Many Columbia student groups utilize the ploy of free food to entice students to attend their events. But Saturday night, at the art event entitled “Potluck III,” free food was not a ploy but a message, and the message was this: art and food do essentially the same thing.

The event was created both to bring together various student art communities and to provide art students with an opportunity to display their artwork in a non-academic, gallery-like setting. According to coordinator Melanie Kress, BC ’10, the “potluck” format fosters a community feeling among the artists gathered from various prestigious art schools, while promoting the idea that art, like food, is created and then consumed. As Kress explained, artists put time and effort into a product that will ultimately provide both nourishment and consumption.

Kress, a visual arts major and the organizer of Potluck, said that the event’s idea sprung from “a frustration with the lack of cohesion in the undergraduate community at Columbia and at Barnard. There is some dialogue [between the artists], but I personally hadn’t seen a lot of it.” Potluck III, the third in a series of similar events, aims to give art students the opportunity to see the work of their peers in an informal community environment. Indeed, the event seemed to have an enjoyable, party-like aura—art students, young artists, art history students, and art enthusiasts joined together to mingle, eat, and look at a selection of original and intriguing pieces. Such social interaction “starts out the dialogue early between future art critics, writers, curators, dealers, and buyers, which people here will all be,” Kress said.

While the first two Potluck events took place at Art in General, a nonprofit gallery downtown, Potluck III, located on campus, provided a more local setting for artists. Since many students are unable to travel to Chelsea every weekend to see up-and-coming work, Potluck III was an opportunity to stay within the boundaries of Morningside Heights and see cutting-edge artworks. In addition, as Kress explained, the New York art scene is quite profuse and often daunting to young student artists, and Potluck provides a gallery setting while simultaneously fostering a casual environment. Kress said that she wanted to “verge the gap between the academic and the professional setting and provide this opportunity for student artists to show in a professional gallery setting with myself as the mediator instead of the galleries.”

Unsurprisingly, Kress’ most difficult challenge in organizing Potluck III was the lack of space at Columbia. After much searching, she chose the location of Watson Hall, a space large enough for artists from Columbia, NYU, Parsons, RISD, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Arts in Philadelphia to exhibit their work. This third Potluck had the “loose theme” of commodity. While artists were encouraged in submission fliers to submit work relating to the theme, many of the pieces were indeed loose interpretations.

One artist from Columbia, Lane Sell, displayed line drawings of Tiresias layered over each other with Greek lettering in the background. Another work, by Katy Hamer of NYU, depicted a face in light colors with a suede mustache. Such pieces are a testament to the variety in Potluck III’s exhibit, a show that provided Columbia students the opportunity to see interesting artwork just a block away from campus. As one attendant remarked, the show was an example of the “Columbia cry for art to come together and be recognized.”