Troy University’s journalism students and International Arts Center have partnered together to showcase a different side of art you may not consider.

The Art of the Story exhibit features articles, photography and cartoons created by TROY’s journalism students published over the past year.

The IAC’s curator Carrie Jaxon saw it as an opportunity to showcase TROY’s journalism students, a community that usually isn’t highlighted at the center.

“The act of telling a story, the art of it, is so important,” Jaxon said. “We wanted to find a way to lift up our journalism students and engage our audience with a different type of art form.”

The exhibit focuses on different events that have happened over the past year, including Rep. John Robert Lewis’ funeral, how events shifted to meet COVID guidelines and the university through the eyes of international students.

“It’s big, national stories that were being covered,” Dr. Robbyn Taylor, the student publications adviser, said. “When you come and look at the exhibit, it’s how those things were happening and how students and faculty and staff at TROY were experiencing those things.”

“It was really important to have this opportunity to show a unique perspective from our journalism students to have a new understanding of how this particular population was affected,” Jaxon added.

The exhibit is also a new way for the students to see people interact with their writing and photography.

“They don’t really get that experience of being able to watch people interact with their work,” Taylor said. “This gives them a wonderful opportunity to come over here and talk about the pieces, invite the community in to take a look at what they’ve been doing.”

Taylor sees the exhibit as a way for visitors to perceive journalism as its own art form.

“It’s an art form on its own trying to figure out what the truth of the story is, who can help explain that, how to do it in a credible way and then package it in an engaging way where people actually read the content,” Taylor said. “At the heart of it, journalism is a public service, but the creation of what happens when students are working on stories, taking photos and collecting video? That’s all art.”

The exhibit is on display in the Huo Bao Zhu gallery and will remain open until Tuesday, Nov. 9.