Fairmount Final Friday
On Friday, May 24th, my
Art & the Community Engagement class, under the supervision of Darryl
Carrington, hosted a Final Friday event in the meeting house in Fairmount Park,
in conjunction with the sexual assault awareness event, Take Back the Night. The purpose of the A&CE class is to
foster a relationship between Wichita State and the Fairmount neighborhood
through art. The Fairmount Final Friday
event was the plan we came up with that we could achieve by the end of the
semester. The event went off better than
I expected. Each person in the class
displayed at least one artwork. We
actually had a decent turnout thanks to the Take Back the Night event having
such great publicity. We didn't even get
our announcement out until the day before the event. The meeting house is a small building, but it
was just big enough for what we needed.
We had student artwork set up on tables in the building and a cellist
performing on the small stage. The cellist
is also a WSU student who has her junior recital next week. Some of the artwork being presented was for
sale and some was not. I believe I was
the only person who sold any work. I had
small 4x5” versions of my large and more expensive photos of Fairmount
buildings “then and now” for sale for $3 each or 2 for $5 and I made $30. The first hour or so was pretty slow, but
after Darryl made the announcement that we were having a Final Friday event in
the meeting house, people started trickling in.
We had the biggest rush right before the Take Back the Night group made
their walk from the park to the campus and back in honor of Latisha Davis. The group walked through the meeting house on
their way there and back. The only
problem I had with the event was that some of our classmates left after only
about an hour. They just picked up their
work and left, even though it was specified that the event lasted from
6-9PM. This left a few tables empty in
the middle of the room. One student
decided to move his work to take up one table all by himself, but we still had
the center tables completely empty. This
just made us look bad and it is unfair to the rest of us who stayed the whole
time and helped set up and tear down.
Unfortunately, Darryl is such a nice guy that these people (and the
people who have only come to one or two classes) will probably get the same
grade as the rest of us. I would say
overall the event was a success, but there were some things we could have done
to make it more successful.
