Hidden in plain sight inside DePaul’s Schmitt Academic Center, a locker-sized gallery is drawing curious students to stop, open the door and take a closer look.

Called “Locker Room,” the project is part of a student-led push to keep art alive on campus as institutional spaces like the DePaul Art Museum disappear.

Tucked into locker No. 121 on the first floor of the SAC, the micro-exhibit rotates every two weeks. It’s open from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, inviting passersby to pause between classes and engage with art in an unexpected place.

Christa Baclia-an, a DePaul senior and the exhibit’s creator, says she started the project at a moment when the arts on campus felt uncertain and wanted to expand how artists connect with multiple communities.

The opening of “Locker Room” follows news that DePaul will close the DePaul Art Museum at the end of the academic year as part of broader strain on the university’s budget. Students like Baclia-an say they’re now looking for ways to fill that loss.

“I felt the need to find a way to make an artist-run space that engages with the community here, as well as beyond DePaul community,” Baclia-an said. “And remind us what we’re doing here, why we want to create, why we want to make things.”

Abisola Clay, a DePaul junior who previously exhibited work in the locker, says this space reflects both necessity and opportunity.

“I think The Art School has always been like, we need more,” Clay said. “With DPAM closing, I think we had, even though we didn’t really have our work in the space, we just had a space itself, and it showed that DePaul still cared about the fine arts in some way.”

Baclia-an started “Locker Room” earlier this year by renting a campus locker for just $25. Viewers have to open the locker themselves, turning the act of looking into something active rather than passive.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions include artists from outside the university — and even outside the country — as Baclia-an looks to grow the space into something bigger.

“I wanted to expand who the DePaul community was engaging with the same way that DPAM does,” she said.

“Locker Room” is just one example of a growing DIY art scene at DePaul, where students are creating their own spaces and connections. Peyton Rhodes, a senior, recently curated an exhibition in the locker featuring an artist she met abroad. She says exhibits like these are essential to fill the gap left by DPAM.

“Student-led DIY shows are honest. Just as DPAM focused on underrepresented artist representation, student shows do exactly that from the ground up,” she said. “They’re essential for artists to begin to put their voice out there in an art world that is so unforgiving and exclusive.”

The current exhibition, “Arousing a profound disquiet,” runs April 26 through May 6 and features work by London-based artist Lee Tzur. Rhodes connected with Tzur while studying abroad and invited her to participate after seeing her work in a student exhibition.

“It’s so fulfilling to know that people that I don’t really know, essentially strangers, are looking at my work,” Tzur said. “They can come up with their own interpretations of the work, and it makes their relationship to the work a lot more authentic and therefore makes the work feel more authentic.”

Tzur, who grew up in Goa, India, and is now pursuing a fine arts degree in London, describes her practice as increasingly conceptual.

Her pieces in “Locker Room” include a framed image of a sex doll and a roll of toilet paper printed with affirmations. Both works interrogate performance, identity and the construction of idealized selves.

The framed image, presented almost like a shrine, examines what she calls a “reductive” view of femininity. The toilet paper piece takes a more satirical approach, printing self-affirmations onto a material associated with waste.

That sense of authenticity is central to DIY art spaces, which operate outside institutional pressures like funding, collectors and marketability.

“I feel like my horizon has really grown so much just through art and just through saying yes to participating and contributing to these sort of DIY scenes,” Tzur said. “They have so much more of an impact on culture.”

Baclia-an has already hosted several exhibitions and plans to continue through the end of the school year, with hopes of expanding the project beyond campus after graduation. She envisions curating shows in other unconventional spaces, keeping the same DIY ethos.

“I don’t like explaining what the art means, why it’s there, but I think it has a right to exist there,” she said. “That’s just what art is, it’s a meeting space.”

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