My name is Jamie Platt and my job title is the Director of Gallery and Events.

I've been at UCM for one year.

One of the things that's different about UCM is ther.. And so that means that there's more that you can do to engage the public, even more than what I was doing.

And it just seemed like the right fit for me and allowed me to be around art all the time, which is a really wonderful thing.

It's a creative job.

And, and it's one of those jobs that people know about, but they have no idea what goes on behind.

I didn't, I didn't when I first thought about, gallery directing, I thought, well, that's what else is there.

You know, put the show up and then what?

What do you do for the rest of the time?

I had no Idea.

There's so much.

All the time.

Well, my job is actually really various.

It's different every day.

And I'm responsible for the, back of house operations for the gallery.

So anything that has to do with planning and exhibitions, from selecting artists for exhibitions, I work with a team of faculty, the gallery committee, to select the artists that will be in our exhibitions.

We schedule a year in advance, and so in the meantime, between exhibitions are working with artists to make sure that they know what we need from them and to make sure that we know what they need from us.

It's really all about bringing people together over art, but it has a lot of pieces.

So you have the things that are happening right now and the things that you're planning for in the future, and it's all happening simultaneously.

This gallery, actually all of our galleries are an exhibition space for a mix of professional artists and student artists.

So right now we have two e.. and one of them is the one that we're in right now is called the Citation Show.

And this is the 56th annual citation show.

It's mind blowing.

The citation show is an annual juried exhibition of student work, and all art and design students are invited to submit up to two pieces, and every piece gets in as long as they follow the the rules.

every piece gets in and then the outside juror comes in and they award prizes.

So they evaluate the work, and then they select eight award winners.

And, and we always try to choose someone who is an arts professional.

The juror this year is Courtney Wasson.

And Courtney is the executive director of the Kansas City Artist Coalition.

So we're really excited to have her.

When you put together an exhibition, usually there's a theme in the citation show.

You don't have that to try to make it cohesive.

You have to look for the ways that themes emerge within the artworks, that relationships emerge within the artworks.

We also have some paintings by, Nikki Haas who is getting ready to graduate this year.

She is working on a series of gargoyles.

And so those are really super interesting paintings that are in the front of the gallery.

And then we I put those next to some other works that resonate with the sensibility in Nikki's paintings to kind of, create, little galleries within galleries.

The other exhibition that's going on right now is our high school art show.

The annual high school art show is an exhibition that is open to high school students within a 150 mile radius.

we get a range of high schools that send out submissions.

And they this year, we juried from 630 entries down to 200.

So, a team of faculty selected the work that's in the high school art show.

So if you walk down the hallways right now, you're going to see that they're lined with artworks, ceramics, painting, drawing, textiles, printmaking, sculpture and bookmaking.

So everything really that, that students get involved in is represented.

And, and it's all made by high school students ..

So this building used to be an elementary school, and the gallery was as an entity, not in this space at all.

And even when, when the art school took it over, originally, they, they were hanging work, in another building.

So then, then they brought the gallery here, and now we actually have technically three galleries, this room that we're in right now is the it's what's called the main gallery.

And then adjacent to this room, which it's all one, but it's it's two separate rooms that are connected to each other.

And we call that the outer gallery.

What matters about that is that sometimes we will have one exhibition in here and a totally diff.. in there.

So you can have two related or unrelated exhibitions going .. And then we have our smaller gallery, Gallery 115.

One of the things that's really important to kno.. is that you don't have to know anything about art.

I think that a lot of times people feel like, oh, I'm not an art person or I don't understand it, but the truth is that you already have everything that you need to be able to come into a gallery just by you being who you are.

So whatever you're bringing with you is going to be totally unique.

That's one of the great things about art, is that what what you see is just as valid as what anyone else sees.