One of the biggest challenges of my past year as the Arts and Entertainment Editor at The Shield has also been a blessing.
If you’ve followed The Shield for some time, you are no stranger to change. As with any piece of student-run media, it will inevitably change as the people in charge of it learn, grow and graduate. With the influx of art-related content, you may have also noticed my name or the title Arts Editor popping up more and more frequently.
As the Arts Editor, my two goals have always been to introduce people to art and to uplift the local art community because, as a studio art major, I have had the privilege to meet so many incredible artists. Many of whom were non-majors.
That is to say, I wholeheartedly believe in the benefits of having a creative outlet and I believe that anyone can make art, even though art is generally my main source of stress.
Unfortunately, between working with a small team or no team at all, it hasn’t always been possible to cover every event that I have wanted to photograph or write about. Some of my decisions on which events to cover, or how to cover them, were not made directly by me, but rather by my workload.
However, if you do hear about something, feel free to contact us about it; we can always try to include it in our monthly calendars.
But this also means that Evansville and our surrounding areas have been doing a wonderful job of keeping art alive. Especially in times like these, for example, with the rise of artificial intelligence, being an artist can feel disheartening.
Though this busy schedule has left me running around like a headless chicken more times than I can count, I can safely say that I am proud of Evansville and our campus for the lengths they have gone to build a community.
So, while I may not have been able to get to every event, I hope that our coverage has been able to inspire, entertain and accurately represent our artists.
But all this running around has not been aimless. During this past year, we brought back the Arts and Entertainment beat, a term we use to refer to the different topics we cover, such as news, sports and campus life. For our January edition, I painted its front cover, and this was our most picked-up edition for this academic year.
I hope Shield readers will continue to support our local creatives in their endeavors because I will do my best to keep you informed of them.
