Dripping with creativity

The colorful blobs dangling from the Washburn Art Center (WAC) windows make it look like the building has been attacked by creative aliens. The out-of-this-world effect is the result of a time-intensive and patience-testing assignment for students in Art 360, which focuses on site and space.

Instructor Mava Vazquez challenged students in his Art 360 class — Miracle Anandi, Cha D’Angelo, Elijah Lee, Jonathan Quenga, Victor Sitali, Estasha Stone, and Wayne Wilkinson — to work outside and consider how sculpture behaves in an environment.

As a starting point, they discussed how the mural on WAC’s front steps gives the impression that the building is melting or leaking color. With its organic forms and squiggles in bold colors on a bright pink background, this led them to explore what a drip can mean — gravity, time, weathering, transformation, movement, and renewal. The result? The creation of several globular drips spilling off the window ledges in bright colors, one forming the word “Art.”

Sustainable sculpting

Created entirely from reused foam board, papier-mâché, cement pulp, exterior paint, eco-polyurethane, and other studio scraps, sustainability is paramount in the students’ drip project. “I wanted them to see that sculpture isn’t limited to traditional materials like marble or welded steel; there’s power in rethinking what’s already available,” says Vazquez.

He was impressed by the amount of material students ultimately reused and how engaged they were in that process. Vazquez estimates the students used more than 90 yards of newspaper and brown paper, roughly the distance from the front doors of Washburn to the G-Area Starbucks. They used about 40 pounds of glue in the papier-mâché–much less than an art project of this scale could use.

Waterproof, sturdy, and non-toxic, using glue as an adhesive in papier-mâché is a popular choice among carpenters. Students ripped newspaper and brown paper into strips and then diluted the glue with water to make it go further. They dipped the strips in the glue-water mix and placed them in perpendicular layers onto the interlocked foamboard structures (pictured below) to create the drip sculptures.

From ideas to installation

Vazquez attributes the conceptual origin of this project to Spring 2023 in a different iteration of Art 360–Studies in Sculpture. That class created papier-mâché sculptures, but presented them as a shared body of work, piled together. This was the first time many of them had to consider their pieces in relation to others, rather than individually.

“When we discussed what this pile could represent, the students chose ‘the alien.’ I’ve interpreted their choice as a metaphor for transformation, something unfamiliar growing into something new, the way artists shift and evolve in their practice,” says Vazquez. 

This semester, he pushed that conceptual thread further with his students on the drip project, saying, “The installation became a way for them to explore identity, environment, sustainability, and site-specificity simultaneously.” Interim Dean of Faculty, Dr. Maribel Gárate-Estes, says the students’ work “reflects their artistic vision, commitment to sustainability and responsible creativity that Professor Mava is instilling in them.”

Vazquez thanks Facilities, especially Dennis White, and Program Director Scott Carollo for making the outdoor installation possible.

“The students’ excitement at seeing the sculptures installed outdoors and how the pieces refreshed the building’s visual character was a highlight of the semester,” says Carollo.

Now students are focusing on their final project: unveiling indoor wall sculptures, which they will soon install in the WAC’s lobby. The unveiling will coincide with the Senior Open Studio and the Linda K. Jordan Gallery reception for Beyond the Waves: Deaf Arts on Thursday, December 4, 5–8 pm. All are invited to join and experience their creativity firsthand.