As the academic year draws to a close and commencement season approaches, there’s no shortage of reasons to celebrate at the College of Fine Arts. Not only does 2024 mark the school’s 70th birthday—CFA was founded as the School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1954—but it’s also a year of exciting firsts for the School of Visual Arts and its five Master of Fine Arts programs: painting, sculpture, print media and photography, visual narrative, and graphic design.
This year marks the first that the print media and photography and the visual narrative MFA programs, both launched in 2022, will graduate a class. The 2024 exhibitions also mark the largest cohort to date—61 graduating MFA students—in the school’s history. And for the first time, this year’s shows include an off-campus venue: the sculpture exhibition is being shown at 1270 Commonwealth Ave., where what was once a CVS pharmacy has been transformed into a pop-up art gallery.
All of the exhibitions, on view through April 20, are free and open to the public. Collectively, they offer a sense of the breadth and depth of work being done by MFA students across a range of mediums. For those who cannot make it to all five of this year’s shows, we’ve pulled together some works from each program for your viewing pleasure. But remember: there’s plenty more to see in person.
The visual arts are often compared to a written language, notes Josephine Halvorson, a CFA professor of art, painting, and chair of graduate studies in painting, in the 2024 painting thesis exhibition catalog. “Reading, literacy, and lexicons are terms we frequently cite in critique,” she writes. “Students [have turned] to language, either materially or analogically, to help them navigate meaning in their work.”
Some works in this year’s exhibition speak plainly, relying on a strong instinct toward realism and representation. James Gold (CFA’24) imbues his canvases with a photographer’s sense of discovery: his subjects—ancient tapestries, mosaics, and scrolls—are rendered so as to capture every detail and texture.
Paintings by Abigail Kenny (CFA’24) share Gold’s photorealistic sensibility, but her concerns are more outlandish, less rarefied. Vivid-hued reproductions of illustrated recipe cards, from Kenny’s own family collection, comment on Andy Warhol’s iconic soup cans from the early 1960s.
Ellen Weitkamp (CFA’24) and Cody Bluett (CFA’24) suffuse their paintings with a more surreal and symbolic language, more poetry than prose. Weitkamp’s works suggest the haziness of recalled memories, depicting domestic scenes through the glass of a storefront or the gauze of a curtain. Bluett is also concerned with memory; drawing from his background in working-class Pennsylvania, his scenes are nostalgic for the bucolic landscapes enjoyed by what he describes as “the proletariat during moments of respite, repetition, and reminiscence.”
Visual language dissolves into whispers and murmurs in paintings by Yinxue Daisy Li (CFA’24). Her abstract landscape works hover on the outer edges of representation, the result of a process of erasing and redrawing that transforms an idyllic outdoor scene into gesture, space, light, and shadow.
The MFA Painting Thesis Exhibition is at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through Saturday, April 20. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm.
The theme for this year’s graphic design thesis show, Side B, refers to the flip side of a record, and “a willingness to defy expectations, explore uncommon tools, and present a multifaceted expression of craft,” write thesis advisors Christopher Sleboda, a CFA associate professor of graphic design, and Kristen Coogan, a CFA associate professor of graphic design and chair of the MFA graphic design program, in the catalog for the show.
For her thesis project, Between Waves, Bella Tuo (CFA’24) literally crowdsourced a new font. Over the course of a day, she encouraged strangers to contribute a hand-drawn line, curve, or serif until each letter of the alphabet was complete.
Arjun Lakshmanan (CFA’24) was inspired by a NASA mock travel poster that imagined interplanetary tourism. With the same retro futuristic style, he produced a series of 50 similar postcards that emphasized three-dimensionality and warped perception.
Lindsay Towle (CFA’24), whose design sensibility is informed by the graphic imprint of basketball and other facets of urban street culture, devised new aesthetic associations that make room for visual subcultures within the dominant narrative. A poster of her thesis concept, Backcourt, mixes graffiti lettering, a hallmark of elements of street culture, with classic typography and handwritten elements.
“The relationships between structure and emotion, constraints and freedom, and a set of parts and pieces to create a whole have always been part of my practice as a designer,” Carolina Izsák (CFA’24) writes. Bursting with color and built to foster interaction and joy, Izsák’s thesis project—which includes prints she has laid onto fabric and wooden blocks—emphasizes playfulness and versatility.
Firki, a typeface created by Dhwani Garg (CFA’24), considers the scalability of typography in a new way. The font uses negative space to construct each figure, an inversion of the simple and expected formula used since the dawn of typesetting.
The MFA Graphic Design Thesis Exhibition is at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., through Saturday, April 20. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm.
The first graduating class of the MFA visual narrative program has created a collection of work that runs the storytelling gamut, crafting work that’s “humorous, poignant, and thought-provoking,” writes Joel Christian Gill, a CFA associate professor of art and chair of the visual narrative program.
Sadie Saunders (CFA’24) and Ella Scheuerell (CFA’24) both opted to create graphic memoirs, and although their methodologies differ (Saunders uses digital drawing while Scheuerell relies on collage and mixed media), their stories are grounded in their experiences as young artists coming of age in the pandemic era. Scheuerell introduces readers to her uncle, whose art she discovered among his effects after his death by suicide. As she comes to terms with his loss, the drawings and his invisible presence keep her company. Saunders’ work reads more like a memoir-slash-sitcom, a self-deprecating tour of her barista job and the cast of characters who challenge her to find her voice.
Works by Avanji Vaze (CFA’24), Sandeep Badal (CFA’24), and Ariel Cheng Kohane (COM’22, CFA’24) have created stories that revel in invented universes and complex plotlines. Vaze’s graphic novel combines a Utopian fairytale (where Earth is run by a species of benevolent mushrooms) and MTV’s The Real World, centering a lovable-but-dysfunctional crew of artist roommates as her main cast. Badal’s thesis work is a comic within a comic; his protagonist, a graphic novelist, shares the stage with his own invented character, a trans-femme superhero who begins to feel like the world is treating her like a villain. And Cheng Kohane’s world is a reimagination of classic Western flicks, but populated by a cast of Asian and Jewish characters to match her own blended heritage.
For her thesis, Lafleche Giasson (CFA’24) chose an unconventional narrative, opting to blend her research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder with digital illustrations to create a comprehensive visual guide to the diagnosis.
The MFA Visual Narrative Thesis Exhibition is at the Commonwealth Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through Saturday, April 20. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm. Students will present their thesis work on Wednesday, April 10, and Friday, April 12, from 3 to 5 pm at the Howard Thurman Center, 808 Commonwealth Ave.
This year’s graduates of the print media and photography MFA program have created work that “disrupt[s] the viewer’s sense of the familiar and, in turn, prompt[s] more questions than answers,” write thesis advisors Lynne Allen, a CFA professor of art, printmaking, Toni Pepe, a CFA assistant professor of art and chair of photography, and Deborah Cornell, a CFA professor of art and chair of printmaking, in the show’s catalog. The four graduates whose work is in the thesis show have subverted the expected with their thesis work, in the process highlighting a core principle of printmaking: that it’s a medium of endless possibilities.
The photographs of Sofia Barroso (CFA’24) have been processed to the point of distortion, incorporating fabric, paper, thread, paint, and processes like cyanotype and silkscreen printing.
Julianne Dao (CFA’24) creates prints that play with negative space; each of her prints began with an object from nature, which she then processed through woodcut, embossing, and other techniques to create a bold design full of light and shadow.
Emily Taylor Rice (CFA’21,’24) and Delaney Burns (CFA’24) injected messages of social activism into their works: Rice creates prints that reflect the emotional turmoil of substance use disorders, using found textiles and colored pigments to reflect the chaos of alcohol dependence and utilizing embossing techniques to replicate emotional scars and ripped-and-torn sections to represent a process of deconstruction and rebirth.
Burns incorporates items from all aspects of her life—plants from her mother’s garden; diary entries, notes, and cards written by women in her family; birth control pamphlets; and used teabags—to draw attention to what she says are the unseen, misunderstood, and taken-for-granted experiences of women. Techniques such as bookbinding and wood carving mirror domestic tasks, imbuing her process with a metaphysical interaction with traditional gender roles.
The MFA Print Media & Photography Thesis Exhibition is at the 808 Gallery, 808 Comm Ave., through Saturday, April 20. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm.
The pieces in the MFA sculpture exhibition may have little in common visually, writes David Snyder, a CFA assistant professor of sculpture and chair of graduate studies in sculpture, “but what they have built together is…a conversation, a culture, a language, a heart.”
The works by the five students included in this year’s show respond to one another, playing on unconventional uses of space.
In one area, a section of a piece by Yolanda He Yang (MET’21, CFA’24) shares room with a pillar constructed by Helena Abdelnasser (CFA’24). Yang’s sprawling narrative installations include materials that evoke personal significance, and the artist has painstakingly cataloged the origins of each object. The result: an annotated roadmap of a memory. Looming nearby is one of Abdelnasser’s sculptures: an obelisk made of whitewashed picket fences planted in a patch of earth—an untouchable idealization. In one corner of the work, blurred by decay and dirt, is a reproduction of a dead bird—a gruesome reality.
Alyssa Grey (CFA’24) is fascinated by the relationship between art and its modes of display—walk past one of her entries and a motion-sensing camera will project you onto a small television mounted on a plywood pedestal. Mae-Chu Lin O’Connell (CFA’24) injects a self-deprecating, almost paranoiac sensibility in each of her works, making liberal use of claustrophobia, clutter, sensory discomfort, and haphazardness in her installations and videos. Boxmaker, a scattered assemblage of objects in the shadow of an assembled piece of box furniture, brims with frustration, while her videos create an eerie sound collage out of the banal act of eating.
Meanwhile, Liam Coughlin’s work addresses the sociopolitical landscape of the suburbs. Coughlin (CFA’24) encases trash—plastic bags and bottles, Halloween pumpkins, fast food cups—in plywood prisons to replicate “growing up in a homogenized, hermetically sealed, village-like culture of a small New England town.”
The MFA Sculpture Thesis Exhibition is at 1270 Commonwealth Ave., through Saturday, April 20. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm, and Mondays and Thursdays by appointment.
