On Thursday, Oct. 5, and Friday, Oct. 6, BU’s College of Liberal Arts held its semi-annual College of Liberal Arts Symposium. To show the accomplishments of alumni of the Art Department, the Haas Gallery held a four-day exhibition.

     The three alumni involved graduated from Bloomsburg with a Bachelor’s degree in Art Studio, and two of them continue to achieve a Master’s degree.

     Before the reception for the exhibition, Erik Pedersen, Brock Dent and Kevin Wixted gave a panel discussion about their careers as artists and gave advice to students while answering their questions.

     One of the main pieces of advice that all three artists agreed upon was that working as an artist will be hard, but while in college, it is best to take other kinds of classes besides art. Summed up, the more you know, the better you’ll do.

Erik Pedersen
     Pedersen graduated in 2013 from Bloomsburg and completed his master’s degree at Florida State University, in Tallahassee FL, in May 2017. He is a printmaker and creates sculptures from wood and common objects. In the show, he had an interesting piece titled “Search Party” which consisted of seven defective flashlights in a corner in a circle. His other pieces were a combination of linocut prints, screen prints and woodcut prints on various types of paper.

Brock Dent
     Dent graduated in 2007 from Bloomsburg, where he currently lives, and teaches drawing and painting to students of all ages at The Moose Exchange. His main medium is printmaking. All of his pieces in the exhibit are described as mixed media; it appears to be prints, along with paint, on wood pallets and often include tape or paper. Based on the work, it’s safe to assume that he uses photographs as source material. His work is about the destructive nature of humans against our earth and against each other.

Kevin Wixted
     Wixted completed his undergrad at Bloomsburg University in 1979 and continued on to complete his master’s degree in 1981, both with his concentration in fine art painting. Currently he is a professor at Alfred University and has had work displayed all over the country. His paintings are quite unique; he uses layers of paint to build onto the canvas, then uses knives to cut into the dry paint. In all of his paintings, Wixted uses bold and strong colors with hard lines to create shapes.

Above: Kevin Wixted, a Bloomsburg graduate and current professor at Alfred University, shows off the creative potential of layered paint designs. Combining bold colors and hard lines, he is able to masterfully create shapes by cutting into the dried layers of paint on his canvasses and draw the eye of anyone who views his work, which has been displayed across the country.
Below (from left): Brock Dent, Bloomsburg alumni and current instructor, exhibits his abstract combinations of various media create mind-bending displays of the destructive realtionships between humans, the earth, and their fellow man. Erik Pederson, a 2013 BU graduate who now works as a printmaker, displayed his skills in abstract work by creating a display out of flashlights, as well as combining various print types in order to create patterns on paper.