Students’ art pieces are featured in the Curfman Gallery in Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center for the Student Art Exhibition.

The gallery, ran by the LSC Arts Program, rotates through different exhibits every few months — from solo artist shows to their annual Student Art Exhibit.

This exhibit will be open through Jan. 27,  featuring art made exclusively by students.

“I think the gallery is a fantastic way to get to know the creative minds we have at CSU,” said Alice Newman, LSC Arts Program co-lead installer and docent. “Spaces like this are such a good way to see how people are combining their research with art and seeing how people work through their process. I think it’s just such a cool place because we really do show a lot of different things.”

Newman and other LSC Arts Program staff nominate the jurors, who then select the pieces of artwork displayed in the gallery.

“What I like about the gallery is that you can come in here and you can confront ideas in a way that involves our emotional experience.” –Doug Sink, LSC Arts Program manager

Sophia Galier is one of the artists whose work is featured in the exhibit. She originally heard of the opportunity through the LSC Arts Program’s Instagram and was encouraged by her mom to submit. Her piece “Still There” depicts the aftermath of sexual assault.

“The red hands, they’re not actually there, but even though the assault has already happened, the victims can still like feel it,” Galier said. “It kind of just represents how sexual assault is not something that goes away easily, and it sticks with you. I wanted it to be very hard to look at.”

Galier was accompanied to the opening by her friend Jaycee Cameron.

“I think (the exhibit’s) pretty cool,” Cameron said. “It gives students the opportunity to feature their artwork that they worked on rather than it just being like a class project.”

“What I like about the gallery is that you can come in here and you can confront ideas in a way that involves our emotional experience,” said Doug Sink, the LSC Arts Program manager. “I don’t think there’s a lot of room for that in our academic experience, so it’s a way that we can kind of be more fluid people in the way that we think about contemporary issues and the way that we go through the world.”

Another displayed work, “3-Piece Combo,” was submitted by Dylan Barber. Barber grew up surrounded by art, with his grandmother being an artist as well as drawing guidance from his grandfather. The piece was heavily inspired by Barber’s own childhood growing up homeless and in poverty.

“To me, (the piece) represents the lifestyle of poverty as an American,” Barber said. “The country dangles a lot of these things towards poor people. And we want them; we go for them — it’s a trap though. Painting and creating art is something that means a lot to me. So I’m trying to put that into the painting but also keep the childlike sense of creativity and passion for art that I had since I was a kid.”

The jurors nominated to select the pieces to be displayed were artists from the Colorado area and had to be unaffiliated with CSU to avoid conflicts of interest. This year’s jurors were JayCee Beyale, an artist and co-curator at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado, and Mamiko Ikeda, an artist and faculty member at the Art Students League of Denver.

The jurors looked through 260 submissions and chose the final pieces based on what they thought would work best in the show. After that, the LSC Arts Program’s staff received the pieces from the artists and decided on where they would be placed in the gallery.

The submissions can be any combination media, the only restriction being it has to be a recent piece made in the last 18 months.

Reach Barnaby Atwood at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.