Ann Skiold turns Bird Library study space into Biblio Gallery art gallery

Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

The Biblio Gallery can be easily mistaken as just another study space in Bird Library. With glass walls and a long conference table, the gallery attracts more students to work quietly than to view the art displayed within. What students may not notice, though, is the work Ann Skiold, the fine arts and language librarian at Bird, puts in to curate the fourth floor gallery.

“I try to make it look effortless,” Skiold said.

But the glass room has come a long way since adopting the identity of the Biblio Gallery. Once serving as a storage space in Bird, the area fell under Skiold’s domain in 2009. As someone who has an academic background in art and art history, she said that she saw the potential for the area to become a gallery for student work.

“I want people to succeed,” Skiold said. “I want them to feel good and proud about their work, so it’s sort of a boost for people.”

Her process of selecting students to feature is interactive from the start. Skiold solicits submissions from an online form, which she reviews and uses to contact artists via email. The Biblio Gallery accepts submissions from artists across all mediums and topics, ranging from Comic Con to oil paintings to intricate drawings inspired by COVID-19. Once she’s approved the artist, Skiold meets with them in person to discuss how to curate their work and produce an artist’s statement ahead of their exhibition date.

While running the Biblio Gallery by herself — and without a budget — Skiold has learned what materials work best in the gallery space: poster board, not glass, she said. Part of the endeavor of working with students is encouraging the artists to play a hands-on, professional role in the construction of their exhibit, which includes printing and hanging their own work.

“I hope they understand how much work goes into it,” Skiold said. “I also want them to realize that it has to look professional; it has to be done nicely. Sometimes I’ve told students that they cut the borders too tight, and it just looks sloppy.”

Since the beginning of the semester, she’s coordinated the exhibition of four collections in the Biblio Gallery and is seeking student work for the summer. The work of Manya Gadhok, a third-year graduate student in film, is currently displayed in the Biblio Gallery until May 9.

Gadhok is originally from Delhi, India. The inspiration for her collection, “Survive,” stemmed from the stark class disparities she witnessed growing up and in her subsequent visits back to India. She took the photos that are now on display in the Biblio Gallery on one of her recent trips to Delhi, and they depict the gritty, day-to-day life of lower-caste people seeking survival in the form of money or food, she said.

“I saw that literal class divide and how these people actually struggle, from my own eyes I experienced it,” Gadhok said. “I decided that I need to do something about this. I need to make my work around this; I need to see the problems; I need to show this to the world.”

The opportunity to showcase politically important work like Gadhok’s is something Skiold said she is happy to provide, and has done so in the past. The Biblio Gallery has also been a home for non-photography-based work, like Xuan Liu’s multimedia and digital art collection that was showcased in the gallery in February.

Liu, a third-year graduate student in illustration, saw the Biblio Gallery as an opportunity to display her work to a wider audience. As someone who enjoys experimenting with mixed mediums, Liu chose pieces that demonstrated her range as an artist for her collection.

“I love exploring mixed media, and sometimes I come by traditional media and the digital media,” Liu said. “It’s kind of my direction; I like to explore (the) using of different media.”

For both Gadhok and Liu, the Biblio Gallery served as an outlet to share their creativity outside of the classroom. Skiold said this is by design: the gallery’s purpose is to let student artists of all mediums, not just painting or photography, get their work out of their home or camera and into the world.

Because the gallery isn’t housed in a space dedicated solely to art, Skiold has found that students don’t often notice the work displayed within it. She’s hoping to remedy this by adding more multimedia components, including a way for film and video artists to share their work.

Regardless of the viewership of the gallery, though, Liu appreciates the ability to exhibit work in a public setting. She emphasized the importance of artists submitting their work to be seen, as it can lead to future opportunities in the creative world.

“If you are confident with work, and if you really love your work, you should treasure every chance to promote yourself and promote yourself as an artist,” Liu said. “If you want to become a professional artist, then you have to make this step. Even if it’s a very small exhibition, it will be a very important line on your CV. So treasure every chance you have.”