Students from across campus pour into the Meadows Museum, chatting about their ideas for the night. Signs labeled “ArtMix Thursdays” point into a room where materials to make mosaics are splayed across tables. Freshman Eden Mason walks in, admiring the different options.

Staring at her completed art project, Mason reflected on the atmosphere of the event.

“I’m really enjoying the people hosting it, honestly,” Mason said. “They’ve been really fun. I got to tap into my creative side without having to be a perfectionist about it.”

ArtMix Thursdays is one of the new programs the Meadows Museum has rolled out to encourage more SMU students to visit the museum. The event takes place on the first Thursday of each month.

Students can attend ArtMix Thursdays at the Meadows Museum by showing their SMU ID at the entrance.

SMU senior Anastasiya Shyvilka is the senior education intern at the museum and led the ArtMix Thursdays event Mason attended.

“We started thinking about it last semester, and the museum is always interested in bringing students into its spaces,” Shyvilka said. “We thought that organizing something smaller would be a welcoming space here to come together and create.”

The event centers around combining art and community. For its first ArtMix Thursday held in February, Meadows partnered with SMU’s Craft Club and made mosaics out of pieces of glass tiles. Students weren’t required to be in the club to attend, but the event is intended to help draw the museum closer to SMU student life.

“Every month we make a new art-making activity,” Shyvilka said. “It’s mainly up to the organization we collaborate with to see what they are interested in, what they think that students will be interested in.”

This new program comes at the same time as the museum’s changing membership that allows students to access more social events. Anne Kindseth has been the director of education at the Meadows Museum for the last six years and is excited about the openness of the new membership.

“Students have always been able to come to the museum for free, and many of our programs are offered free to students,” Kindseth said. “This membership will also get students access to some of the more social things that the museum does, like our member openings and meet ups and things that you hadn’t had access to before.”

Open for over 60 years, the Meadows Museum is a central part of campus culture at SMU, located right at the beginning of the Boulevard. Students in Spanish classes have field trips to see the artwork, programs draw in people throughout the community and it collaborates with other departments.

Patricia Manzano Rodriguez, the museum’s curator, takes the SMU students into account when deciding on upcoming exhibitions.

“I think our goal is to have as many students come through the door as possible. Sometimes the students that come have never been to a museum before,” Rodriguez said. “I would like for them to take away that museums are for everyone.”

Meadows has three exhibits this spring that last until June 21. Rodriguez said. “Raimundo de Madrazo,” is the biggest exhibition for spring, it features the Italian artist who became known for his French-style portraits.

“He lived most of his life in Paris, so that is what we are showcasing,” Rodriguez said. “[It features] beautiful art, mostly portraits of women from the 19th century in Paris.”

“Rubén Guerrero,” one of the other exhibits, features contemporary abstract and figurative paintings. “Yañez: Saint Sebastian Revealed,” highlights Spanish Renaissance work of Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, through a technical study of his “Saint Sebastian,” organized by the Meadows Museum in collaboration with the Kimbell Art Museum.

The artwork in the museum’s collection spans centuries, and Rodriguez said it allows her to constantly refresh what students see when they walk through the doors.

“Our collection is so vast, it goes from the 10th century to the 21st,” Rodriguez said. “We always try to highlight a bit of everything, within 1,000 years of Spanish art that we have in the collection.”

Behind the scenes at the Meadows Museum, student workers and staff say programs like ArtMix Thursdays require months of preparation and collaboration across departments at Southern Methodist University. Shyvilka said helping develop the event gave her new insight into the planning process.

“It’s been a really great experience so far. I really enjoy learning how to actually brainstorm and create a new program,” Shyvilka said. “It’s really hard to imagine how much goes into planning events unless you actually start walking through all those steps.”

Staff members said the museum’s goal is not only to showcase art but also to create a space that connects students with the broader Dallas arts community. Kindseth said the institution regularly works with multiple audiences while keeping SMU students central to its programming.

“We really serve a lot of different communities of Dallas,” Kindseth said. “We’re really wanting to be kind of a place where everyone thinks of us as a resource and as a kind of collaborators.”

Organizers added that events like ArtMix are designed to offer students a creative break from academic routines.

“Really just enjoy taking a break from your screens and your life and looking at art in a gallery,” Kindseth said.