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For two days at the beginning of April, art students from Colorado Mountain College's Alpine Campus took over the floor and wall space at the Steamboat Springs Center for Visual Arts.

They learned how to organize and hang an exhibit that includes about 90 pieces of art created by anyone who has taken a visual arts class at CMC during the past school year.

The resulting Student & Faculty Art Show is a diverse but unified collection of paintings, drawings, pottery and abstract art, said Linda Laughlin, owner of the Center for Visual Arts.

"Overall, there's really something for everybody here," Laughlin said, describing the work that takes up the back part of her gallery space. "It's a much bigger show than last year. : (There are) more pieces, more colorful pieces; it just seems to hold together better."

Jacob Thaden, a full-time CMC student who is majoring in visual arts and participated in the Student & Faculty Art Show last year, said he had an easier time getting his work together the second time around.

"I kind of knew what I was doing and didn't really have to ask as many questions," Thaden said.

"It was more the students doing the work and the professors standing by and answering questions."

CMC art instructor Keri Searls said there are about 50 students and teachers included in the show, with community members and traditional students sharing studio time and wall space.

Many of those artists tackled the nuts and bolts of hanging their work for the first time, Searls said, from cleaning frames to vacuuming after installation.

Kit Hendrickson, a student finishing his Associate of the Arts degree this semester by taking a demanding three-course load of studio art classes, said he'll know to plan ahead more carefully for his pieces in future gallery shows.

"I would focus more on how I was going to display my works before I made them : because nothing had a frame, really, and it would look a lot better if it did," Hendrickson said.

Cynthia Zyzda, an assistant professor of visual art and humanities at CMC, said she hopes community members who come see the show get an idea of the level of work put out by CMC art students.

"I would hope that they would at least have an awareness of what students are up to in the visual arts up here, and see how much they're learning," Zyzda said.

Searls said she hopes the show will inspire community members to enroll in one of CMC's art classes.

The CMC Student & Faculty Art Show opened with a reception April 10 and will be on display through April 26 during regular gallery hours at the Center for Visual Arts. Students were allowed to select which of their works they wanted to put up for sale in the show.