Composed of submitted art by students across various fine arts.
Gabriela Griggs
AC&T Editor
Sydney Meetze
Staff Writer
AC&T
On March 5, 2026, the Winthrop College of Visual and Performing Arts hosted the 38th annual Undergraduate Juried Exhibition Reception in Rutledge Gallery, also known as UJE. The exhibition was completely composed of student work, including pieces that were created as finals for classes like Introduction to 2D and Beginning Painting.
The University defines the gallery as “[an] exhibition featuring works of undergraduate students from the Departments of Fine Arts and Design.” The selection process for the gallery, however, involves individuals from outside the campus community.
“We bring in a juror to pick the work. Students digitally submit their work, [while] I do a campaign to raise money for the galleries as well as awards for students,” gallery director Mike Gentry said.
Gallery assistant and sophomore Lily McKay said that, “any student who is an undergraduate in fine arts can submit their work, and there is one juror who looks at all the work and goes through a series of weeding things out and figuring out what should be in the show.”
Gentry spoke about his reasons for selecting Rebecca Henderson as the juror for this year’s show.
“She is an art curator— she has a degree in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth, [and] she’s also a comedian,” Gentry said. “She’s got really great opinions on art and that’s why I really wanted to work with her. I chose somebody with credentials in the area who’s also not super familiar with Winthrop.”
The student gallery assistants are also incredibly involved in the process of putting the gallery together.
“The process of setting everything up is really fun,” McKay said. “The student gallery assistants get to assist a lot in organizing everything and figuring out where things should go. We had a really fun time getting to set everything up.”
Morgan Spargo, a junior studying sculpture and ceramics, is one of the students whose piece was accepted into the show.
“[My piece is called] Perspective,” Spargo said. “It was a project for a digital collage, which is something that’s outside of my major, outside of my expertise. I made it 3D [and] more visually enticing by putting it on a box and putting things inside of it, lights and smells, so it attracts people and uses your senses, making you look deeper and have different perspectives on the piece.”
Spargo was not the only artist pushing boundaries with her work. Across the gallery, it was evident that many interdisciplinary and large scale three-dimensional works had been accepted into the show.
“I really appreciate how many sculptures there are in this, because [Winthrop juried shows are] usually 2D centered, so it’s really nice to see more of that in here,” Spargo said. “I think that, based on the past shows we’ve had, this [one is] the most ‘in your face.’ It’s filled with amazing work, and no matter where you look, you’re going to see something good.”
Cassi Bleitz, a junior fine arts major, also contributed to the exploration of art forms with her accepted piece.
“[It] was for my interdisciplinary class, it was a final piece, and I was actually in residency at Goodyear Arts in Charlotte during that time, so it kind of became a conglomerate between that and my class,” Bleitz said. “I basically just had this really nice space, and this set, and room, lighting, and resources, so I would haul up to Charlotte and it was meditative in how I got to travel and be in this space and create this new thing. It’s very different from anything I’ve ever made.”
“Winthrop’s art seems to change over the years,” Gentry said. “Sculpture is very prominent in our program right now, and the students are much more ambitious in scale. If you look around the gallery, we have pieces hanging, we have metal sculptures leaning against the wall, we have someone performing inside of a chrome horse, so the ambition of the students and scale has been really interesting and inspiring.”
However, accepting many large scale pieces into a gallery with limited space does not come without consequence.
“This year we got around 100 entries, [with] 24 pieces selected by Rebecca Henderson. I usually tell a juror 30 to 35, but she understood the scale of the space and knew what she picked, so [she knew] fitting the 24 pieces in the exhibition would work better than going up to 35,” Gentry said.
The 2nd Annual UJE Rejects Show was shown in McLaurin 314 at the same time as the Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, organized by McKay and sponsored by the Rising Artists of Winthrop, a club also known as RAW. Students in the club wanted to create a space for artists who were not accepted into the Juried Show to display their pieces.
“That show really highlights a lot of the students whose work didn’t get accepted because, obviously, with so many artists submitting their work a lot of people are getting rejected, so we like to still have a place where students can showcase their work,” McKay said.
Bleitz, president of RAW, encouraged attendees to visit the McLaurin gallery space. “Go to the Rejects show! UJE is stuffy, it’s formal. Rejects is us being young and saying ‘we’re in these spaces too.’ We’re gonna dance, we’re gonna look at weird art that wasn’t invited into this space for whatever reason … everybody deserves to show their [work] off.”
The Undergraduate Juried Exhibition will be held in Rutledge Gallery until March 13. The gallery is open to students and the public Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
