Creative Juices club to highlight Capitol artists with April event

Capitol Technology University may be a STEM-focused school, but that doesn’t mean artistic talent is in short supply.

Many students enrolled in the university’s engineering, technology, and business programs also have an active interest in music, the visual arts, poetry, and other creative genres.

A new club at Capitol, Creative Juices, aims to provide a venue to showcase these students’ activities. On April 12, the club will be hosting an art exhibition at Puente Library that will be followed by a dinner in the Student Center and a rock band performance in Gudelsky Auditorium.

“The event is an art exhibition, and we’re doing it so we can better represent the artists here at Capitol. There are a lot of artists at the university – musicians, poets, photographers, digital and graphic artists -- and we want to show them that they have friends here on campus,” said Barron Botts, the club’s founder and president.

Barron, a sophomore in the computer science program, established Creative Juices last year after seeing that no other art clubs existed on campus.

Artistic endeavors can provide an essential counterbalance to homework, lectures, and labs. “When I was in high school, poetry was one of the few things that kept my interest going while I was busy scarfing down information for classes,” he said. “When I got to Capitol, I didn’t want to be in a situation where I just went to class every day and came back home to do my homework, with nothing to go out and do.”

This year, in addition to leading the Creative Juices club, Barron is also enrolled in an engineering poetry class taught by adjunct professor John Washington, an accomplished poet who is also Capitol’s assistant director of advising and student success.

“It makes us realize that there’s another perspective to engineering and technology,” Barron said.

Interested in finding out more about the April 12 art exhibit or the Creative Juices club? E-mail Barron at btbotts@captechu.edu

Photo (from left): Jalyn DeJesus, Jacob Rush, Barron Botts, Joshua Ferguson, and Jorge Rodriguez. Creative Juices poster designed by Johnathan Botts.