For a long time, studio art major and thesis student Jess Hu ’25, saw art as a way to express herself without relying on others. “As a kid, … if I didn’t have friends, I’d draw on my own,” she said. “Because that’s something I can do by myself. It’s an alternative to hanging out with people in real life.”
Hu — who is now a multidisciplinary visual artist — did not initially plan on majoring in studio art when she arrived at the College, despite her lifelong love for drawing. “I came here as a psychology and Spanish major,” she said. “Art has been something that I’ve done my entire life and it’s my ‘passion,’ but in high school, I didn’t take any art classes, so I didn’t feel like it would be a career choice.”
Taking “Introduction to Printmaking” with Assistant Professor of Art Pallavi Sen during her first year at the College made Hu realize that art was her calling. “That class genuinely changed my life,” she said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is what I want to be doing in college.’”
Since taking on the major, Hu has dived headlong into art coursework. This semester, she is enrolled in three art classes. “It’s like I’m living in Spencer,” she said. Hu said that pouring time into her art has also helped her develop a strong sense of camaraderie with fellow student artists, improving her work. “It’s really nice to come in and see the same people for my senior seminar class,” she said. “Once you get close with someone, they can give you really good feedback on your work, because they know you.”
Hu’s work spans sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and painting. She has also started to incorporate writing into her work: Earlier this month, Hu erected an exhibition featuring white funeral banners inscribed with Mandarin phrases in the Spencer Art Building’s Wilde Gallery.
Although her work often addresses recurrent themes, Hu finds certain mediums better suited for particular nuances of her ideas. “My paintings are about grief and the body, and the body as a site for violence, whereas the worlds that I make when drawing are an escape from that,” she explained. “But it’s still connected, because it’s all about grieving.”
Hu’s thesis, a set of two paintings featuring her body in contorted positions, brings these underlying themes of mourning to the forefront. “I am thinking a lot about the body as a site for inherited grief — specifically, a disabled body, because I am disabled,” she said. “I think about how my being alive has taken a lot of opportunities in life away from my mom, and how that grief sits in my body.”
As someone with OCD, Hu is also interested in exploring the relationship between grief and compulsive thoughts. “As a kid, the fear of death was all consuming,” she said. “[Now,] I’m thinking about unhealable wounds. Like a mother dying is an unhealable wound that the body will feel, and maybe imagining the experience of that grief over and over again prepares the body for that.”
In addition to studio art, Hu is also a computer science major. Hu identified a collaborative attitude to problem solving as a common thread that drew her to both departments. “The CS department, people-wise, is very similar to the art community here,” she said. “I think I’m drawn to [environments] where people are really supportive. Even when I’m bad at coding, I still want to go to class and do the assignments.”
In addition to her role as an art student, Hu has interned for both the Williams College Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. After graduating, she plans to eventually pursue more schooling. “I want to be an art professor,” she said. “I think the [requirement] for that is getting an MFA [Master of Fine Arts], so I will be going to grad school at some point.”
In the meantime, Hu plans to bolster her artist portfolio. “I want to have a stronger sense of my art outside of Williams,” she said. She already has plenty of creative projects up her sleeve. “After classes are done at Williams, my friend Riku [Nakano ’25] and I want to do a rice ball sculpture project,” she said. “We’re talking about it now, knowing that we could start it next week, but also continue after college, which is really sweet.”
Ironically, Hu — who once used art as an escape from socializing — now considers the community she built with other artists at the College a highlight of her undergraduate years. “I wish I could have embedded myself in the art community earlier, and been friends with everyone in all of my art classes,” she said. “I think that they’ve all been so amazing.”
