Unlock Gallery
OVERVIEW
Each year the Creators Collective hosts a gallery featuring passion projects, art pieces, and outstanding academic work by students at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. Our goal is to encourage as many students as possible to participate in the event, whether they submit their own pieces, or attend to view and support the work of their peers.
The project was a 6 month long process of planning, testing, marketing, and curating. After overcoming obstacles such as ones caused by the covid-19 pandemic, the gallery was showcased March 20th - 21st and featured over 150 pieces of work from over 50 artists at the school.
PROBLEM
The Stratford School is a satellite campus of the University of Waterloo, and the distance causes a bit of isolation from the main campus. During the 4 years of university, students away from the main campus deserve to be able to have a community with one another and know each other beyond the scope of academia. The problem is, how might we create an environment that fosters creative interactivity and community?
USERS & AUDIENCE
Those who are curious about the works of student in Stratford school programs such as:
- current students enrolled at the Stratford school (in GBDA, or MDEI)
- faculty members
- alumni
- the school's industry partners
- prospective students.
TEAM MEMBERS & RESPONSIBILITIES
Gallery Director (responsible for leading project, planning meetings, assigning responsibilities, internal and external communications):
- myself
Assistant Director (responsible for providing direction, and curator duties):
- Daniel MacNeil
Curators (responsible for brainstorming, providing insight and opinions, outreaching to students, curating gallery exhibits):
- Aditi Shete
- Jenny Chauhan
- Kelly Huang
- Priyana Elangainesan
- Tiffany Shen
DURATION
Sept 2020 - March 2021
BUDGET
$1,500
PROCESS
We met weekly and started with reaching out to potential sponsors to obtain funding for anything we could plan to do. We then established potential plans that we could do to create a gallery during the pandemic. Our primary challenge was navigating a plan for a gallery during the difficult times due to the circumstances of lockdown and social distancing, and its impact on businesses. While we worked on different forms that the gallery could be presented in, we also decided on themes that the gallery could be developed around. In the end, our final decision was a virtual reality online gallery, with a theme loosely based on the pandemic called “UNLOCK”, and a procurement of funding from the Stratford school. We planned to create the branding as the gallery team, but we later outsourced it to the design team.
We then planned out how we could encourage artists to submit their work, and encourage fellow students to attend an event online displaying all the pieces. We planned an artist incentive such as providing something career advancing, and some form of a raffle for viewers. Conclusively, we decided on monetary incentives for artists and used it to market the submissions for the gallery, with stickers and a raffle for viewer incentive.
Marketing gallery submissions lasted one month with weekly posts on the Creators Collective Instagram account, with further individual outreach from each member of the gallery team to peers within the GBDA and MDEI programs. It was challenging reaching out to students, as the Creators Collective heavily relied on social media such as Instagram to market our events. This meant that while we were noticed by those who were already following the account, it was difficult spreading our message to the whole community at first. We overcame this by leveraging our partnership with the Stratford School to send our message through a weekly newsletter to everybody on the Stratford campus. We also had it marketed across the platform used by the university: the LEARN management system.
Once all our submissions were received, I realized that the initial space that I anticipated, would not fit all of the artwork. So, the curators created three exhibitions to hold all the work, and we worked on marketing the final galleries. Our biggest challenge however, happened 3 days before the event. A fire occurred, damaging the server hosting our gallery and making it unreachable. We were forced to postpone the event a week later but still managed a high attendance.
OUTCOMES
Our end result was 3 virtual gallery exhibitions that can be viewed here:
We received over 150 pieces of art from over 50 artists, and 10 artists received prizes for those submissions after reviews from instructors’ professional judgement. We had 84 attendees who registered to view the event, yet over 200 who viewed the gallery. Many students and even industry partners were able to see and appreciate the creative talent possessed by those attending the Stratford school.
Founding Director of Stratford School
As I was “walking through” the three different exhibits, I was truly impressed with the quality of the artwork and the curation of the space. I can’t wait to be back on campus, so that we can have another fantastic in-person gallery with Stratford School student artwork
TESTIMONIALS
Managing Director (Industry Partner)
The showcase was really impressive. The three galleries were well laid out and easy to navigate. It was very interesting learning about the impact of Covid on the students and seeing how it was expressed in their work. Their talent and creativity was inspiring.
Student at Stratford School
“I love the gallery! You folks have done an amazing job at bringing students' work forward! It’s so cool! I wasn’t sure what to expect but I love the virtual walkthrough!!”
TAKEAWAYS
We learned that there were many ways to communicate our message, but there would still be those who don’t know what’s happening. We needed a method that would reach people from all aspects, and know where people’s attention was at. In the future when planning the next gallery I will focus my attention on how we communicate as a team, across teams, and to the students we want to engage with.