Parsons Fine Arts is pleased to announce its 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition, yet traces linger. The exhibition is open to the public and on view in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center’s ground floor exhibition spaces, encompassing both the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery and the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery. 

Dates: May 13 - June 01, 2024

Opening Reception: May 15, 7 - 9pm

Participating artists:  Zhenyu Zhang, Yining Zhang, Ryan Van Der Hout, Sabrina Thompson, Beki Song, Rose Silberman-Gorn, Sej Sanghvi, Anna Samara, Maria Clara (Mari) Rios Cacua, Lilly Reyes, Valeria or, Victoria Norton, parisa mah, Shiqi Luo, Ziqi Li, Odella Li, Arden Kraatz, Meiqi Kong, Jordan Homstad, Lola Carlander, Anahita Bagheri, and Maryam Alameri

Learn more about the artists at:

https://amt.parsons.edu/finearts/2024-mfa-thesis/

Curated by Sarah Cho

yet traces linger ruminates on the myriad ways in which the graduating artists of this year’s Fine Arts MFA program have explored embodied memory. Through multimedia installations, hand-built ceramics, large and small-scale paintings, delicate drawings, and distorted metal, these artists consider the various ways memory manifests in, beyond, or even in spite of materiality. Twenty-two artists with disparate practices are connected through their cohort’s interrogation of the intangibly visceral. 

The Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery features a focused presentation on the insidiously persistent echoes of time seen through the lens of childhood and the domestic. Multiple artworks cute-ify the traumatic; seemingly saccharine in colors and forms, they are darkly grim upon closer inspection. Some artists confront haunting childhood memories, reconstructing their own narratives. Others question psychological safety within the domestic space. In the interstitial hallway gallery, additional paintings, works on paper, and a video installation expand upon the concepts surveyed throughout the exhibition. 

The artists in the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery use paintings, sculptures, and installations in contemplating grief and memory, filtered through the refractive lens of time and perception. Numerous artists contend with the body – visceral, cultural, spatial, contextual, and archival. Some approach this through elegies to familial and cultural history, while others use spatality to examine voids, confinement, and networks of interactivity. Many artists explore residual emotions, with a few stretching the limit of the mind through meditative practice or contemplation of the boundaries between habits and compulsion. Abstraction is key throughout the show, with artists using the visual language of gestural fragmentation to work through the liminality of remembrance and the subconscious. 

Delving into trauma, loneliness, and the bodily, the MFA Fine Arts cohort considers what lurks and lingers in the shadows of recollection. In processing the palimpsest of grief and time, these artists propose new rituals, alternative realities, and novel mythologies. 

Curator Biography

Sarah Cho is an Assistant Curator at the Queens Museum. Previously, she was in the curatorial department at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Cho also has experience at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, and New York Artists Equity Association.

Parsons Fine Arts MFA is a two-year, cross-disciplinary program led by an internationally accomplished faculty committed to expanding the formal, intellectual and conceptual dimensions of emerging artists’ work. Embracing interdisciplinary approaches to making and thinking about visual culture, the program promotes global understanding of the arts through one-on-one studio visits, group critiques, critical theory seminars, studio electives, writing/research, professional training seminars, and interactions with an array of visiting artists and curators. This year visitors included Farah Al Qasimi, Tara Asgar,  Jeanette Bisschops, Daniel Bozhkov, Beatriz Cortez,  Abigail DeVille, Sarah Faux, Min Sun Jeon, Corrie Jackson, Ebony L. Haynes, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, David Lisbon, Jumana Manna, Troy Michie, New Red Order (NRO), Tammy Nguyen, Cassie Packard, Mika Rottenberg, Angelique Rosales Salgado, Azza El Siddique, Rose B. Simpson, Tsherin Sherpa, Ian Wallace, Madeline Weisburg, Joe Whittle, among many others. In 2022, QS World University Rankings, a London-based higher education organization, named Parsons as the number one college for art and design in the US and number three worldwide for the fifth year in a row.

For more information about Parsons Fine Arts MFA program, visit our website / Facebook / Instagram / X or contact the MFA Director H Lan Thao Lam at lamh@newschool.edu.