If Sarah L. Gogel ’06 has her way, visitors to Tommy’s Pizza next week will see a 1000-square-foot mural on a Bow Street wall. And she says she hopes eventually to create similar murals in the building of every Harvard academic department.

Gogel says traditional gallery space for student artists at Harvard is simply insufficient. She’s not alone in wanting more space to show student art.

Although Harvard’s campus teems with student artists, students say finding space to display their work is more difficult than ever.

With the opening of the Winthrop Art Studio this fall by resident tutor Zoe P. McKinness—which expands on the limited studio space in the Houses—students have been given more space to create, but some say not nearly enough to exhibit what they’ve made.

According to Adams House Arts Tutor Jen Mergel ’98, sufficient display space encourages art making and gives up-and-coming artists valuable practice in exhibiting and curating their work before they enter the real world.

“It’s important to give students of all artistic levels a space to display their work, set up initiatives or curate shows,” Mergel says.

Those outside the small Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department have long complained that the department’s courses and facilities often exclude non-concentrators. This problem has prompted a number of efforts to locate additional studio and exhibition space that is not limited to VES students.

Several Houses maintain spaces where students and resident tutors can display their work—and a few, like Adams and Winthrop, even provide studio space—but the distribution of these resources varies greatly among Houses.

According to Nancy Selvage, who directs the Ceramics Program at the Office for the Arts (OFA), VES concentrators can occasionally display their final projects in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts or Hilles Library.

Mergel oversees installations in the Adams House ArtSpace, one of the few on-campus exhibition spaces available for student displays, and the only multi-room gallery devoted to art by the Harvard community.

“The ArtSpace is an amazing resource,” Mergel says. “It gives students who are serious about art the opportunity to do things that they otherwise couldn’t: organize exhibitions, curate shows and display their own work to their community.”

Since this year, the ArtSpace—a set of squash courts converted for gallery use nearly a decade ago—has received more requests for student-curated exhibitions than can be accommodated. According to Mergel, more than 15 exhibits were displayed in the space this year, including every week of the spring semester.

“The ArtSpace is being used much more than before,” she says. “I’ve had to turn interested students away just because there’s been such a high demand to display their work.”

In addition to the ArtSpace, there’s also permanent exhibition space in Mather House and Eliot House.

Amidst the bustle of Adams ArtSpace, Susanna Garcia, resident art tutor in Mather House, says she sometimes wonders where all the artists have gone.