The effects of the pandemic were still lingering. University mask mandates had recently been lifted. People carried their COVID card. In the midst of worldwide chaos, The Legends, Quinnipiac’s only A Cappella group, continued to gear up for its annual competition.
But the 2022 competition would not be normal. The organizers of the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella made an announcement: the venue in Hartford changed their mind about in-person performances, but our quarterfinal was still to go on. Each group would send in a video of themselves performing, and would be allowed to use the resources they would have been able to use at the venue. Every A Cappella group could perform on a stage, with each member having their own microphone, just like the actual competition.
For other groups, this was not a big issue. For The Legends, it was a huge one. Quinnipiac had neither a large stage or sixteen microphones. And yet, the group was left to compete virtually against groups at colleges that did.
Legends members emailed local high schools to see if they could use their resources. Being a Legend myself, I emailed my high school band director to see if they had access to a sixteen microphone set – knowing full well they did not. Someone checked with the University to see if they had enough microphones, only to find out there were less than sixteen owned in total.
Our president at the time found a solution. Her public high school in Massachusetts had a proper stage and a microphone set that we could use for free.
There we were, about sixteen students from a university traveling from Hamden, Connecticut to Plymouth, Massachusetts to record a ten-minute video. We then submitted the video, came back to Quinnipiac, and won first place in the quarterfinal for group’s first time.
The lack of resources and opportunities in the arts is most likely not an intentional fault by Quinnipiac. But there have not been many large-impact attempts to further the presence of the arts on campus either. A quick search on The Quinnipiac Chronicle website will pull up opinion articles from the past decade of students pointing out this exact issue: Quinnipiac lacks in the arts.
In recent years, this situation has become more dire. Being in The Legends opened my eyes to the issue. Now, the more I look, the more problems I find. The issues students brought up in The Chronicle still exist as I write. They range from the lack of student art displayed in campus hallways to the recent heartbreaking decision to sunset the theater major – the only performing arts major Quinnipiac has.
Recognizing this, a month or so after The Legends won, I presented a new idea to my colleagues in the Student Government Association’s First-Year Cabinet. As a Senator at the time, I had been working on a different project to clear out the practice rooms at the inconveniently located Music Building on Sherman Ave – a distant land set apart from campus civilization.
Sean Formantes (second from left), founder and president of the Student Artists League, performs with The Legends A Cappella at SAL’s Spring Into The Arts Festival in 2023. Photo by Grace Doyle.
I felt like my new idea could truly make a larger impact on the arts. The idea originally came to me on a chilly December night, during winter break, while sitting at my kitchen counter back home. I envisioned a new student organization, the Student Artists League, that would tackle the arts issue head on. It was an idea in my mind before The Legends competition, and one that persisted even after.
The cabinet’s reaction was overwhelmingly positive. In the months after, I filed the paperwork, wrote the Constitution, met with students, and worked to establish the group with the help and input of other SGA members. I then decided to leave student government to settle into my new roles as the group’s founder and president.
Immediately, the Student Artists League – which came to be known as SAL – had challenges to face. The first was that I was the only E-Board member. On top of recruiting students, I had to find willing leaders of the group. I pulled in my college suitemates and a couple other people who showed interest. Eventually, we got rolling, holding G-Board meetings where the majority of all but one of the attendees were E-Board members.
We held an art show in the Mount Carmel Auditorium that no one came to, except for the few campus visitors who walked through to get to the admissions center. We had an event where the projector in the Piazza did not work. We barely passed the five member minimum policy for student clubs. Many of the students who attended our first meeting, filled with excitement, did not show up again.
SAL was greatly unrecognized. Because we were new, people had not only never heard of us, but did not even know the reason behind our existence. Some students even seemed oblivious to the idea that the arts at Quinnipiac were not doing so well. Yet, despite all of this, we managed to win the Judith Frank Student Organization of the Year Award in 2023.
What can our impact be measured in? Perhaps not in numbers, because SAL, to this day, still has very little to show in that regard. Instead, our impact is measured in the lives that we impact, the mindsets that are changed, and the discussions and efforts that are started.
If SAL inspires even one Quinnipiac student to support the arts, one artist to meet another artist and create together, and one student to change the way they think about themselves as a leader, we will have done our job. Indeed, we have succeeded in doing all of these things.
Apply this same method of thinking to the on-campus arts. In what way can one measure the impact of a student song, a collage, or a short film? Yes, numbers can play a role, but it is a severely minor one at that. What is even more important is the perspectives that are shifted, the insights that are made, and the conversations that follow. Numbers are indicative of growth. But behind every number is a person; one who will be directly affected if decisions are made purely based on numbers alone.
The arts are important because they allow humans to see, in the same way that I see issues with my own eyes. We, as humans, have an innate ability within us to create; it is only a matter of whether individuals choose to do so or not. To stifle this creative ability is to take away from our shared humanity. If we can never look, we can never see. And if we never see, we can never solve.
Unfortunately, the arts scene at Quinnipiac remains stifled. We have wins in the short-term, but are losing ground in the long-term. Our performance groups are left to fight for themselves. Even when they do something great, it goes underappreciated.
There is much that needs to be done at Quinnipiac. But all of those issues are solvable. We need students who are willing to face challenges head on, not simply point out the issues and complain about them. Anyone can complain about something, but it takes a true leader to fix it.
I have made amazing friendships through The Legends. I am sure that other artists would say the same thing about their creative communities. The arts provide intangible value, especially on college campuses. My hope in having founded SAL is that no other group of students would ever have to go through what The Legends did. But whether that mission succeeds will be determined by the next generation of student leaders.
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