Student Artist Spotlight: Havily Nwakuche

Courtesy of Havily Nwakuche

I visited Tjaden Hall once again on Oct. 31 to sit down and talk art with senior BFA student Havily Nwakuche ’25. With her graduation looming in the near future, Nwakuche reflected on how both she and her art have grown since coming to Cornell. Growing up near a library that offered community art projects and always loving art in school, Nwakuche really started getting serious about her craft in her senior year of high school. Now, her main focus is the impact that art has on viewers and the power it has to exert external influence, rather than just existing as an idea or passive object.

SUNBURSTS | Clubfest

Hundreds of Cornell’s clubs tabled at this weekend’s Clubfest in Barton Hall. The Sun’s photography department covered the event, taking photos of the clubs. MEDIOCRE MELODIES | Among the clubs were many a capella and performing arts clubs.Genna Handel ’26, Anthony Wang ’26 and Daniel Hofmann ’26 sing at their table (they weren’t that bad). MED-IN BLACK | New and old clubs alike tabled at Clubfest. Ose Imoisili ’26, Justin Paris ’26, Shaun Hinds ’26 and Esunge Ntiege ’26 founded Med In Black just this Fall.

On Making Bad Art (and a Lot of It)

But maybe bad art is more fun than eating vegetables — partially because you can hold it, and especially because it’s just for you. I write down my friend’s dream featuring me playing basketball. I write down what my sister wore to her sorority date night. I write down what the soup was at Zeus and where I ate it. My journal is an explosion of the mundane, sprinkled with heartbreak and days when the sun shined bright enough to lull away the sonorous pitch of outgrowing things and places again and again. 

PONTIN | A Devotion to Disposability

I succumbed to the powerful current of the mainstream this past fall after finding myself intrigued by the grainy, strangely-lit photos I was seeing smeared across every social media platform. Something about the process seemed delightfully out of place, a superfluous return to a technology we have long since outgrown.

LEUNG | Letting Go of ‘I’

I felt like a cliché. The college grad who faces a crisis over her own personal fulfillment, so she wants to leave the country and start a life abroad — but is too scared of societal pressures and whatever conditioned ideas of success she has, so she stays. I’ve thought of these recurring thoughts and the idea that people don’t understand me, or no one knows how I feel. But the feelings of misunderstanding, isolation, longing and restlessness — they’re not new. People have felt these emotions over and over, by those who have lived hundreds of years before and those who will come after.

POLLACK | The Lion in the Path

I’ve long feared this moment — not the one where I don a cap and gown, cross a stage or two, pick up a piece of paper and enter the rat race after twenty-one years of nurture. No, the moment I’ve feared most is having to convince the Cornell Daily Sun’s readership that the photo editor can write more than a one sentence cutline. That moment is here. Here goes nothing. I didn’t study photography at Cornell.