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Every year, the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design has a juried exhibition of artwork created by its loyal undergraduate students. The stakes are high; two participants whose work is deemed “best in show” are awarded a whopping $2,000 prize each, with several honorable mentions bringing in $100 as well. The jury usually consists of University affiliates, this year being made up of three alumni of the Stamps School (before it was the Stamps School). The decisions of said jury are always much debated for weeks after the cuts are made.

This year, the exhibition consists of many design projects, from toothpaste lids that hold your brush in place to vegetable peelers that fit on your thumb, a few tables, prints, and various other media. The winning projects were Hillary Butterworth’s mesmerizing drawing machine that changes what forms it creates based on how close people are standing to it, and a presentation of video and collage made with a jaw-operated pinhole camera by Nick Williams. Of course they deserve the award, and had it been up to me, I would have chosen the same two projects.

In addition to the juried show, however, something a little different took place. The students who didn’t make the cut put together their own exhibition, affectionately titled “The Shit Show”. It was installed in the street gallery outside Slusser, right next to the work that was deemed higher quality by the panel of alumni. On the night of both openings, December 2nd, there were also installations put up in the senior studios, videos in a room played on a large digital projector, and performances to augment the work in the street gallery.

Upon entering the building, one first encounters the unjuried work leading up to the large open room scattered with objects and images. The general consensus was that if nobody had expressed there were two distinct exhibitions going on, they would have thought it all the same show, judging by the quality of work. The biggest difference, it was said, was that the work in the Shit Show actually had something that the juried work lacked in some cases: character. While not every piece in the street gallery is a masterpiece, there is a definite diversity of media, content, and form that’s exciting in comparison to the cleanly finished pieces all spaced out along the walls and floor of the Slusser Gallery. I even heard one or two brave souls venture to posit that the Shit Show was maybe even better than the Salon – I mean the Stamps show.

While I think it’s good to give students an opportunity to show their work in a professional setting, and a little friendly competition to be healthy, it seems like the pressure exerted on students to make what the University defines as “exceptional” work can be overwhelming, and leads to tension between friends and fellow artists who may or may not have gotten in. It is especially difficult to walk through the Slusser gallery with the idea that every piece inside was specifically and individually decided to be “better” than yours, despite what people have said or your own judgments about the work. When it comes down to it, the process of comparing two completely different projects about different things made with different materials is ultimately completely subjective. It’s probably helpful in the long run to get used to being denied access to exhibitions, as keeping our expectations in check results in happier surprises when things do work out. All in all, every artist has to learn to deal with rejection – but is their undergraduate University the right place for this kind of put-down? Ask around and your answers would likely be split by the line drawn between those artists who were good (or lucky) enough to make it into the show this year.

Both the Juried Exhibition and the Shit Show will be displayed for the next week or so: come on up to North Campus and decide for yourself which show is “better” – or appreciate them both for what they are, without marginalizing one collection of work in favor of the other. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it not?

This is how i feel.

This is how I want to feel.

The journey from point A to point B is challenging only based on my own self-imposed obstacles. And I know that I will eventually get over this hump of procrastination. But sometimes it doesn’t help to realize that I will never hit the point B that I imagine, because it is all in my head.

Then again, I guess what is important is that I get past the hump

One step at a time…one step at a time.

The early bird gets the worm. I am not the early bird. And there’s more than just worms out there.

The English language is full of idiosyncrasies. Why the there, their, and they’re? Why do c and s sometime have the same sound and sometimes not? How do poop, shit, and feces all mean the same thing, but have three entirely different connotations? The answer may never be entirely clear, but in a way that’s the beauty of English. I’ve always loved language and its power. The power it has to move, to shock, to express, to relay, to convey, to make change. How cursive, print, and American Sign Language can all have the same alphabet, but look entirely different. English is an art. My Spanish professor once told our class that he loves English because it is one of the most creative languages he has ever encountered. I thought he was crazy at the time, knowing how ridiculous and unclear the rules of the English language can be, but looking back on my career in English, I think he may be right.

As a lot of kids do, I used to dumb myself down in school to interact with the other kids. It’s apparently cool not to care. Senior year, however, something changed in me and I decided to start using the pile of vocabulary that had been gathering dust in the back corner of my mind. I began incorporating scholarly vocabulary into my every day life and you know what? It felt good. I finally understood what my father had been getting at when he encouraged me to use “50 cent words,” which turned into a little game where he would score my integration of more uncommon and intellectual words into every day sentences. I now use 50 cent words as often as I get the chance.

I think the most powerful thing about language, the reason I dedicated my college career to studying the English language, is its profound ability to impart some of the most breathtaking beauty. Language has an amazing ability to engage all of the human senses with a mere syntactical feat or an elliptical that can say all at once, “this sentence is over, but this is not all.” Phrases can induce tears, words can build characters and worlds that we can explore from nothing just by putting words on a page. Words are an endless realm of possibilities and I want to continue to explore them, learn them, play with them, exhaust them, exasperate them until they can do nothing else for me (though I doubt this will ever be the case). This is why I am an English major, this is my art, this is all of our arts. This is Harry Potter and The Great Gatsby and Othello. This is all of the poems I wrote in middle school and the complete works of William Wordsworth. This is nature and culture, history and the future, reality and fiction. Wherever my future holds, I’m ready because I know the power of language.

Before August 9th, few people outside of Missouri knew about the suburb of St. Louis called Ferguson. Yet with the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. by police officer Darren Wilson, this suburb of 21,000 was thrust into the international spotlight reinvigorating the national conversation on race. As mostly peaceful protests take place in Ferguson, Chicago, New York, Seattle and the Bay area, people have taken the streets, internet, and national television to share their thoughts on the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson.

One such peaceful protest occurred on Sunday when NFL players Cook, Austin, Bailey, Britt, and Givens came out during pregame introductions with their arms raised in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture. That evening the St. Louis Police Officer’s Association requested the NFL to discipline the Ram players who participated in that protest. While the NFL has declined the request, questions of the appropriateness of this very public protest have been raised.

In the context of modern society, the players are both athletes and entertainers. While their venue is a football stadium broadcast directly to millions of TVs every Sunday, they perform the same basic function of traditional entertainers: to hold the attention of their audience with something amusing or diverting. Many entertainers have come out in support of various causes, bringing attention to their causes at their performance venue before or even during a performance without detracting from the experience. At a performance at Hill Auditorium in 2011 Audra McDonald interrupted the performance to speak about marriage equality and anti-bullying. Was there any outcry about this brief tangent? Not that I heard.

As an entertainer on a national scale the athletes are expected to be role models, knowing that people around the country are watching their every move and many strive to emulate their behavior. The backlash that the players received from their peaceful protest stems from disagreement with their stance and the unfamiliarity of football being used to make a political statement or show support for a cause. Regardless of the intense physical requirements of football at the end of the day it is simply one form of entertainment, and for me, the best kind of entertainment always has something to say.