In the morning, people always struggle to find what hat they are going to wear — what they are going to do and what part of themselves they want to focus on.

Grace Moon, a senior majoring in electrical engineering, has a lot of experience trying to find out what hat to wear on a regular basis. While she is an accomplished engineering student, Moon has also achieved a lot of success within the art world of Binghamton, being showcased in the Best of SUNY Art Exhibition for her printmaking piece “Day and Night, I Pick Flowers for You.”

Her work has been featured at the H. Carl McCall Building in Albany since December 2022. The Best of SUNY Art Exhibition is a juried art show, with the winners selected from a panel of independent judges. Moon’s piece is one of three winners of the Best of Show award, where she not only won bragging rights but also a $1,000 scholarship.

To get to where she is today, Moon took a somewhat unconventional journey. The eldest daughter of immigrants from Korea, she was admitted to Binghamton University in the TRIO program, an educational outreach program for disadvantaged students aimed at bridging the financial gap that gatekeeps higher education.

“In kindergarten, I came back with this giant-like Crayola crayon picture of a massive heart and my family in it, and then my parents saying, ‘this is amazing,’ and me being really proud of it,” Moon said. “I think in high school is where I really buckled down into, ‘Oh, I think I’m actually really good at this.”

One of the formative experiences of Moon’s as an artist came as a freshman in high school during a teaching session by Kim Jung Gi, a Korean artist. Moon explained that because she is from a white suburban background, she had not met a lot of people of Asian descent.

“Seeing this [person of] Korean [descent] be recognized and be famous and being respected in this art community for drawing really inspired me,” Moon said. “I can do that.”

After this teaching session, Moon had a fortuitous conversation with Kim, when he stepped outside to take a smoke break while she was waiting to get picked up by her parents. Although Kim had a very successful career in art, he did not decide to do art until he got to college.

“In my heart, I want to do art,” Moon said. “I get this courage, go up and introduce myself in Korean and be like, ‘I’m such a big fan. I love your art.’ We had this really wonderful conversation that kind of inspired me further. That made me fall more in love with art.”

Despite Moon’s artistic background prior to college, the strict requirements of the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science at BU led to her being resistant to double-majoring in art and design, or even minoring in it. Even still, Moon, has pieces in the scholars’ gallery, as primarily a painter, which is her work from high school.

“I didn’t do art for two years,” Moon said. “In junior year, I was like, ‘Okay, you know what, I want to take some more art classes,’ so I started to take printmaking randomly, instead of taking painting. It was really random, but then I met one of our professors, Colin Lyons. He’s amazing. He’s really great.”

This advisor-student relationship ended up being fruitful for Moon, who learned the art of printmaking from Lyons, who has a master’s degree from the University of Alberta in printmaking. The intricate process, which involves technique-driven methods such as linocut, etching and layering. The Best of SUNY Art award is not the end of Moon’s journey as an artist, however.

“My professor wants me to make a lot of extra editions so that I can send them out to galleries and museums and begin my professional career,” Moon said. “That’s currently my focus. Right after college I am applying to a lot of engineering roles, but I am open to whatever art opportunities come my way. I’m also applying to a bunch of art residencies and seeing where that goes.”

Moon’s current work is mainly in printmaking, but like any other creative, she does not want to be one-dimensional. On top of Moon’s work as an artist, for example, she is also the publishing and layout director of the fashion magazine RENA at BU, which recently had a heavily-attended fashion show.

“I don’t want to just be a photocopy machine,” Moon said. “I want to paint, I want to express myself with art. It’s beautiful. It’s calming. I think it’s very emotional. It’s evocative. It’s very feminine, and it’s very patterned and colorful. And I think that’s very representative of myself. Every single one of my pieces at the moment, I model for them, so you can see a bit of me in the figures, which I think is fun.”

When looking at Moon’s art, it is easy to see the influences of her teacher, Lyons, in her art, especially how it tries to push the envelope in developing art to have a life of its own. Moon herself looks toward Kim and Gustav Klimt as her influences in becoming the artist she is today. As for personal influences, Moon wanted to thank her parents, her professors Andrea Kastner and Lyons and her friends at RENA magazine.

“The RENA people helped me bring that creativity back into my life when I wasn’t really doing much with it,” Moon said. “They are all very ambitious people, and that ambitiousness is very infectious.”

Grace Moon’s art Instagram is @moon.e.grace.