A meeting of minds occurred Thursday at the Jack Olson Gallery, as NIU graduate students from the art department exhibited work in the Graduate Group Exhibition.

The Graduate Group Exhibition is an annual event organized by the NIU School of Art and the Graduate Artist Association that showcases the research going on in NIU’s graduate art progra.

“This is a window into what each of these students are doing as far as their work is concerned,” said Matthew Drogo, a graduate assistant who helps organize exhibits at the gallery.

The exhibit featured pieces from all types of media, including digital prints, lithography, digital video, photography, clay and a wide variety of mixed media.

Graduate student John Regan crafted his piece “Collected Memory” from 600 funeral bows of various colors and photographed visitors who came to the exhibit as they posed with the piece in various places around the Jack Olson Gallery.

“My work has typically been about finding a means to express memory and commemoration for loss and grief,” Regan said.

“Collected Memory” focuses less on grief and more on commemoration, Regan said.

“By asking people to interact with [the work], there’s this suggestion of the act of giving condolence,” Regan said.

Graduate student Garrett Brown’s lithograph “Personification” depicts a band that has fallen apart because of arguments about its image.

“I’ve been working on the music industry and the danger of exploitation,” Brown said. “My goal with all the work I’m doing in this graduate program is about social conscience. I work with images that revolve around the music scene.”

Students and faculty came to view the various pieces in the exhibit.

“There’s a lot of media I’ve never really seen,” said Christian Ortiz, a sophomore art education major.

The exhibit differs from others because it displays many different pieces across all different types of media, said Peter Van Ael, the Jack Olson Gallery coordinator.

“The fun and also the challenging thing about a show like this is that because we have multiple artists and they all have one piece and no unifying theme, it becomes more of a challenge to mount a cohesive exhibition.”

Registration fees artists paid to the Graduate Artist Association will go toward the printing and distribution of a brochure highlighting the pieces at the exhibit, Van Ael said.