NSUBA features Shakespearean creations student art exhibit

(Broken Arrow, Oklahoma) — The Northeastern State University Broken Arrow Art Gallery exhibit will feature Shakespearean-inspired artwork throughout the month of May.

The featured exhibits will be creative projects created in Assistant Professor of English Dr. Jenny Bledsoe’s fall 2020 Shakespearean Tragedies course.

Student works will be on display in the Visitor Center Gallery on the Broken Arrow campus. It consists of six visual artworks and six writing projects inspired from the five plays the students have read: William Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “Titus Andronicus” and “Troilus and Cressida.”

Bledsoe said the artworks range from paintings that highlight the empowerment of fictional and historical women to digital creations like a chilling horror theme park ride to poems, plays and short stories that revise or expand Shakespearean narratives, some of which are even written in Shakespeare’s preferred verse form.

Jin Lowell, a master’s student in leadership, created an artwork display inspired by Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”. The project includes a portrait series called “They Were Roommates”.

Lowell said the portraits are meant to be viewed together, with the pink portrait — “The Female Gaze”— to the left of the gray portrait — “Absolute Queen”. The subject in “The Female Gaze” is meant to be glancing down and towards the other portrait.

The exhibit can be found in the Administrative Services Building Visitors’ Center Gallery on the Northeastern State University Broken Arrow campus and is sponsored by NSU’s Department of Languages and Literature.  The gallery is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and is free to the public.

For more information on the exhibit, please email Bledsoe at bledsoej@nsuok.edu.