Corrections appended

Tucked between classrooms and offices in Smith Hall, Gallery 102 sometimes looks like a deserted display.

Roxanne Goldberg, a junior and curator for the gallery’s upcoming exhibition, said most students do not even know the gallery is open all day, five days a week. She’s hoping new exhibitions will draw the community inside the forgotten corner of campus that’s now striving to become an artistic oasis.

“This year, our goal is bringing students in and showing them that this is available for them,” Goldberg said. “This isn’t for us, this isn’t for the five or 10 people on the board. This is for all the students and all the people of D.C., really.”

Blair Bainbridge, a secretary of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History, said the space across from Phillips Hall was transformed from a classroom for printmaking and design to a student-run gallery in the fall of 2008.

“The way we stand out as a gallery in D.C. is that we’re a projects space, which is something that D.C. doesn’t seem to have a lot of right now,” Bainbridge said.

“Caged In,” the gallery’s newest project, is focused on music by American composer John Cage. The exhibition will open Sept. 16 and features original works by a GW graduate student and from artists from the D.C. area. Each piece is inspired by a Cage recording selected by each individual artist from his 25-year anniversary album.

Travis Beauchene, the only GW artist in the exhibition, said he was familiar with Cage’s work beforehand because he wrote a paper about Cage when he was an undergraduate at North Dakota State University. His piece consists of stained cross-section layers of plywood designed to reflect the song “Williams Mix,” and its use of spliced magnetic tape.

“I wanna take that concept of pushing material to its possibilities, so I chose plywood, because magnetic tape is a very common good and not beautiful, it’s like how can you beautify common or low budget material,” Beauchene said.

The works will be coupled with a panel held Oct. 2, which will include prominent John Cage scholars, such as co-director of the John Cage Centennial Festival Steve Antosca, curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Carlos Basualdo and director of the John Cage Trust Laura Kuhn.

The exhibition marks a turning point towards a more consistent schedule for the gallery’s events, which Goldberg said were previously sporadic. Though Goldberg, a former Hatchet writer, said this organization would draw a wider audience to the gallery, she stressed that the space will typically be student-focused.

“It’s not a professional space, we’re not trying to be professional, we’re trying to have fun and experiment and be students,” Goldberg said.

This post was updated on Sept. 16 at 9:33 a.m. to reflect the following correction:

The Hatchet incorrectly reported that the exhibition showed work from artists around the globe, but they are only from the D.C. area. They also did not just select a song from John Cage, but also full recordings, like albums.