Rosa Isela Lopez, president of the Art and Design Club at Elgin Community College, speaks about her role and experiences as an artist.
Q: What are you studying and do you have any future plans for your education?
A: I am studying communication design, specifically graphic design, and my plan is to hopefully graduate with two associates; an Associate in Art as well obviously the Associate in Applied Science for communication design. I plan to transfer to a four year university to obtain my bachelor’s.
Q: What does the Art and Design Club do?
A: In contrast to most clubs, we’re representing the art department, so we try to incorporate a lot of the art mediums that are taught here at ECC. I try to get as much professors to demo, so we’ll have Daniel Josh do ceramics. Last semester we had Candice do photography, we had Joel Peck for printmaking, and Marissa for painting. I think the saddest part about art is it can get expensive, or some people are busy trying to work towards their required credits for their other majors, so we want to implement that for free. It’s for an experience. A temporary experience to really get them to feel for it just in case they wanna take those classes in the future. I think the
best part of Art and Design Club is that you meet other people, other creatives, and a lot of people end up collaborating or we will have our art sales. Representing the art department is important, but I think the most important part is truly fostering this sense of community among creatives, especially for new students. That’s the most important thing to me, for new students to find a place where they feel safe and not alone. When I started going to ECC I didn’t really find a place until ADC, and that’s what got me to open up more and talk to other people. It’s a lot about connecting with people.
Q: What is the process of starting a club at ECC?
A: We didn’t, actually. I did join ADC last year. We were struggling to maintain an audience, but honestly, it’s all about really finding people who genuinely care. A lot of our officers are artists themselves, and they’re not just there for the resume portion. All of them actually want to do things. They want to connect with people. Again, that’s important for any club because if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, then really it defeats the purpose of being an officer. It was declining, and ADC was gonna go on hiatus. And I think I took the risk to be president and continue on. I did not want it to die. There’s not really much to it. It’s just about finding the right
people: people who, again, care, and usually through the meetings we try to connect with everyone to show them how special it really is and have them gain confidence to potentially pick up on a leadership position in the future.
Q: What achievements are you proud of?
A:This is one of my first accomplishments here at ECC: when I was here during my second semester. I was still a beginner in graphic design, so there was a poster competition going on to redesign the emergency safety procedures, so the stuff with the preparation for active shooters, tornadoes, you know, just all the weather hazards, and I ended up winning first place and now it’s all over the school. That has to be one of my proudest moments because I think it really motivated me to continue pursuing the art and design field, and maybe there can be improvements in the design right now, but for a beginner, I think that’s a huge deal. I think another achievement that I’m proud of was I got an award for leadership last year for the Student Life banquet, and then recently, one of my photography works was chosen to be juried by Skyway this year. That’s something that I’m truly looking forward, that’s like, three things I’m proud of. And obviously, being president of the Art and Design Club.
A: It has to be my life experiences. I feel like what motivates me the most in life is representing moments in my life through my artwork. It’s mainly shown in photography. I had some family that passed away. It made me realize you don’t get all the time you want in life sometimes. You may think, oh yeah, I’m so young, but anything could happen at any moment. And just living and going through experiences in life, it’s something that I really try to show in my artwork, not only for memories, but how I felt at a certain moment in life, especially dealing with grief for the first time as an adult. That’s what got me to experiment the most and really get in touch with art. I
feel like previously I would do things just to do them. They didn’t really have meaning. Now, I feel like everything I do has a meaning to it.
Q: Are there any changes you’d like to see in the ECC art department?
A: There’s a lot of changes that I wanna see. For the most part, definitely having more availability to have students use our Makerspace. I think everyone in the department has talked about this in the past. A lot of 2D, 3D design courses get to explore all the equipment we have, and we have a lot of cool things like the CNC router, 3D printers, button makers, T-shirt printers. I appreciate that that’s being used in a class setting, but I feel that it is a Makerspace, and we have so much material that could be used to make more art. I think that we’re so limited, and I understand why, I mean, for safety, and some people don’t know how to use it, but maybe if we have more workshops to learn how to use that material I feel like that would be extremely beneficial to open up that space more to artists in the department.
