Keep up with the students and alumni from the MFA Studio Art program.
Current Events
Jacob Rowan's (MFAST '19) Solo Exhibition "Edifice and Alchemy"
"Edifice and Alchemy," is on view from February 22 through March 25, 2020 in the Bitsy Irby Visual Art and Dance Center Art Gallery at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi.
Rowan's practice is built around investigating what he terms "edificial epistemologies"—humanity’s efforts to construct knowledge into mental and physical architectures in a search for truth and transcendence. His research materials span from ancient cosmologies to speculative fictions and the myriad of philosophies, theologies, and aesthetics between. The scaffolding guiding the construction of this installation is an ongoing modular drawing. On these modules Rowan maps, diagrams, and notates his research into a labyrinthine puzzle of references and structures that serve as semantic gestures. For Rowan, drawing is thinking. It is a method of transcribing the intangibilities of thought into material substance. Like thoughts, Rowan's modular drawings can be endlessly reconfigured, separated, dispersed, replaced, and updated.
Suzy Kopf’s (MFAST ‘16 ) Solo Show at International Arts & Artists at Hillyer
Suzy Kopf was recently featured in a solo show at IA&A at Hilyer, Washington, DC. Kopf’s work for the show was inspired by two trips the artist took to Puerto Rico’s Levittown, a suburb of San Juan, both pre and post Hurricane Maria. Between 1947 and the early 1970s the real-estate developers Levitt Brothers built more than 140,000 houses in towns they named after themselves in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico. These well-preserved mid century homes have largely been saved by their owners and still stand as both a testament to the United States’ ongoing colonialism of the Caribbean and a physical embodiment of a cross-cultural version of the American Dream of homeownership for the masses. Through her watercolors, oil paintings and large-scale sculpture, Kopf asks her viewer to scrutinize previously overlooked subjects for their problematic origins.
The title of the show, “Bow and Arrow,” was taken from the name for the design of the breeze blocks, decorative cinderblocks made of cement, used throughout the world to promote airflow and create a sense of partial privacy between public and private spaces. They are a shorthand for mid century leisure and design ideals. By making the to-scale blocks out of readily available lightweight housing insulation, Kopf adds her own questions to the familiar form. A student of the school of the American hyperreal— our national conflation and acceptance of a symbol for the real thing— Kopf asks us, in this era of fake news, will Americans continue to define ourselves by what we want to be true rather than reality? What does the mid century promise of prosperity for all mean in a late capitalist society?
Rachel Hubbard Kline (MFAST '19) Solo Exhibition "Symbiosis"
Rachel Hubbard Kline will be exhibiting her work of fragmented tiles and vessels at Cerbera Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. The exhibition opens on March 6 and runs through March 28, 2020. This collection of work explores the wistfulness of personal connections to historical domestic objects and material culture. Rachel’s work seeks symbiosis in the relationship of surfaces to forms and addresses the hierarchy of importance between the form itself and the image or decoration.
The fragmented tiles reference early American quilt patterns and ceramic tiling. By pressing newspaper advertising mats from the 1950s into clay slabs, Rachel makes ephemeral advertisements and outdated means of technology a permanent record.
Stephanie Garon's Solo Show "(De)composition"
Stephanie Garon’s (MFAST '22) exhibition “(De)composition” will be on view at the DC Arts Center in Washington, DC through March 22, 2020.
Stephanie’s work contains industrial elements juxtaposed with natural materials. While deceptively formal, the resulting artworks are ecologically motivated interventions. The physical process of decomposition becomes evident as the pieces change over time, emphasizing the fragility of nature. Rich in associations, her work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life. The resulting artwork is a visualization of an uneasy truce: the fragile balance between nature and humanity.
The exhibition closes with an artist talk on March 22, 2020 at 5 pm. There will be an artist panel discussion featuring Mike Dax Iacovone on March 4, 2020 from 7-9 pm.
Mike Dax Iacovone (‘09) and Billy Friebele (‘ 08) participate in “Applied Forces” exhibition at Arlington Arts Center
“Applied Forces” is on view through March 28, 2020 at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia. The exhibition focuses on the collision of forces, bodies, objects, and spaces. For this exhibition, Michael Dax Iacovone has created an on-site land drawing and has included photographs and video from large-scale interventions in the deserts of Nevada and Utah completed over the last three summers. Billy Friebele’s contributions include drawings, videos, and a new kinetic sound piece that rotates slowly, periodically pouring water back and forth between two plastic bottles.
Solo Show for Recent Alumna Nikki Brooks
Nikki Brooks (MFAST '19) created an immersive art experience in her solo show "Between Ourselves," exhibited at the Prince George's African American Museum and Cultural Center. Nikki examined the assimilation of black people to white culture, the affirmation that comes from identifying with the black community, as well as the alienation and rejection from that come from that same community.
Natalia Gonzalez (MFAST '11)
Natalia Gonzalez, an MFAST alumna ('11) and Bolivian native, recently participated in two biennials, one in Cochabamba. Bolivia and the other in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
Natalia contributed "Brecha de mecanografía (Type-Gap)", a montage of colliding texts that stage the multi-valence of words and the possibilities of nonsense, to the sixth version of the Contextos Contemporary Art Biennial, UTOPÍA / DISTOPÍA, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Solange Roberdeau (MFAST '12) Has Solo Show at Mendocino Art Center
Solange Roberdeau's work using metal leaf and ink is featured in the exhibition "Moments in Time" at the Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, California through January 4, 2020.
Solange makes drawings that emphasize slowing down and seeking out the creative potential in our immediate environments. Informed by natural phenomena and material processes, this exhibition consciously promotes a tension between serendipity and control, which is expressed through the pairing of organic with geometric mark-making.
Working with 21K gold and copper leaf, sumi ink, acrylic and chalk on wood and paper, Solange's drawings speak to the fluid nature of perception. They are existential records of being in a place and with its details, of human gesture and exploration through materiality and form.
Bart O'Reilly (MFAST '12) Mounts Solo Exhibition
Bart O’Reilly’s exhibition of paintings and drawings from the last two years, “Empathy with Branches,” is on view through January 5, 2020 at Marketview Arts Gallery at York College, York, Pennsylvania. Bart is an Irish artist based in Baltimore, MD. His work is interdisciplinary with a focus on painting, video, and poetry. Driven primarily by formal considerations, the work in this exhibition explores the ever-shifting relationship between what we perceive and what we claim to know.
Kristen Letts Kovak (MFAST '10) - "Trumpet to the Tulips"
“Every once in a while one should do a crazy experiment, like blowing the trumpet to the tulips every morning for a month. Probably nothing would happen, but what if it did?” –George Darwin
The exhibition “Trumpet to the Tulips,” curated by Kristen Letts Kovak, features paintings on which Kristen collaborated with Sarah Jacobs, and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann. There was only one rule for adding to the collaboration: do something atypical and see what happens. The show is on view at “Space” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from November 16th 2019 through March 15th 2020. There will be a gallery crawl and opening on January 24, 2020 from 5:30-10 pm.
The collaborating artists write, “the paintings in this exhibition are a combination of our independent and collective voices. There are paintings created before our first meeting, artworks produced in response to the game, and collaborative paintings shipped between cities where we worked directly on top of each other’s marks. Additionally, there are a large number of works created within the last year that reflect how each of our painting practices has shifted as a result of our collaboration. We each blew our trumpets in counterpoint and a collective melody emerged.”
Solo Drawing Exhibition - Kristen Letts Kovak (MFAST '10)
Kristen Letts Kovak (MFAST ’10) presented her drawings in a solo exhibition entitled “White Noise” at York College, York, Pennsylvania, from November 1-23, 2019.
Of the work, Kristen says “this body of work is a visual meditation on intense observation. Instead of filtering through the noise to arrive at clarity, I record my visual aberrations and tangents. The marks convey so many contradictory points of focus that realities become intertwined and individual signification is lost. Even nuance is reduced to a hum of animated white noise. The drawn forms vacillate between object and atmosphere (fact and context) to create a cacophonous volume so loud as to become deafeningly quiet.”
Solo Exhibit for Mary Stuart Hall (MFAST '20)
Mary Stuart Hall (MFAST ‘20) is exhibiting her sculptural installation “Sympathetic Dissonance,” in the Carlos Gallery at The University of the South from October 21 through December 12, 2019. In this work Hall explores a phenomenon known as sympathetic resonance, where under certain conditions, bringing a ringing tuning fork nearby can make a silent tuning fork begin to ring. Illustrating the materiality of sound in space, Sympathetic Dissonance considers how the idea and reality of encountering a landscape can be incongruous. The installation relies on the complex experience of a place and space to create a contrast between the idea of a place, an imaginary landscape, and the sensational experience of the material world.
Hall states, “The distance sound travels can define a space in ways that walls or lines on a map cannot. Political boundaries have evolved as lines often divorced from the everyday experience of a place. In contrast to a binary expression separating here from there, an ancient Germanic tradition defines the boundary of a town with a church bell. Any person hearing the bell is inside the town. By using sound to define a boundary, the perceptual experience of a place is incorporated in its existence. One could even be in two places at once.” Sympathetic Dissonance complicates the understanding of how we measure space and define a place.
Kate Hooray Osmond (MFAST '19) Solo Show
Kate Hooray Osmond’s solo show “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” runs from Nov. 1-23 at the Miller Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. The work in the show originated with Kate’s MFA thesis work presented this summer. Kate describes the connection between her current show and her thesis work in an interview with the “Charleston City Paper”:
“It featured 59 painted panels on 59 canvases, placed in a circle. In the center were 6,000 dominoes. ’It was my model of the universe," says Osmond. The panels were images of the Charleston area, AK-47s, schools, nuclear waste facilities, "everything that could be in a landscape.’
‘The idea for this project,’ says Osmond, ‘was creating a model for a child to go into and understand the workings of the universe so they wouldn't be afraid.’
The panels will be displayed differently at the Miller Gallery, separate from one another instead of in a circle. "All the panels will be in a different order to display energy and change without change; they're endlessly rearrangeable," says Osmond.”
Sarabel Santos Negrón (MFAST ‘19) exhibits at the University of Virginia
Sarabel Santos Negrón (MFAST ‘19) has recently shown her work “Groundscapes Displaced” during the “Coasts in Crisis: Art and Conversation after Recent Hurricanes” event at the Environmental Resilience Institute at the University of Virginia. The event poses the question “Why do the arts matter after a hurricane?” Artists participating in “Coasts in Crisis” performed, displayed and discussed their work forged out of the experiences common to climate refugees and hurricane survivors: homelessness, forced migration, family separation, food insecurity, and living without electricity or running water. Sarabel’s work addressed ongoing displacement; in her own words, “Two years after María, this piece continues displacing in memory of all the floors, homes and lives that we lost as a result of the hurricane.”
Sarabel will also be a visiting lecturer for the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University on November 20th, 2019.
Howard El-Yasin (MFAST '16) Featured in Connecticut Art Review
Howard el-Yasin, class of 2016, is featured in the October, 2019 studio visit series of "The Connecticut Art Review." Jacquelyn Gleisner writes of Howard’s early forays into art and how his exposure to Eva Hesse’s work informed his desire to make “ugly work, once cited as raw by a critic, and....embracing it.” In the MFAST program at MICA, Howard “...became much more attuned to conversations about identity, which is central to my work,” although Howard prefers his work “to be open-ended, not a finite statement about his own experiences.” Howard’s work continues to utilize discarded and unconventional materials, such as the dryer lint and desiccated banana peels seen in the photos below. For a current work in progress, Howard explores the color black with a selection of discarded objects. In the article, Howard’s explains that the work is about much more than the “racial energy” contained in the color black: “the objects embody a poetic spectrum of blackness by exhibiting a full range of textures...[the] collection is a metaphor for the multiplication of existence.”
"Left Space" Show
34 MFAST alumni, faculty, and current students tackled an industrial space for the "Left Space" pop-up show on October 5-6, 2019. The empty seventh floor of 1100 Wicomico Street in Baltimore hosted contemporary art installations for two days, with an opening reception on the afternoon of October 5. Bart O’Reilly (‘12)) organized the exhibit, which included the work of the following artists: Damon Arhos (‘17), Erin Barach (‘14), Shannon Brinkley (‘20), Nikki Brooks (‘19), Samia Bzioui (‘22), Sarah Clough (‘17), Joe Corcoran (‘21), Mark Dixon (‘12), Chas Foster (‘12), Lauri Hafvenstein (‘20), Emily Hager (‘19), Christian Hall (‘12), Michelle Lisa Herman (‘20), Fritz Horstman (‘11, Cassandra Kapsos (‘11), Denese King-Ashley (‘21), Suzy Kopf (‘16), Caryn Martin (‘17), Liz Miller (‘20), Katie Morris (‘18), Bart O’Reilly (‘12), Kirk Palmer (‘16), Dianne Pappas (‘12), Jassie Rios (‘11), Rebecca Rivas Rogers (‘18), Solange Roberdeau (‘12), David Salgado (‘21), Rolf Sjogren (‘22), Anna Skarbek (‘18), Wendy Tribulski (‘21), Renee van der Stelt, Elena Volkova (‘07), Ashleigh Wink (‘19), and Jean Yang (‘15).
Michelle Herman (MFAST '20) Receives Second Year of DC Arts & Humanities Fellowship Funding
For the second year in a row, Michelle Herman (MFAST '20) has been announced as a recipient of a Visual Arts grant from the DC Arts & Humanities Fellowship Program!
Recent Projects and Publications of Fritz Horstman, class of 2011
"Emergence: Art and the Incarnation of Space" at the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University includes two of Fritz’s large sculptures based on glacial valleys and 25 small Formwork sculptures included along with the work of five great painters: Edith Baumann, Benny Fountain, Richard Kenton Webb, Shingo Francis, and Jane Harris. The exhibit was curated by Richard Davey and also features a series of Josef Albers's prints. Pictured below is an installation view from the Martin Museum of Art.
Fritz is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Dessau Bauhaus in Germany, working on an installation drawn from their Bauforschungsarchiv (building and materials archive). This is a collaboration between the Bauhaus and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where Fritz is resident artist and education coordinator. "Archive Assemblage (Dessau") will be on long-term display in the Bauhaus building.
Recent publications include "A Blue Dark", a book pairing Fritz’s drawings with Fiona Sze-Lorrain's poems, "The Original Bauhaus Workbook" (50 exercises from the Bauhaus Preliminary Course), "The Bauhaus and Harvard" (a catalogue from the recent exhibition) and an article available both in print and online in "The Royal Academy Magazine."
Finally, Fritz is looking forward to curating an exhibition, to open in March at the New Britain Museum of American Art, called "Anni Albers in Connecticut: 40 Years of Innovation."
Katrina Bello ('13) Shows Work in Two-Person Exhibit
Katrina Bello, class of 2013, presented work inspired by her experiences with immigration in a two-person exhibition (with artist Mariejon de Jong-Buijs), “Vast Expanses,” at the Brick + Mortar Gallery in Easton, Pennsylvania. In her series “Immensity,” Katrina uses a somewhat formal representation of landscape by including the outline of Mindanao, her former childhood home in the Philippines. This relatively small island holds within it the Pacific Ocean, breaking with a traditional use of scale as the great ocean is constrained by the small island.
Katrina explored the shared experiences of migration with her daughters, each residing on one end of the vast Pacific which both separates and binds them. As the series progressed Katrina considered the political and environmental effects on the ocean today, touching on pollution and ownership in an inconspicuous manner. Creating an abyss of negative space, in contrast with the highly detailed representational drawings of islands and oceans, Katrina laid bare the medium by allowing the water and charcoal to change the topographical landscape of the work. The photo below was taken during Katrina’s artist talk for the exhibit.
MFAST Faculty & Mentor Fabienne Lassere is awarded 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship
Congratulations to MFAST Faculty & Mentor Fabienne Lasserre, recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship! Lassere received her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal and her MFA from Columbia University in New York and has been a full-time faculty member at MICA since 2007.
Lassere has described her recent work as both "double-sided paintings" and "two-dimensional sculptures" that blur the line between the two categories. This interest in challenging dichotomies is also present in the content of her work, as she explores the idea of an "excluded middle" and views her pieces as "embodying connections between entities usually seen as separate, where bodies, materials, and things are porous."
Brett Wallace (MFAST '19) Solo Exhibition "Working Conditions"
Working Conditions, a solo exhibition by Brett Wallace (MFAST – Class of 2019), investigates the consequences and implications that new technologies such as artificial intelligence and algorithm-driven platforms have had in restructuring the relationships contracted workers have to their employers, their labor, and themselves.
This exhibition is an investigation that is half-sculptural, engaging in the embodied, physical reality of labor; and half-journalistic, reporting on major cultural events as well as presenting oral narratives from those affected most.
This exhibition was reviewed in the New York Times by Jillian Steinhauer, and the April 2019 issue of Brooklyn Rail has an extended interview with Brett and Andreas Petrossiants about his artwork and his research into the future of labor.
Nancy Edelstein (MFAST '21): "First Year"
1st Year candidate Nancy Edelstein wrote an honest and insightful piece for Lenscratch about her experience in the MFA Studio Art program!