“L” was for lovers, as were “H,” “I,” “Ñ” and the rest of the alphabet at Modified Arts in downtown Phoenix on Friday.

The gallery’s installment during February’s First Friday art walk was “Love Letters,” a mixed-media exhibition that exclusively featured ASU art students.

Participating artists were assigned a letter from the alphabet, given a one square foot size requirement and left to freely interpret their letter. Almost every medium imaginable was represented at the exhibit from felts and fibers to photography, screen prints, paints and video.

“The structure provided a context both to contain and organize the [artists’] ideas, and then sort of to just spring forth from them,” said Gregory Sale, visiting assistant professor of intermedia at the Herberger College for the Arts.

Sale said he wanted to encourage art graduate students and students who just completed their undergraduate degree to develop a vital arts career through interaction with the community. He teamed up with Modified Arts owner Kimber Lanning to create an opportunity for students to develop their own exhibition in a major downtown gallery.

“I didn’t want it to just come out of my class,” Sale said. “We wanted to just give them the seed of the idea, then give it to the grad students, and then just support them.”

The goal of “Love Letters,” which opened Jan. 16, was to join Lanning’s local arts-advocacy efforts with those of ASU art graduates by blurring the lines of traditional curatorial practice and connecting the young artists to the community, Sale said. The theme and work of “Love Letters” was coordinated, created and executed entirely by the graduate students and recent grads.

Lanning said she thought the ASU art graduates developed and executed a “wonderful concept.” She said that it was refreshing to see the positive effort put into the exhibition, because she felt that artists from ASU have been isolated from the community in the past few years. Lanning said her goal with “Love Letters” was to get art students to see all the gallery opportunities available to them after graduating.

“I hope they recognize how much there is to offer [local artists] in the community, and that there are reasons to want to show your work,” she said.

Peter Bugg, a 28-year-old photography graduate student and a key organizer of “Love Letters,” agreed that students who want a future in art should reach out to their community, starting with the ASU campus.

“I think that art students and the art school in general could do more to get non-art students to come and look at shows,” he said.

Bugg said the strength of “Love Letters” is not the common origin of the artists as ASU graduates, but the art itself.

“The theme isn’t really esoteric, and there’s a lot of different media,” he said. “So if you really don’t like photography, or you really don’t like painting, there’s still something you might enjoy at the show.”

Lynette Andreasen, who created “Lock for a Lost Love” based off the letter “L” for the exhibition, said the mixed-media aspect of the First Friday gallery helped it appeal to a broader audience.

“I think people are interested in [art] when they can relate to it, and also when they want to know more [about] how it’s made,” she said. “That’s what gets people excited.”

Andreason, a 24-year-old graduate student in the metals department, said that the eclectic theme of “Love Letters” appealed to her as a participant.

“It’s something you can look at from a million different angles, and everyone looked at it from a different perspective,” she said.

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.