The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennslyvania, opens its 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibitions with a seven-week series of concurrent solo exhibitions by 29 second-year students. On view now through April 27, the shows explore empowerment through the lens of visual and material culture.
“The depth and breadth of these works is incredible and inspiring. They demonstrate deep engagement in a broad range of contemporary issues that explore past, present, and future images and imaginaries, objects, and mediations,” said Associate Professor Sharyn O’Mara, Graduate Director for the Master of Fine Arts Program. “They both expand within and defy traditional disciplinary boundaries, and the results are powerful, provocative, political, and poetic.”
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The works reflect a variety of discipline-centric and mixed-media practices that celebrate visual narratives and explore the interplay of diverse materials, digital processes as a companion to hand fabrication, draftsmanship in printmaking, and multicultural perspectives and personal identity in graphic design, illustration, and UX/UI design.
“Claiming agency in a contemporary politics of aesthetics, the students have eagerly engaged in the production and distribution of knowledge and experience that is our shared visual-material culture. Art is wielded both as a tool of creative empowerment and a framing of the local and global ways in which selves are situated as subjects,” said Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies Philip Glahn. “These artists work with and across a variety of mediums, often exchanging skills and resources to collaboratively forge the means and methods that meet the needs of their practices.”
Tyler’s annual MFA Thesis exhibitions are the culmination of two years of intensive artistic and critical development through critical analysis, cross-disciplinary studio practice, and diverse theoretical study. Students showcase their work at Temple Contemporary, the school’s center for exhibitions and public programs.
When they graduate, Tyler’s MFA Class of 2024 will join a community of distinguished alumni that includes Moe Brooker (BFA ’70, MFA ’72), Syd Carpenter (MFA ’76), Edgar Heap of Birds (MFA ’79), Harriete Estel Berman (MFA ’80), Virgil Marti (MFA ’90), Anoka Faruqee (MFA ’97), Trenton Doyle Hancock (MFA ’00), Will Villalongo (MFA ’01), Erin Riley (MFA ’09), Amber Cowan (MFA ’11), Sijia Chen (MFA ’11), Kara Springer (MFA ’17), Warith Taha (MFA ’20), and Isaac Scott (MFA ’21), among others.
To see a calendar of the MFA Thesis Exhibitions, visit tyler.temple.edu.
Source: Hyperallergic.com