Students don’t have to travel to the city to find great art. Great art can be found here on campus at the Skyline art gallery. On Sept. 25, Elizabeth Broun, Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, visited and acquired two artworks by one of the featured artists in the show Technopia, Jon Huffman.

The Skyline gallery has been showing Technopia, an exhibition that mixes the idea of technology and the Twenty-first century.

Huffman, one of the five artists featured in the show, works by comprising large- scale photograph transparencies known as Cibachrome. Huffman and Paul Bridenbaugh, Director of the Skyline art gallery, gave Broun and guests a one hour walk through of the show.

“It was so awesome and such an honor to have an esteemed visitor of one of the top museums of contemporary art take a trip across the country to see the work,” said Bridenbaugh. “I enjoyed watching her see the art-work. She had the delight of a child”. Art has been significant to Huffman since a very young age, where he grew up in Claremont, California.

“Most of my childhood friends’ parents were Art professors at the university, so I was around Art making, going to openings, etc.,” he said.

Huffman became aware of the different ways artists execute art work and was completely intrigued. His visceral joy is in the process, which keeps Huffman afloat by keeping an inquisitive nature.

“My work changes over time but Art making is a kind of searching and sorting out of issues.”

His Cibachromes and C-prints are photographic images from a frozen screen on a video monitor focuses on reversing the traditional technological image trajectory. His works are vivid images of the fusion of thousands of lights that illuminate color.

Broun was introduced to Huffman’s work through an email on the internet. When Broun saw the images she said,

“I just had to see the Huffman’s in person.”

Two of Jon Huffman’s art works will be part of the Smithsonian Art Collection. The Smithsonian Archives of America is one of the world’s largest American collections documenting various art movements in the visual arts.

“To have the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquire two of my works is a big surprise,” Huffman said. “I could not be more pleased.”

Broun expressed that exhibits like Technopia are proof that it’s in a college gallery where important cultural moves are presented by artists. Perhaps it’s why Broun signed the gallery book,

“Fresh and exciting work in the best ‘techno’ tradition.”

For more information on the Smithsonian Museum visit their website at http://americanart.si.edu/.