From her desk, a security guard gazes at the pages of an open book.

In a room to her right, brightly colored photographs in black frames hang on walls of a vacant, tan and brown-hued room.

To her left, sepia-toned portraits of young and old women hang.

The only sound in the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Talley Student Center is the faint, constant hum of the air conditioning unit.

“I see about 10 people here during the week,” Kerrie Hill, a security officer for the Budd Group, said. “About seven [people a day], maybe, on weekends.”

Hill, who began working as temporary duty last Wednesday, said the museum is usually quiet.

The museum, which is one of six programs sponsored by ARTS N.C. STATE, opened its present location in Talley in 1992, according to Charlotte Brown, director of the visual arts and the gallery in Talley. Both the second and third floors of Talley house the museum. On the second floor are new collections, and the third floor displays pieces of older exhibitions and donated art from the community.

The exhibition currently on display is SPoT!: The Southeastern Photography Triennial, a collection of digital print photographs by 39 artists from the Southeast. Joyce Tenneson, an internationally recognized photographer, chose the photographs that are on display from over 170 submissions, Brown said.

Tenneson also donated photographs from her exhibition Wise Women to the museum. A room in Talley is solely dedicated to showing the juror’s work. The photographs are a small part of her larger collection since the entire collection would not fit in the Gregg Museum, according to Brown.

“We can’t expand without more room. We can’t get more exhibitions without more room,” Brown said. “Since no single exhibition is attractive to everybody, the way to have more people is to have more exhibitions.”

Abby Cranford, a sophomore in First Year College, said she went to Gregg Museum last year with her brother, Wes, a former student in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“I just remember walking in and saying, ‘This is cool,'” she said.

Cranford said she would like to go back to the museum when it acquires new exhibits.

“It was surprising to find an art gallery on campus, since this is primarily a science and math school,” Cranford said. “But it was nice and quiet, but nice.”

Though Brown said the museum does not get as many visitors as she would like to have, she said she feels there is not a shortage of students interested in the museum.

“We have student interns who work here for course credit through the College of Textiles,” Brown said. “We have students who come, usually First Year College and those in the University Scholars Program, to see exhibitions and get guided tours through the museum. And then we have students who just come.”

Some fraternities and sororities are featured as special guests of exhibition openings, according to Brown.

However, all students can be guests of the free exhibition premiers at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design. Two exhibitions will unveil Oct. 25.

One, called A Retrospective, will feature ceramics and textiles by Tom Spleth, a ceramicist, painter and print maker who lived and taught in North Carolina, according to Brown.

The other show, Sock Monkey Madness & The Red Heel Dream, will feature photographs and dioramas of sock monkeys.

“Sock monkeys started as a way of making dolls when all you had was a sock and nothing else,” Brown said. “These are more sophisticated sock monkeys, of course. It will be quite an amazing show.”

The student fees funding the museum and these exhibitions constantly remind the gallery students are the main audience, Brown said.

“The students are who we think most about in not only what we collect, but what we exhibit,” Brown said.

For the same reason, Brown encourages students to come to the gallery.

“The real draw is because art is just another way of communicating ideas and feelings, and a lot about our culture because we primarily exhibit contemporary art,” Brown said. “It shows who we are, where we are and sometimes how we got here. Art is part of education.”