Gallery of Featured Art Issue No. 5, 2022: All Rights Reserved

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Thank you student Marvin Brown for documenting Ke'lab's launch party in 2018

Ke'lab is Tompkins Cortland Community College's first literary and visual arts journal. Its unique name comes from the word "collaborate". Ke'lab is pronounced like "collab"  [KUH] + [LAB] and its unusual logo was inspired by the pronunciation respelling of the word "collaborate" which looks like this "/kəˈlabəˌrāt/". 

The publication is a collaboration between the Art and Creative Writing programs, both at the college and their concurrent enrollment CollegeNow partner high schools. Submissions are open to the college community and include current students, alumni, faculty, staff, and CollegeNow students.

The concept of the journal is to develop a collaboration between artists and writers. When writing and art are carefully paired together or made in response to one another, a deeper experience of both can be felt by readers and viewers. These pairings come in the form of:

• Ke'lab-orations between artists and writers
• Pairings of writing and art submissions by the Ke'lab staff.
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​The publication is printed each year in May, at the end of our spring semester. The publication's first issue was created in Spring 2018. The first completely student run publication was created in a new college course during the Spring 2019 semester.  Because of this special applied learning course the magazine is now produced, marketed, and managed by students who are collaborating in an interdisciplinary course devoted to ensuring the publication is created by students. This is a groundbreaking applied learning endeavor at the college. Students in the course earn valuable job-ready skills and build their resumes as they work in a professional environment; more akin to working for a real publication than a classroom.
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Drew Towers, class of 2017, designed the logo.