Pictured: Sheryl Oring at a Pittsburgh event in 2017. Photo by Renee Rosensteel.

The Ringling College of Art and Design campus overflows this Friday, October 12, with an ArtWalk from 4pm to 7pm featuring the opening of seven new exhibitions. From faculty art to student creations, featured photographers, college-wide collaborations and even a former New York Times journalist looking to activate local democracy through art, folks may just have to run if they’re going to see it all.

Technically, the day begins at 11am, when journalist-turned-artist-for-democracy Sheryl Oring will be on campus with her “I Wish to Say” performance, seeing the artist adopt the role of a secretary out of the 1960s, armed with a typewriter so students and other passersby can dictate their own postcard to the president. It’s something she’s done since 2004, hoping to activate democratic impulses in her audiences, especially students. “That’s been important to me because young people sometimes feel like they’re not listened to,” says Oring. “Maybe they’ll actually write a letter to one of their elected officials or take action in some small way in their community.”

In the Basch Visual Arts Center, audiences will see selections from Oring’s past projects, as well as a new series incorporating statements ripped from news articles about the #MeToo movement and another new series exhibiting past postcards sent to President Trump through Oring in 2017.

Photography enthusiasts want to head for the Cooley Photography Center, where Meaning/Material explores these themes through the work of 11 photographers who search for meaning in a materialistic world. And be sure to swing by the Richard and Barbara Basch Gallery to see Kindred: Recent Photographs by Noelle McCleaf, highlighting two of the artist’s four-year projects through large-scale photographs made from film negatives.

Recent student work can be viewed at the 8th annual juried show in the Madeby Gallery, as well as in the Brizdle-Schoenburg Special Collections Center in the Goldstein Library, where an ongoing exhibition of photographs and wearable animal heads showcases the work of students learning costume design. For those curious about the other side of the equation, an exhibition in the William G. and Marie Selby Foundations Gallery shines a spotlight on work from all of the new additions to the college’s illustration department.

And to see what faculty and students can accomplish together, along with faculty and students from Saint Lucas College of Art and Design, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and other European universities dedicated to design, the Willis Smith Gallery presents A Tale of Two Cities, Mapping a Site. A six-year international collaborative project involving an ever-changing cast of contributing artists, the result is a multi-media sprawling artistic expression of the two cities, Sarasota and Antwerp.

For a taste of the Halloween spirit, swoop into the Crossley Gallery, where gallery directors Savannah Bonnette and Meagan Hindel indulge their dark sides with Macabre, a show full of “the gruesome, the grotesque, the grim.”

The Ringling College ArtWalk begins at 4pm on October 12 and runs through 7pm.

Pictured: Sheryl Oring at a Pittsburgh event in 2017. Photo by Renee Rosensteel.