Lisa Wei '26
Oct 14, 2022
On Friday, October 21, 2022, Chad Godt’s show, Beauty is Suspect, will open with a reception at the Burgin Center for the Arts. Godt will also be at Mercersburg Academy Thursday and Friday during the school day to speak to students in the art classes taught by Sydney Caretti, Director of Galleries and member of the fine arts department.
Formerly an art teacher at the University of Arizona, Godt currently teaches art at Alamance Community College in North Carolina. He has also shown his work at galleries across the country. However, in his Mercersburg show, he has more control over what is being shown and how.
“I met Chad Godt when I was in graduate school in Marywood University. I reached out to him after I invited Pamela Parsons [to do an art show], who was our painting mentor and professor,” said Caretti. Parsons suggested that Caretti reach out to Godt with an invitation to show his work at Mercersburg Academy, because she thought students would benefit from the clever way in which he portrayed his subjects and from the relatability his brings to his artwork.
“I started out wanting to be a comic strip artist… I started drawing and copying what I liked from that genre. I then moved to wanting to be an animator and needed to develop better drawing skills. I eventually realized that I hate computers and the idea of sitting in front of a computer all day for months and years at a time doing repetitive drawing was like torture. I was a little lost in life at that point and took my first painting class and fell in love with the medium. However, I still loved drawing. Through a lot of doing what I thought painting was… I wasn’t feeling like I was expressing who I was and wasn’t expressing anything that fulfilled me mentally. I started thinking about what I loved about art and the artists I admired… and what I felt really showed who I was… That was combining drawing and painting together. I loved it…It continued and evolved from there,” Godt said.
Now, Godt’s focuses on everyday objects, mainly broken toys. “I think the work he’s showing us in the gallery, while it has a simplistic style, is also heavily charged with meaning and connection to all of us,” said Caretti. Godt’s work and inspiration are mainly self-referential. He found that art was the best way to express who he is and what he was and is dealing with.
Caretti hopes that Chad Godt’s visit to Mercersburg Academy will open the eyes of students to new possibilities. “I want our students to know what is happening beyond our microcosm and that the intention of an artist has such a larger meaning than what is represented. Our students can learn from Chad that after an artist learns the elements of arts and principles of design, they then can break the rules and have areas of space that are not activated,” said Caretti.