Last Friday, Feb. 13, four Herron Art students premiered the first ever student-led art exhibit. The students, Jack Melton, Ella Faupel, Cecily Walsman and Sophie Sturgeon, had been working on this project since November 2025.
Sturgeon is an integrated studio practice major with a focus on sculpture and painting. Melton and Faupel are both visual communication and design majors and Walsman is an integrated studio practice major with a focus on drawing, illustration and practice.
The once seemingly empty walls of the Eskenazi Fine Arts Center, had been transformed into a luscious gallery filled with unique paintings and sculptures. “At the Tone,” a student-led collective, is focused on artistic expression and exploration. All of the pieces shown were created outside of academic context giving students an opportunity to set the tone for their own professional artistry.
After taking Herron Professor Nick Witten's building and making course last fall, the students gained experience with working, setting up and planning an exhibit. After they’d drawn inspiration, the students began to work on crafting a central theme for their project.
“The name was decided on after the theme. The show is about messaging and exploring your voice as an artist,” Melton said.
Sturgeon agrees, adding that their creative process in finding the best fit name for their project.
Sturgeon said, “We wanted to play off the term when calling for art, we even brainstormed ideas of 1800-call-for-art.”
Once they had an idea, the team created flyers and social media posts to help advertise the event. With a submission deadline set to Jan. 18, the team had received over 40 submissions, which filled the entire Eskenazi space evenly leaving no white space on the walls. They received submissions from anything to ceramic creations or welded metal sculptures. They accepted the work of all students, whether traditional or nontraditional and one artist came all the way from Bloomington to showcase her work.
“We put up flyers around campus that said ‘Come send us your artwork,’ and thankfully people did,” said Melton. “Once we got a good amount of public submissions from then on it was a lot easier to move forward.”
Some of the creators themselves had presented their pieces in the exhibit.
Melton presented a piece called, “Resonance,” which focuses on his unique experiences growing up without a father and getting to know him through his father’s artistry. This piece aims to encapsulate the feeling from noise and music, a physical sensation that has no vessel.
“I wanted to participate in the show, to not only put it on but also just find my voice as an artist and experiment with what messages I want to portray in my art,” said Melton.
Walsman had presented a steel rod juice box sculpture. The 43-by-26-by-22-inch metal juice box was created in Walsman's Sculpture one course. Created out of nostalgia, Walsman wanted to highlight the curiosity of childhood and pay homage to the juice box.
Sturgeon had three pieces presented in the gallery. “Nowhere Next To Me” is an oil-on-canvas piece that was inspired from a photo taken of Sturgeon. While the name of the piece derived from the Peach Pit song “Nowhere Next To Me,” the phrase stuck with Sturgeon leading her to create a piece showcasing the feeling of being nowhere next to someone you love. She framed this piece with a welded steel frame to create a feeling of physical and emotional heaviness.
“Adding the steel frame was very important to me because I wanted to incorporate my sculpture practice into painting while adding weight to the whole piece,” Sturgeon said.
Her other pieces were sculptures made from cast aluminum. “Worth the Mess” is a welded pomegranate sculpture that was created to represent the feeling of deep connections and the difficulties that accompany them.
Other notable pieces in the show include Cario Morada’s piece, “Rebirth.” This piece is an 8-by-11-inch etching made from natural materials of matcha, blood, charcoal powder, cicada skin, and turmeric. Comparable to a Käthe Kollwitz, who made etchings from charcoal, Morada piece represents one's stagnant counterproductivity leading to self sabotage. “Rebirth,” is a way to start over and be reborn.
With nearly 250 attendees, many members of the community — such as local artists — all made their way to the exhibit to show their support. This event was built onto the partnership between Herron and the greater community.
While the exhibit organizers had an excellent turnout, the behind the scenes set up of the gallery was rigorous. When the time came to hang out each piece of art, the organizers learned that much math goes into installing properly centering a piece of art. For the exhibit organizers, the second hardest part was the manual labor of setting up each installation. The first? Scraping together the funds to make their vision a reality.
Faupel recalled that due to a self funded budget, they would use any free resources and even baked the cookies served at the event.
“This was fully a self-funded show, the four of us would either bake cookies, print everything out and just buy everything we needed to,” said Faupel. “We're hoping to get into some situation of making this a club or get funding because we loved doing this and it was insane to see such a big turnout.”
While this exhibit was only on display for the night, the creators hope for future events, which will be posted on the, “At the Tone,” Instagram page.
Mya Kalita (she/her) is a senior majoring in journalism and public relations with a minor in communications. She is a writer for The Campus Citizen and for the publication Where Words Ignite Worlds.
Liberal Arts Career Week to connect students with career resources Feb. 23-27
By Taylor Goebes | Feb. 20Liberal Arts Career Week (LACW), happening Feb. 23-27, offers students an opportunity to network, receive guidance and get questions answered, such as, “What can I do with this major?”
MARLA: IU Indy’s creative lab and living museum, 15 years in the making
By Zachary Aigbe | Feb. 4Created in 2009, the Media Arts Research Learning Arcade, also known as MARLA, has grown from an empty room into one of IU Luddy Indianapolis’ most distinctive, creative spaces. Today, it functions as a hybrid: part collaborative lab, part social “third space” and part officially recognized IU Museum Collection dedicated to preserving video game history.
IU Indianapolis cancels 57th MLK Dinner; students organize events across campuses
By Salsabil F. Qaddoura | Jan. 19IU Indianapolis’ annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner, a campus tradition that has spanned nearly six decades, was cancelled this year, prompting frustration among students and leading a series of student-led events across Indianapolis on MLK Day.
