By London Gailey, Megan Fox, Meghan Maci, Carley Donnelly

The “Tiny Florence” art exhibition held on Friday June 2, 2023 was a showcase for students who spent the past 3 weeks in an Introduction to Digital Photography and Landscape and Architectural photography class. These students learned the basic skills of how to use a professional camera, edit their photos, and capture meaningful moments. Another group of students from the Art Curation course played a large role in the success of the “Tiny Florence” exhibition as well. These students helped organize, plan the event, and helped select the best photos that the community saw during the showcase. “Tiny Florence” was about capturing a small, unique, and meaningful photo anywhere in Florence. The photos included a variety of subjects from children playing, to a small detail of a large monument displayed on the walls. The exhibition itself was a unique experience because every detail was produced by FUA students from the warm greeting as you walked into the front door, to the photos on the wall. Each student had an important role to play in order to make the showcase a success. Hospitality students greeted guests with a glass of champagne to enjoy while perusing the student’s artwork. All of the artwork on display at the exhibition is for sale for 20 or 30 euro and all the proceeds go to funding students' experiences at FUA. This exhibition was a chance for students to showcase their work to the FUA and local community. We got the opportunity to go to the exhibition and interact and speak with some of the guests, artists, and event planners to hear more about some of the behind the scene work that took place.
We spoke to artist Delse Rodriguez-Del Valle who had her work displayed in the exhibit. Delse is a student in Intro to Digital Photography who was tasked with submitting 8-10 photos that would be considered for the exhibition. “The assignment was basically to encapsulate the essence of Florence and one of our field trips was to a market and our professor said have at it, this is as Florence as you can get,” said Rodriguez-Del Valle. Rodriguez-Del Valle’s photo was of a young child eating a lollipop and was one of the more candid photos on display. She has two photos on display at the exhibition, one of which was placed in a black picture frame. Another student, Jessica Vella, was a part of the art curation class and went through the photos to decide which one’s would be displayed. Every student had at least 1-2 of their photos displayed in the gallery with the top 30 photos being highlighted in a black picture frame. “We did a survey and asked students to tell a story about someone they met, which was really nice because then we knew where that photo came from, Vella said. The amount of detail and effort put into the exhibition was apparent through a speech from some of the students of the Gallery and Exhibition Curation course led by professor Lapo Morgantini. The students were encouraged to overcome cultural barriers to capture photos that they felt represent Florence and felt very rewarded in their experience.