource tool, used not only to provide cultural enrichment through curated exhibitions and associated events but also as a gateway for new students to be exposed to the program and welcomed to the campus.

Art galleries on college campuses also serve and engage the local and regional arts community in a little different way than a commercial gallery might. “A professional art gallery is a bit more complex than just coming and speaking with the director about using the space or hanging up any ol’ art,” said Sarah D. Gilmartin, the Gallery Director.

The shows are often curated challenging the viewer to think critically and creatively about any number of possible topics from how a work was created or its conceptual intent and context in contemporary culture.

College galleries are a way to interact with and challenge students’ global perspective and thinking about what art is or what art can be. The artists find interaction with the students quite rewarding when invited there to speak about their work.

The schedule currently supports 2 exhibitions per quarter. There can be any number of artists participating in a given exhibition.  A call for art goes out annually. Exhibitions are usually planned around 2 years in advance of a show in our space. The current show is a solo exhibition featuring the work of Jason Sobottka.

Sobattka always focuses on animal imagery, primarily because the concerns of flora and fauna are of utmost interest to him. In addition to celebrating animals, typically specific animals that hold a personal connection to him or otherwise stand for a greater conservation or environmental cause, animals are easy doppelgängers for people.

“This connection was made more real for me after I started teaching Human Life Drawing at Lake Washington Institute of Technology.” Working with human anatomy greatly informed his animal studies and reinvigorated Sobottka’s commitment to both the human and animal figure.

“My mother jokes I was born with a pencil in my hand.” he taught myself to draw dinosaurs and jet planes when he was a toddler.  Sobottka studied art his entire life and other than a brief stint in commercial art and design, he has been working towards being a visual artist his entire life. “I hold an Associate’s Degree in Fine Art, a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Art) and my Master of Fine Art.”

Sobottka’s current work is inspired by the Anthropocene: The Nobel Prize-winning meteorologist, Paul Crutzen, first mentioned the Anthropocene in 2000. This proposed geological period marks the conclusion of the Holocene epoch and begins when humankind dramatically shapes the natural systems of the planet.

Sobottka’s work asks how could nature evolve in that environment? What if the flora and fauna flourished? What could that look like?

“The long legacy of the Helen S. Smith Gallery (nearly 50 years!) is really a source of pride in helping these early career artists find their footing, especially as we look back over time at how many have been very successful.” Basically, they tend to show Northwest artists keeping a spotlight on the creative dialogue of our home region.