Exploring poverty

Guest post by Phil Sugden, assistant professor of art

This year, the committee promoting the civic engagement theme will use select digital technology avenues to encourage discussion around the topic of “Living With Enough: Responding to Global Poverty.” Two of these venues are a Facebook page and a Twitter account.
Our hope is to engage the community on Bluffton’s campus and the extended campus community, including alumni, parents, friends and others, as we all struggle with this question of global poverty.

Feel free to join these conversations and visit the university civic engagement site for more news.

We are also working closely with departments to encourage students to more deeply explore this issue through class assignments. For instance, the art department is getting a little more creative with its final drawing and painting assignments. The final project for the Drawing 204 class will be “The Landscape of Poverty: A Conceptual Drawing.” In a conceptual drawing, the idea of the work takes precedence over the actual design of the piece. These drawings will question and explore poverty, the nature of poverty or the cause of poverty from a personal point of view.

Completed works will be hung in Marbeck Center in April and then will be on exhibit in Findlay’s Coffee Amici next summer.

You too can get involved! Submissions for “The Landscape of Poverty” art show in Marbeck and Coffee Amici are open to the public. For more information, contact professor Phil Sugden on Facebook, Twitter or via email at sugdenp@bluffton.edu.