Showcase Recognizes Outstanding Student Art and Design Work

Catlin Miller’s Honey Interlude
Catlin Miller’s Honey Interlude design earned her the grand prize at the 2017 Undergraduate Visual Art & Design Showcase.

The Second Annual Undergraduate Visual Art & Design Showcase featured 40 projects on display in Jesse Hall, Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2017. Several of those projects received recognition at the award ceremony that concluded the week’s events with two projects taking top honors.

Projects in this year’s Showcase ranged from photography to architecture, digital storytelling to art, textile and apparel management to theatre design, and more. The top prize in the applied design category went to Catlin Miller for her design, while Carina Jimenez’s paintings earned her the grand prize in the artistic expression category. The grand prizes came with $3,000 in professional development funds.

Miller, a senior textile and apparel management major with minors in business and Italian, won for her piece titled Honey Interlude, which is a shawl inspired by honeybees and honeycomb.

“Everything is inspired by the honeybee,” she says. The design is six hexagons, like a honeycomb, attached together to form the back of the shawl and two larger hexagons that form the sleeves.

Jimenez, who graduated in December with a major in fine arts, won for her paintings titled Imposition.

Jimenez grew up in a Hispanic household and noticed a difference in how males and females were treated. “It always bugged me,” she says. “They didn’t care because everyone was so used to it.”

She wanted to voice her opinions about unfair treatment of women. The idea behind her paintings is to show women can and should have just as much power and pride as the men who made those paintings in the past, as well as to speak particularly to the gender relations of her own culture.