ART-ificial

Pitt ARTificial is the only art club here at Pitt, so naturally, at the beginning of the semester, I had to see what it was all about. The club meets every Wednesday night from seven to nine, the first hour is dedicated to doing individual projects, then the president will do announcements at eight o'clock, and then the last hour is a guided project or lesson. The whole club has about 20 members that come weekly and a lot more who have signed up and do not come weekly.

The art club takes place in the Center for Creativity below the bookstore on Fifth Ave. The Center shares the basement with all of the overpriced textbooks. The Center has a lot of resources including a paint room, a ceramic wheel room (my personal favorite commodity), a room with paper and typewriters, and a music room. This is my favorite space on campus, all of the staff are super supportive and accommodating.

Meetings are different each week, and that is what I love most about the club. We do a lot of seasonal activities like during the Halloween season we painted pumpkins. We also sometimes have lessons on famous artists and their styles. We learn about the history and review their work. I also love when the group takes the club outside of the Center. For example, they have canceled regular meetings twice now to meet Thursdays to go to the Carnegie Art Museum. We also did a gallery crawl at the beginning of the semester, which was super fun.

ARTificial has been such an encouraging experience. It is basically just a meeting of people who love art, or to talk about art, and are great humans.

A collage I made one of the first meetings