Bowdoin’s Visual Art Department recently held its first PechaKucha night for student recipients of the McKee Photography and Kaempfer Summer Art grants at the Edwards Center for Art and Dance. The evening event allowed students to share their summer art projects with the Bowdoin community. PechaKucha is a simple presentation format originally developed in Tokyo for architects, although now it is a method used globally by artists and designers. Students had 20 PowerPoint slides and 20 seconds to speak about each slide, limiting their talks to 400 seconds, or a bit longer than six minutes.

Associate Professor of Art Michael Kolster said that asking students to put together a public talk encouraged them to create descriptive narratives to pair with their artworks. “The PechaKucha format allows students to structure and organize their experience,” he said. “The presentation allowed students to articulate the arc of their experience, and talk about their journey.”

A few of the artists’ stories and their works can be seen below; scroll over the photographs to read some of the artists‘ reflections.

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