While many students may find themselves hunched over in the library, pulling all-nighters and keeping a constant IV of coffee hooked up during exam week, art and design seniors have already put the finishing touches on their final graded pieces of artwork displayed as an installation in the Devos Art Museum located in the Art and Design Building on campus.

Northern students earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts are required to participate in and pass the Senior Exhibition, frequently referred to as its course ID 403. Students use the semester-long course to create a piece or body of work to display in the Devos Art Museum, acting similarly to a cap- stone course.

The exhibition showing began Monday, Nov. 28 and will continue for two weeks leading up to the

closing ceremony on Dec. 9 from 7 to 9 p.m., just before commencement. Students invite their parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, cousins, third cousins, and friends near and far to this event to proudly show off what makes them an artist.

Though the Senior Exhibition is a culmination of art and design students’ time at NMU, for many it is only the beginning of their art works.

“My piece is an example of the direction I want to take my work,” said Josué Briones, a senior digital cinema major. When his short film, titled “CHUBBS,” finally came together, Briones felt nervous and vulnerable, but relieved after weeks on end of coming up with ideas, making work, remaking work, filming and editing. He explained the total process of his project took a copious amount of thinking and production time.

“But the hardest part was coming up with an idea that I was invested in. I wanted to work with narratives, instead of experimental filmmaking, like I have throughout my career at Northern. When I was brainstorming ideas, I knew I wanted to make a piece that was representative of that transition,” Briones said. “I see my 403 piece as the beginning of my narrative filmmaking career.”

The fall showing of the Senior Exhibition is typically smaller than the winter semester due to a smaller graduating class size, but there is no shortage of intricate and impressive work.

Destiny Sanford, a senior photography major, said she learned many valuable lessons from this exhibition.

“It taught me what type of math equation to use to hang up art in a gallery at a viewer’s eye level,” she said. “I had to hang my second photo up three times be- fore I finally had it level with the first photo.”

Sanford was most excited, however, about the final product and seeing her work in a professional location. From this spurred inspiration to make work on an even larger scale, bigger than she has ever worked with.

For many art and design students, creating a gallery-ready piece of work from start to finish is not the norm, but through the Senior Exhibition students found themselves further prepared and with a better understanding of the whole process that goes into creating and displaying work in public venues.