McNeese Art Students Attend the ULS Academic Summit

McNeese State University students Navy Tate, Olivia Little, Nya James and Nelly Gonzalez Chan, presented their artwork at the University of Louisiana System (ULS) Academic Summit this spring. 

Each year the ULS Academic Summit offers students from all nine schools in all disciplines of study an opportunity to meet and present research, show off their art and share ideas. Thirteen McNeese students attended the Summit this year. 

Each student was invited and encouraged to attend the Summit by one of their professors. 

Tate showed a piece called Lisa’s Flower, a ceramic sculpture of a girl with a flower protruding from her mouth.  

“This piece is inspired by the feeling of not being able to speak your mind for the sake of kindness. It is about holding in anger to spare others’ feelings and to keep the peace at any cost,” explained Tate, a senior from Lake Charles. 

Little, a junior from Lake Charles, created a promotional package for a masquerade ball in her graphic design class and showed it at the Summit.  

“This project was inspired by fantasy book covers and fantasy ball and masquerade invitations,” she said. “I used crowns as inspiration for the detailing.” 

James, a junior from Sulphur, took a still-life photography piece to the Summit. It is part of a three-part series titled, She Still Remains, that depicts the process of healing and grieving after a loss.  

“The piece highlights the influence my late grandmother has given me artistically and how she continues to influence me even after her death,” James explained. “My grandmother inspired this piece. I let her work through me intuitively.” 

Komorebi is the Japanese word that signifies the play of sunlight filtering through leaves and trees that Gonzalez Chan’s painting captured. A junior from Lake Charles, she used scale, value, lights and darks, and distance to create a painting that showed sunlight filtering through leaves and flowers.  

“What truly inspired my piece was the lighting and shadows from the plants in my garden. I felt so interested in the shapes and figures that the light creates when it hits a plant, the shadows that it casts,” Gonzalez Chan said. “I also felt inspired by the vibrant colors that shine through such as greens, yellows, blues and pinks, that overall create a sense of life and tranquility and that inspired me to put that same feeling into the painting.”