The Office of Institutional Advancement presented an art exhibit featuring talented artists, students and faculty members on Sunday, October 6th at the Oakland Memorial Chapel in Lorman, Mississippi on the campus of Alcorn State University (ASU).
The “Brave Art: An Exhibition” was created after numerous students wanted an event that displayed their work and spotlighted art pieces. It was decided in September of 2019 that ASU would put on an art exposition for the first time. Painting, patchwork, fashion, pencil drawing, and fractal art was included in the show and were separated into different rooms. Being that this was the first time, it was limited in participation and certain people were chosen to unveil a few pieces of their work.
Junior Joseph Maxwellson, a Computer Science major from Ghana, participated in the art display. Maxwellson, who specializes in pencil drawing, had his own room for all of his art. He is self-taught and began to really take pencil drawing to another level in 2014 and also established his brand, PencilMagic. During the event Maxwellson stated, “My artwork is inspired by black people. One of my paintings is inspired by one of our Ghanian Kings, who fought for our rights. It’s important to do something like this because not many people know who he is or what his mission was.”
Another student who was featured was Junior Bezakeel Akinbami from Nigeria, a Biomedical Engineering Technology major, whose art was fashion designing. He has been to tailoring school and is now certified. Many of his designs are created around different African textiles, however, he doesn’t have a particular object he gets inspired from. Many of his designs come from something he sees and he begins to work from that. Akinbami expressed, “Most of my work comes from anything I see, whether it’s a table or something of that nature, I’ll put my hands on it and get to work.” For his display he had two female ASU students to model his clothes.
This program was a great Alcorn Homecoming activity. It is hoped that this will be an annual occurrence and that more people will have the oppurtunity to take part in future exhibitions.