MFA 1st Year Critique at CEPA Gallery

During the Spring semester the Department of Art launches a group exhibition of 1st year MFA Candidates' artwork. This provides the opportunity for our graduate students to formally curate their work and share it with the community. It also offers the setting for the Department Faculty to engage in a formal critique of the students' work. The MFA candidates observe their peer's critiques, helping them gain more insight into what it means to have an interdisciplinary practice, and professional development including speaking about their work, and presentation strategies.

A common theme in this year's critiques were how the personalized narratives within the students' work can, does, and should, speak to more widely felt human experiences. Assistant Professor Noah Breuer touched on this topic in regards to Helen Lin's work "our heart", an archival photographic print of a hand squeezing a tomato, with small gold chains woven through the flesh, noting how it is "getting to the universal through the specific". When Assistant Professor Berin Golonu inquired as to whether more of Isabelle Janssen's collage works could aim at personal narrative, Professor Millie Chen posited "Why are we making art? It's not to represent history in general-- it's speaking from our point of view."

In addition to the 1st Year Critique, our Faculty conduct "studio visits" continuously with the MFAs throughout the two year program, and group critiques at the finale of major projects, occur in each Art course, multiple times per semester.

Sequence features work by Teju Abiola, Doğa Ertekin, Isabelle Janssen, Marjan Khorramgolkaran, Helen Lin, Eilis Regan, Eugene Sims, and Sudi Wang. 

Abundant themes and artistic skills are on display in this exhibtion, hosted in the 2nd Floor gallery of CEPA Gallery, 617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14203

For more about Sequence, see the Department's exhibitions archive page here.