Fall 2026 student exhibit
KALAMAZOO, Mich.—University Libraries is honored to feature creative and research works by Western Michigan University students during fall 2026. This student exhibit can be found on the second floor of Waldo Library in the rotunda.
Cecilia Taylor
Undergraduate student, Studio Art
"i'm losing you to time (for safekeeping)"
This small hanging quilt reflects on my relationship with my father through the shifting layers of memory and time. The backing fabric is dyed in colors tied to my earliest visual memories of him, while the photo collage on the front is quilted and embellished to express the emotional terrain I move through when revisiting those moments.
As my father ages and his memory fades, I glimpse versions of him I never fully knew; when I look at images of my younger self, I feel a similar distance. These parallel realizations confront me with the quiet, anticipatory grief that time will inevitably separate us, as it does for all families and all homes. In stitching these fragments together, I attempt to hold the many versions of us—past, present, and soon-to-be gone—close, if only for a moment.
Teresa Barclay
Undergraduate student, Art Education
"Community Pilars"
Community shapes all of us in many different ways. In this piece, I explore three main ways we form communities. Coming from a Hispanic household, I wanted to start with cooking. In Hispanic communities, we come together for big meals, spending the entire day cooking, laughing, and sharing stories, and ending with a good meal.
I then move into communication. If you think about it, we couldn’t have a community without it. I couldn’t have met the amazing community here at Western without communication.
For my final piece in this triptych, I focus on how communities are shaped by where you live and where you go. I have been able to build and be part of an incredible community on campus, as well as within the Frostic School of Art.
Tayler Mercil
Graduate student, Creative Writing
“Little love,” “Middle School Bug Project” and “Cribbage was invented by a poet”
I created these three poems as part of a larger collection exploring how joy and grief can coexist, inspired by a daily gratitude practice I have maintained for the past ten years. The poems center on ordinary moments marked by significant emotional shifts: instances where love emerges, innocence is altered, and time feels especially present. Through these snapshots, I aim to show how subtle experiences can carry lasting emotional weight.
Vijaya Pandey
Collaborators: Maya Turon, Judy Tingey, Emma Wendelburg, Molly Hornyak, Jacob Hood, Alex Davies
Graduate student, Chemistry
"Multifunctional Organophotocatalysts for Divergent Decarboxylative Protonation, Oxidation, and Alkylation"
Some commonly used methods for making essential chemical products require expensive metals, multiple chemical additives, high temperatures, or harsh and toxic conditions. These requirements can make chemical processes less environmentally friendly, more expensive, and difficult to use on a larger scale.
Our research develops new, more sustainable ways to carry out these chemical reactions using light and specially designed organic molecules called photocatalysts. These catalysts can help transform readily available starting materials, including compounds found in medicines and natural biological molecules, into useful chemical building blocks. We also developed a metal-free method for joining carbon-based molecules together, providing a simpler alternative to methods that rely on metal catalysts.
Overall, this work aims to develop safer, simpler, and more sustainable chemical methods that could be useful for preparing valuable molecules in pharmaceutical and other areas of chemical research.
Andrew S. Messecar
Collaborators: Clifford Aidoo–Mensah, D. Hoping Raising, Evangeline M. Beeching, Steven M. Durbin, Brelon J. May, Robert A. Makin
Graduate student, Computer Science
"Quantum and Conventional Machine Learning Analyses of Synthesis Energetics in Epitaxially–Grown III–Nitride Materials"
Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is a technique for very precisely controlled crystal growth. The advantageous amount of control that MBE offers, however, is accompanied by great costs in terms of both time and resources.
Because of these expenses, machine learning can be useful to molecular beam epitaxy for two separate reasons: machine learning can help us to recognize patterns in data describing MBE experiments that will make it easier for us to optimize crystal growth processes, thereby (1) reducing wasted time and material, and (2) allowing for scientists to design of more precisely targeted experimental outcomes, leveraging the control that MBE offers in ways that haven’t been previously considered.
Here, machine learning is applied to study the MBE synthesis of nitride materials, namely indium nitride (InN) and gallium nitride (GaN). Similar analyses are applied to study the behavior of the nitrogen plasma source that is used to grow nitride materials.
Luci Foreman
Undergraduate student, Fine Arts
"Rock Me Amadeus"
People say that love is not a feeling, but a series of ongoing decisions to care for another person. I made this set of prints to spark conversation about coercion, gaslighting, and withholding information, and how these things can remove one's autonomy when it comes to making decisions about love.
This print is one of five unique prints centered around the idea of rumination and will to alter the past in relationships and dating. Whereas the other prints that you do not see here have been torn and repasted over with different parts of other identical prints, this one remains the original unedited version, or how I imagine things actually happened.
Grace Helms
Undergraduate student, Environmental Science and Studio Art
"Kathleen"
My mother has always been a social butterfly. Me, not so much. But her guiding me through the world has made my eyes much like her own. I love people like she does, but she has often been the one crucial to getting me through the door in the first place. The first step to being a part of something is knowing you deserve to be there.