The art of NC State student artists took the stage at the Fish Market Gallery in downtown Raleigh on Friday. Open to the public and offered with free wine, students and viewers saw work portraying a theme of “Dark Arts.” 

Ryann Horn, a fourth-year studying graphic and experience design and part of the Fish Market Gallery team, described a little history of the gallery venue and this month’s theme. 

“Fish Market student art gallery is an NC State-run art gallery for NC State students,” Horn said. “We host monthly shows every first Friday. We have different themes each month. So for the October show, it’s ‘Dark Arts.’ We’re just showcasing cool, spooky art made by artists. We have a lot of photography and puppetry and all kinds of different mediums representing dark arts.”

Horn said the gallery is funded through the College of Design and that artists display their art at no charge to them.

“Dark arts has become like a tradition,” said Collin Lawrence, a fourth-year studying fashion and textile management, brand management and marketing. “Since Fish Market has been around for like 20 years, I don’t know when dark arts came into the mix, but it’s now one of our core shifts. People seem to like macabre, darker subject material so for the past two years we’ve done it.” 

Lawrence described the process by which the displayed work gets selected and how students can submit their pieces. 

“It’s pretty open in the sense that we create a Google form, blast it out and then people will submit their work,” Lawrence said. “It’s almost like the same way a contest would go, except it’s really hard to lose. So people, based on whatever the theme is, send us a picture of the artwork, give us a little info, like, is it a picture? Does it need to be hanging on a wall? So that’s kind of how it goes. And then we just review all the submissions as things get close to the deadline.”

Lawrence said the Fish Market Gallery is one of the bigger opportunities for NC State student artists to freely display their pieces. 

“I think it gives people a lot of confidence,” Lawrence said. “Here, they have a legit opportunity to get their work displayed in a gallery downtown on a wall and envied by the public. So it’s kind of like, where else are you going to get a free opportunity like that? … Especially for a student, there’s not a whole lot of opportunities like this.”

Lily Cronrath, a second-year studying media arts, technology and design, had two of her pieces displayed and is about to join the team. 

“We get a lot of submissions for this theme,” Cronrath said. “I think people are just very into the surreal and dark and Halloween spooky vibes. You get a large variety of that with the dark arts, and you can kind of have it be a play on words where people are playing with lighting and shadow work.”

The artists showed great variety in their mediums, which can get artists’ gears turning when they have a theme to match. 

“It gets people’s minds going when we say [themes] like the dark arts,” Cronrath said. “This is a really good theme — other themes don’t draw in quite as much attention. So it’s trying to find something that’s going to be broad enough that people will say, ‘Oh, I have a piece that fits that,’ but specific enough that people get excited and they’re like, ‘I have the perfect thing just for this.’”

Erin Secosky, a fourth-year studying graphic design and part of the Fish Market Gallery team, told of the venue’s plans for this upcoming year. 

“This year is our 20th anniversary at Fish Market, and as part of an archival process, we want to create a lost web archive of Fish Market,” Secosky said. “There are a bunch of pictures of the gallery that are hidden in different WordPress accounts, Instagram, Facebook and Google posts, so we want to work on trying to track down some of the past gallery directors and learn more about the history because we have no written history yet. One of our biggest goals for this next year before me and the Fish Market Gallery team graduate is getting a written Fish Market history online.”

The Fish Market Gallery will continue to support NC State student artists as the team works toward growing and improving the gallery and its events.