What does the Fresno Chaffee Zoo and Fresno State’s Art History Club have in common?
They both have creativity and celebrate historical events from across the world. The Art History Club had an opportunity to share their artwork at the zoo’s Lunar New Year Art Exhibit on Feb. 10, in their first collaboration ever.
The Art History Club explores the love of art through the eyes of history and art enthusiasts at Fresno State. The club ventures on museum outings, mixers, art history talks and more events. The club is also a hotspot for artists who want to express themselves in more ways than paper drawings.
Club member Olivia Myracle, a junior majoring in studio art with a focus on drawing and painting, often explored the zoo with her family as a child. Those experiences led her to create a cut-out drawing showing the discovery of the zoo on the back of a Chinese dragon.
Made of colored paper, acrylic paint, pen, and glue and tape, her submission portrays a dragon that carries — on its back — flamingos, lions, followed by stingrays, a tiger chasing a cheetah, an elephant, a large grizzly bear, and ends with an array of sea lions. She also included her own family in the piece since she associates them with the experience of the zoo.
“I would go with my family a lot. So, you could see that’s my mom and dad and me,” she said excitedly while pointing to the drawing.
Myracle was eager to bring up her signature on her artwork. She said that she based her signature on the Chinese YìnJian, which is a mold stamp with a pre-existing signature used for professional documents. She hopes her work will inspire children to create cultural art with limited materials like paper and glue.
Fresno State student Miguel Gamez-Macias also submitted a few pieces. He submitted two kinds of artwork into the exhibit. First were clay fish that go through multiple techniques of shaping and casting including a rocco glaze that is dropped in a trashcan and enclosed in flammable materials for one to two hours.
His ceramic fish had scales based on multiple types of fish including the pufferfish, catfish, and koi fish illuminated with a string of blue led lights. He also displayed a kola fish sculpture with a rocco glaze.
“I’m not a good painter,” Gamez-Macias said. “I style my imagery.”
His second piece was a tile fragment art that depicts the difference between a healthy ecosystem through a roaming copperband butterfly fish and a human infested ecosystem through a fishing boat, creating a controversial opinion about humans interacting with the ocean’s ecosystem.
He painted Goal 14 on the side of the boat. Goal 14 is an agreement between the United Nations and the sustainability of materials in the ocean. Gamez-Macias hopes to combat the marine conservation of the ocean’s material since it affects all of us as a whole.
