Concordia Students Collaborate on Neutral Grounds Exhibition
Photos courtesy of Sarah Johnson.
by Hayden Rensner
Two Concordia students, senior Mark Schmidt and junior Brooke Gettman, recently collaborated to put together an exhibition featuring art and poetry, which is currently on display at Seward coffee shop Neutral Grounds.
Concordia alumna Sarah Johnson had the idea over the summer to put together an art show accompanied by poetry in order to provide a visually pleasing collaboration for the Seward community. Johnson called upon Schmidt and Gettman to help her fulfill her vision. Gettman took photos, Schmidt wrote poems, and they were able to combine their talents.
“I thought it would be good to actually choose two people to collaborate and see how they could feed off of each other’s creative energy,” Johnson said.
When asked about the process that she and Schmidt went through together while preparing the art show over the summer months, Gettman said that she took photos while Schmidt responded to the photos with poems. Gettman then responded with more photos after reading Schmidt’s poetry.
“The whole thing was just this exchange, which was a really neat collaboration project for us both,” Gettman said.
Gettman hopes viewers notice how the poems and photographs interact to reveal the theme of human experience.
“We kind of hope that people take in the poems and the photographs together, and really sit with them for a little bit and think about them based on their own experience as a human. It’s all about being human and what qualities make us human,” Gettman said.
Schmidt was able to draw attention to the art collaboration by reading aloud some of his displayed poetry at a Friday open mic night, a community event sponsored by Neutral Grounds.
Going along with the themes of response and human qualities, Schmidt shared that three different languages are represented throughout the art: Spanish, English and German.
“We are trying to bring about communication through languages, art and poetry,” Schmidt said.
The poems and photographs together represent a unique display of art, response and what it means to be human. The artwork will be on display at Neutral Grounds until the end of September.
