Camtastic Newsletter November 2024

Empty Bowls-Where Art Meets Hunger

By Mark Stoffel, College of Arts and Media

Carbondale buzzed with activities during Southern Illinois University’s homecoming weekend last month, but one standout event with a deeper purpose was the Empty Bowls fundraiser, a collaboration between Neighborhood Co-op Grocery and the SIU School of Art and Design’s Ceramics program. Call it functional art for a cause: The co-op in the heart of Carbondale makes delicious soup while students create and sell the bowls. Organizers donated proceeds from the Oct. 12 event to the Survivor Empowerment Center (formerly the Women’s Center), an organization dedicated to ending domestic violence and sexual assault in southern Illinois and supporting survivors of these crimes. Victims and their children can seek shelter at the center while stabilizing their lives.

Empty Bowls started as a national initiative to fight hunger and poverty, tailored by local artists and art organizations to address community needs. In 2014, Pattie Chalmers, a professor in the School of Art and Design and head of the Ceramics program, launched the initiative in Carbondale with the conviction that art could be a powerful tool in the fight against hunger and poverty in her backyard.

“The idea is that you buy a bowl, you eat some soup, and you think about an empty bowl that someone else might have,” Chalmers said, “and so you are contributing to their bowl by buying a bowl. Our students donate their time and their materials to make these bowls and then make them available to the public. It also brings awareness that there is a need for funds and for us to support the community”.

Carbondale’s Neighborhood Co-op Grocery has been hosting the event since its inception, consistent with the store’s operating principle of “concern for community.”

“We are always happy to support community organizations and community events,” said Francis Murphy, the store’s general manager. “Whether they are university-based or just in the larger community. Empty Bowls, of course, is marrying both of those.”

About 15 advanced undergraduate and graduate students created roughly 300 bowls throughout the semester to support the fundraiser. 

Sarah Willes, a third-year Master of Fine Arts student studying Ceramics, said it is an event she always looks forward to attending. 

“We do this every single year, and I think that it’s just a really fun project for us because we get to practice our pottery skills, and it’s also a nice way to get all the students together and have a collective goal,” she said. “It’s really fun to also just meet everybody when we participate in the sale because customers come, they see the bowls and pick out whatever they want. And we get to serve them soup. It’s just really lovely.” Chalmers said it’s fun for students to see who chooses to eat from their bowls: “They want to have a connection with the person who now has something that they made. I think that’s great!.” “And especially in ceramics we are always thinking about the utilitarian use when we are going for our pottery,” adds Sarah Willes, “so it’s nice to see that someone is actually enjoying what we are making.”  

What Chalmers appreciates most about this project is the opportunity to give back, no strings attached. This year, the event raised nearly $3,000 for the Survivor Empowerment Center. 

“I’m not doing it for me, and we’re not doing it for the program,” she said. “We’re just doing it because it’s good. I think that there’s something good about doing something good, especially right now, in a world where it seems like everyone is feeling stressed about all the badness. And doing something good can make people feel a little bit better about the state of things -- that someone as small as an undergraduate student at SIU can do something that benefits someone else.”