And they loved it.

“Fun is an understatement,” said Katie Winokur, a junior art history major who was on the trip March 13-17. “It was an amazing experience. We’re all a little sad to be back on campus.”

Every four years or so since 1963, Wake Forest students have traveled to New York to buy art for the Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, amassing works by Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Keith Haring and other well-known artists. University officials say they think it’s the only university art collection in the country to have been chosen by students.

This year, on a trip that marked the 50th year since the first art-buying expedition, the students visited 14 galleries, some of them more than once.

The days were long, but productive. Even when they stopped for meals, they didn’t stop debating the pros and cons of the art they had seen. They had a lot to consider. Could they afford a particular piece? Was it something that the university’s collection needed? And would the student body and visitors respond to it?

“That was one of the tougher things, trying to balance all these things we had to accommodate,” said Mattos Paschal, a junior art history major.

“It was exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking,” Winokur said.

Sometimes what they found surprised them. The students had been researching artists for months in an effort to narrow down their search, and they had certain pieces in mind before the trip.

“We went to New York having two items on hold, and we went to see them in person and had a totally different reaction to them,” said Caroline Culp, a senior who has a double-major in art history and history. “Honestly, there was disappointment there.”

There were other disappointments along the way, too. “We wanted the first work we saw, but it was a little out of our price range,” Winokur said.

But they also found themselves drawn to works that they hadn’t anticipated. The woman they met with in the first gallery they visited said something about looking at art that proved to be prophetic, said Kelsey Zalimeni, a junior studio art major. “She said, ‘You’re going to fall in love over and over and over and over again.’”

It was true, Zalimeni said. The students found much to admire in the galleries they visited.

After days of going from gallery to gallery, the students sat down to make a tough decision. Their hotel didn’t have a conference room, so they ended up pushing together some tables in the hotel’s dining area. They huddled together with books and images of artworks piled around them.

“It was like Mission Control, essentially,” Winokur said.

Their deliberations went on for five hours. “It got heated a couple of times,” said Lauren McLaughlin, a senior who has a double-major in art history and English.

But it was still “much more civil than I had honestly anticipated,” Winokur said. There were moments of tension, but also of laughter, the students said.

They banished their faculty advisers, Joel Tauber and Jay Curley, from the room.

“We kicked them out of the final deliberations,” Paschal said. “The only time we called them in during the deliberations was when we were hungry.”

The students eventually settled on three photographic works: “Grazing Incidence Spectrometer” by Thomas Struth; “Lightning Fields 143” by Hiroshi Sugimoto; and Andrew Moore’s “Courtyard, Cass Tech High.” The students and faculty said they weren’t permitted to talk about their budget. University officials have declined to talk about the value of the collection because of security concerns.

The Struth piece is a large-scale photo of a pile of machinery in a nuclear power plant that Struth came across and captured on film. The students thought the nuclear power theme would speak to their generation, and they also thought that the shape of the pile resembled a woman in repose, one of the recurrent images in art history.

“When you see it in person, it has such a power and presence. It looks like the image is right in front of you,” Winokur said. “It’s hyper-focused.”

Struth is “a really big name and has been around for a long time,” said Tauber, an assistant professor of art. “He’s one of the main fathers of this kind of large-format photography — these sort of hyper-detailed, very detailed large sort of landscapes. It’s actually pretty amazing that we have him in the collection now.”

The students were drawn to “Lightning Fields 143” not only for the beauty of the image but also because of how it was created.

“In terms of a photograph, it’s not traditional at all,” Culp said. “What the artist has done is built this contraption that electrifies a single piece of film, photographic film, so what we see in the images he’s created is a visual record of electricity itself. What we see is a black background with what looks like a lightning bolt. ... It’s a compelling visual piece.”

The Moore photo is a scene of urban decay that lets the viewer look into the windows of the abandoned, dilapidated high school in Detroit that Diana Ross attended. “Each individual window is a moment of ruin,” Paschal said.

“It looks like it’s been blown up, but it’s really just what happens to our unused items in society,” Zalimeni said. “It was a piece that we felt was highly contemporary, something very applicable to our lives ... this horrible mass exodus from Detroit.

“The ruins that have been left behind are frighteningly beautiful. The image entices you, but once you realize what’s going on, it does repulse you.”

Tauber said that the students made good selections. “I think they did a really wonderful job,” he said. “I think it reflects who they are and what their interests are.”

All of the artists are also critically respected, he noted.

“I think they learned a lot, and I think they brought back good work,” Tauber said. “This is a school. This is one of the ways that learning occurs. I thought it was beautiful.”

He and Curley were hands-off during the trip, he said. The students decided what they wanted to see, made all the decisions and handled all the negotiations.

“When I talk to people about the trip, there’s a lot of surprise in the degree of empowerment that the school is handing to the students,” Tauber said.

The students themselves still seem a little amazed at what they were allowed to do.

“We’re just students, but we were working on a very professional level,” Paschal said. “We were the ones who chose the artists, decided where we would go to, we negotiated prices.”

The works that the students chose probably won’t arrive on campus until fall. The group also hopes to have a show of Andrew Moore’s work in 2015.

“It’s difficult to handle all those logistics,” Tauber said. “But they started that ball.”

The entire experience was remarkable, Culp said,

“I think something that’s really important for us is that this is a very academic and educational experience that has accumulated into something other than a grade,” she said. “We’ve put hundreds of hours together into research, into meetings, into discussions. And instead of getting an A, instead of getting class credit, we’re getting something physical and tangible, something that will be here forever.”

sgilmor@wsjournal.com

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