WKU President Timothy Caboni met guests and presented awards to artists at the Kentucky Museum, which received dozens of community members to recognize outstanding art pieces.

The museum hosted the Abound Credit Union Celebration of the Arts, Friday, which featured 155 submissions from local artists, including 32 from WKU students.

“Shows like this help artists grow in profound ways,” Kentucky Museum Director Brent Björkman said. “As part of this show, artists share the creativity within themselves… these innovative works inspire us to think in deep ways about the diverse mediums and the message or messages they embody.”

Caboni spoke on the importance he believes art education holds, not just in shaping a complete university experience, but for creating a good life.

“As I will say to everyone, I don’t want to hire or produce an engineer that’s never taken an art class, because they’re symbiotic, right?” Caboni said. “We are a university, and we want to create well-educated, well-rounded people for society.”

Senior Molly Phelps won second place in the mixed media category for her piece, “My Natural Dreamscape.” Phelps said she wanted to incorporate media and techniques from as many classes as she could in a piece she said was personally very meaningful.

​​Her piece featured a painted self-portrait, which she said drew from anatomy and figure studies, decorated elaborately with woven fiber, wire beading and screen-printed bugs that she drew and painted. Phelps said the rungs that framed the piece’s different sections were sticks she found in the park, and that the moths were inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Great Peacock Moth.

“I’ve always felt moths are overshadowed by butterflies,” Phelps said. “If I can imagine myself in the most beautiful world ever, it would be surrounded by adorable little frogs and moths just covering me in this gorgeous, colorful world.”

The submissions were broken into ten categories: ceramics and glass; digital art/graphic design, drawing/illustration, fiber arts, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and watercolor. 

Alongside the many student submissions, there were a number of submissions from WKU faculty.

Björkman said he sees the museum and such events as important avenues to engage visitors with the museum and to connect them with WKU. The museum offers opportunities to learn about art, history and culture from Kentucky and beyond.

“We see ourselves as a town-gown bridge,” Björkman said of the museum.

Björkman also said around 23% of WKU students visit the museum as part of a dedicated class visit.

“One of the things I’m most proud of as an institution is how we embrace and celebrate the arts, and this is a great way to do it,” Caboni said.