2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition Transforms the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery

On Saturday, April 26, 2025, twenty-nine emerging and established artists celebrated the culmination of their MFA experiences at the School of the Arts' annual MFA Thesis Exhibition opening. Curated by Amal Issa, the show exemplifies the full range of mediums and aesthetics: vibrant and muted, loud and quiet, it features installations, videos, paintings, drawings, sculptures—and pieces that resist labels altogether.

Visual Arts student Maya Dixon describes a "shared language" between herself and her peers who are pulled toward creating embodied, spatial experiences: "we're all asking similar questions about memory, ancestry, and becoming—just in different dialects." Her installation, Rise From the Dead to Raise My Arms (installation, gourds, foam, metal, wood, hair, riot helmet, paint, fishnets, hair accessories, and video with sound), speaks through materials—in particular, through gourds.

"I was fascinated by them as vessels and bodies—symbols of resilience, survival, and growth," Dixon said. When she started the Visual Arts Program, Dixon was drawing a character she called Liberty, who embodied Black resistance and rage. This character came to life first through performance, then through sculptural installations. "I think my first-year self would be shocked—in a good way—by how far I've moved from narrative illustration toward abstraction, and by how confident the work has become." 

"Confident" is right; I wandered the pink room of Dixon's installation in wonderment, completely immersed in the spiked, globular, sensual landscape, allowing strings of dangling black hair to brush my shoulders.

Dixon is in good company; multimedia installations are a popular vessel for these artists' far-reaching minds. Devon Pin-Yu Chen, Magali, a Cult, Wenfei Quan, Yueyang Luo, Ahzel, Alvarez-Backus, and Rama Ghanem take this approach, creating small worlds of their artworks. In parallel large-scale pieces that blur the distinction between painting and sculpture, On the Corner (acrylic, oil, insulation foam, plywood, ceramics, and miscellaneous materials) and Memory Lane (acrylic and spray paint on plywood), Daniel Castro places us in a surreal cityscape that embeds cultural commentary in its use of "non-art" materials like found objects, insulation foam, and concrete.

With One Face on Thousands Postcards (rice-constructed photography, watercolor and inkjet pigment on silk, colored rice starch on wire mesh, aluminum sheets, found postcards, and lightbulbs), Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee converts her corner of the gallery into a metallic mesh net that suspends her ethereal, fragmented prints, illuminated from several directions by highly reflective aluminum sheets.

Ridwana Rahman's Revert (carpet, vinyl, plastic bags, stand, chairs, inkjet prints, stanchions, and steel) transforms a different part of the gallery: the floor. Boundaried by rope and a sign politely requesting that visitors leave their shoes behind, the patch of carpet is embedded with a small arrow reading "QIBLA," pointing toward the Kaaba in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca—the fixed direction of prayer—though several chairs face various directions, creating a rift in the visitor's attention. At the opening, the chairs had nothing on the human urge to sit cross-legged on a carpet; the piece became a gathering spot—a place to celebrate, laugh, discuss the artworks—and for children to do cartwheels. 

Though more typical of the gallery space, the two-dimensional works are not exactly shackled by tradition, either. Annika Tucksmith reveals how textural oil painting can be, both by layering paint on and carving it away, revealing luminous colors that add depth to her already mysterious, haunting subjects.

Zelmira Rizo's drawings are a record of her embodied practice, existing parallel to journaling and somatic movement. Though representative moments slip in here and there, the "subjects" seem to be how brushstrokes interact with wood grain, where a line might dissolve into curve, and what happens when purple meets orange. Similarly, Francisca Brunet Bayón's lush abstract oil paintings are "about" their brushy layers, which allow coats of color to shape uncategorizable, though unmistakably organic forms.

Miles Scharff's works utilize the wall space, but not in the way you might imagine. Part Sound Art student and part inventor, Scharff fashioned an art-making machine, Printer (acrylic, steel, microwave transformer, roller chain, sprockets, hard drive magnets, power supply, and motor), which creates in the gallery, in real time, another piece, Magnetic Exposures (magnetized steel stained on acrylic). 

Scharff was surprised and excited by viewers' reactions—particularly by comparisons made between Printer's ceaseless activity and the human cardiac system. "It's a machine that just barely works, which is kind of like a body," Scharff said. "It requires quite a bit of care, too. During the opening, one of the roller chains fell off during a crowded moment in the gallery. I placed the chain back on and realigned it. People seemed unfazed by the whole thing, and it didn't seem to stifle any conversations or engagement with the piece. The breakage seemed to almost make sense to everyone there. Bodies break, but they still remain!" In my hours spent at the opening, I never saw Scharff leave Printer's side.

Accompanied by the artists or standing alone, these works speak for themselves. Feast your eyes and ears on Calhan Hale's punchy surrealist paintings, Leena Kim's poetic moving-image exploration of memory, Andrius Alvarez-Backus's floor-to-ceiling palm leaf sculpture, Liz Schneider's quilted ceramic horse—and more—through Sunday, May 25, 2025 at the Lenfest Center's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.