Image: Laura Stayton (MFA ’26 LowRes)

JANUARY COLLOQUIUM

Every winter, students in MassArt’s MFA: Fine Arts Low Residency program gather virtually for five days to engage in a colloquium and review. Each of these intensive winter experiences is organized around a theme and features guest speakers and visiting artists. Topics are grounded in contemporary studio practice, art history, art theory, and expanded fields of study (audience, landscape, empathy, identity), and provide a lens for discussion. The January colloquium also includes reviews of student work by program faculty, guest critics, and select mentors. Students present their work, guide discussions, and provide feedback for their peers.

Image details(F-B): (B)Laura Stayton (MFA-BLR ’26), (F)Among Us, multiplayer game, InnerSloth LLC, 2018

2025 COLLOQUIUM PROGRAMMING

LEAD FACULTY / PANEL MODERATOR

Falaks Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic. 

Falaks’ lived practice currently takes the roles of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by Sybil Press and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, RI, with her wife, cat, and ball python.

2025 COLLOQUIUM VISITING ARTISTS

Ayesha Singh is an interdisciplinary artist who examines built architecture as spaces that embed power dynamics, expose the intricate politics inherent in nation-building exercises, migration, displacement, and functions as a location of identity- embodying aspiration, desire, and belief. Through critical spatial interventions that emphasize collaboration and coexistence, her works aim to counter established narratives to unpack layers of alteration and erasure of history through construction, restoration, and destruction. This results in her research being experienced through participatory performances with poetry, kinetic sculptures, sculptural line-drawings, public installations of scaffold and images that are created with community involvement, video, sculpture and often graphite drawings on paper. 

In a country with little to no governmental or institutional support for the arts and with limited opportunities, Singh is determined to create spaces for community interaction, alternative methods of knowledge-sharing, and guidance. Started during lockdown in 2020, Art Chain India is therefore driven by the potential for localized assistances and commonalities to create global solidarities within artist communities, to challenge opacities within which systemic hierarchies thrive. It is a movement that seeks to exist beyond the uncertainties of today, to cultivate a politics of autonomy and collaboration, and to decenter conversation, economy and resources.                     

(Keynote Visiting Artist speaker)

Bow Ty Enterprises Venture Capital (i.e. BTEVC, a.k.a. Bow Ty) is an action artist and multidimensional human business conglomerate working in the mediums of time, care, fear, identity, ambition, and career. Bow Ty produces rules, images, events, situations, and enterprise solutions which playfully deconstruct institutional foundations, attempt impossible feats, flip hierarchies, trial the limitations of popular wisdom, and open up discourses on conformity and difference. Bow Ty is known for combining ephemeral, socially intervention works which resist traditional forms of documentation with the highly stylized aesthetics of business enterprise and personal branding. Some of their most well known projects include meeting and memorizing the names of 2700 people in 3 months, a cross-industry trade show of experimental businesses worn as a garment which became a meme in at least 10 different countries, and the interdisciplinary new media collaborative LIZN’BOW formed with artist Liz Ferrer.

Bow Ty’s work has been featured at Locust Projects, MOCA North Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Young at Art Museum, David Castillo Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Ignite Festival, A.I.R. Gallery, Squeaky Wheel, iii Points, Borscht Film Festival, Wassaic Projects, Tempus Projects, Pique Gallery, the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, xTED Cincinnati, 2nd Floor Rear, The Defibrillator, The James Baldwin Library at MacDowell, The Taiwan Art Center, The Trail of Shit Performance Festival, The Chicago Subway System, The Wicker Park Bar District, Panera Bread, House Parties, Private Dinners, Bedrooms, and Streets Everywhere.

(Visiting Artist speaker)

Hiba Ali PhD shares their digital art in the form of immersive digital environments, sculpture-based installations, moving images, garments, and sound. They developed the term “digital somatics” to embody the body-mind-spirit connection to the principles of game design, worldbuilding, and narrative storytelling. They use virtual reality, 3D animation, and augmented reality to slow down time and create portals of solace and care, and consider the digital portal as a liminal space where they call forth more loving and healing into our world.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

Star Feliz is a Dominican-American artist originally from New York, NY currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Their artistic practice activates the intersections of spirit, ecology, and technology. Building upon their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage of multi-dimensional healing — Feliz works within sculpture, music, film, performance, and plant medicine to expand upon themes of hybridity, knowledge, and healing. In 2018 under the moniker of Priestusssy they released their first EP ‘Cantos de Aje’, an experimental exploration of devotional music. Their book When Eye Land was published by Printed Matter in 2023, and the 3rd edition of The Green Gold Oracle Deck is forthcoming in 2025. 

Feliz is also the founder of Botánica Cimarrón — a wellness brand bridging connections between people and the transformative healing power of plants. Feliz has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally including The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; The Horse Hospital, London, UK; among others. They have been awarded numerous fellowships, residencies, and grants including ACRE, Steuben, WI; Mohn LAND Grant, Los Angeles, CA; and the Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publication Grant, New York, NY. They are a graduate of the MFA program at UCLA’s department of Interdisciplinary Studio.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist, feminist activist, educator, and the co-founder of two collectives –Blockbusters (an international group of Video and New Media artists), and *anonymous* (a network of Iranian femme and queer activists, artists, and technologists). Born in Tehran, Iran in 1991, the year the Internet was made available for unrestricted commercial use, Khoshooee uses digital time-based strategies in presenting work that fuses 3D environments, video projection mapping, sculpture, performance, and sound. Khoshooee’s practice explores the complex dualities of technology: its oppressive role in surveilling, documenting, and criminalizing marginalized bodies, and its radical potential for resistance and collective healing. Her work unearths how technology mediates the intimate and collective experiences of grief, violence, and memory, reclaiming these digital spaces as arenas for liberation, resilience, and reimagined futures.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

Tycho Horan is a trans printer and teacher based in unceded Narragansett territory. She co-creates community arts spaces like Binch Press / Queer.Archive.Work and the Queer/Trans Zinefest, where people can creatively thrive and work in solidarity with movements for collective liberation. Her practice is almost always collaborative, and involves gathering people to create publications, make prints, code websites, plan events, tinker, spreadsheet, and perform all the other forms of maintenance that facilitate everyday communism. She currently teaches at RISD as well as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

Yun Ingrid Lee is a US-born, Hong Kong-raised artist, performer, and curator mostly working with performance, sound, text, and digital culture. In their work, Yun finds form for their anxieties about technology and capitalism by pushing existing formats to the edges of their conventions: a face-melting lecture on facial recognition, a self-deleting essay on acceleration, a boxing match about the pressures of capitalist masculinity. In short, Yun is concerned with how our filtered ways of sensing both limit and extend the ways we understand, categorize, and compose the world.

Yun currently lives in The Hague, where they curate the lecture-performance series BARTALK and organize workshops at the intersections of art, music, and technology at iii.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

Hope Wang is a multimedia artist and creative entrepreneur based in Chicago, IL. Her practice explores memory, loss, and longing in the ever-shifting architectural landscape. She is interested in capturing what always feels out of reach: the last seconds of the sun setting against the factory wall, the smell of asphalt baking in the summer heat, or the wavering space between an open storefront and a shuttered one. 

Hope is also the founding director of LMRM “loom room,” a project space working to broaden access to digital weaving equipment for artists in Chicago. She is invested in equitable conditions for working artists, resource sharing, and moving at the speed of trust. She is a recipient of an Artists Run Chicago Grant (2024) from the Hyde Park Art Center, and a Chicago Community Fellowship Fund (2023) from the Breakout Foundation for LMRM’s contributions to the city’s art community. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the US, which includes the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, The Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee, WI, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, IL, amongst others. Wang holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

(Visiting Artist panelist)

GUEST CRITICS FOR STUDENT REVIEWS

Mariah Doren has a Doctorate in the College Teaching of Art and Design from Columbia University, an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and a BA in Architecture and Urban Studies from Bryn Mawr College. She is the Dean of Graduate and Continuing Education at MassArt. Her work is a mix of studio practice, research, and teaching, carefully woven and intermixed such that each component feeds and supports the others. Mariah has a studio practice based in photography that includes collage work combining printmaking, drawing, and photographs that have been part of recent exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art and Site Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.  Mariah’s writing centers on teaching, most recently with a co-authored book titled Let’s Talk about Critique: Reimagining Art and Design Education (Intellect Press/University of Chicago-2023) and “Assessment as Learning” in Introduction to Design Education: Theory, Research, and Practical Applications for Educators by Steven Faerm (Rutledge 2022). 

(Saturday & Sunday Reviews)

Yo Ahn Han is a visual artist from the Republic of Korea. He has received his BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from MassArt. Han is teaching at MassArt as an assistant Professor and RISD as a visiting Lecturer. His work is a visual dialogue between suppression and desire, a duality which speaks to both his experience of cerebral arteriovenous malformation and to his bifurcated cultural identity. His work has been shown internationally in the United States, South Korea, and the Netherlands. Recent solo shows include “My Princess, Bari”(2015) at ART MORA Gallery in New York, “Botanical Rhapsody”(2019), “Seeking Serenade”(2021) at Chase Young Gallery and “Soils of Tinctured Embodiment”(2020) at Berry Group Office in Boston. Yo Ahn Han has recently been appointed as a juror for Beacon Gallery “totem” group exhibition (2020) and biannual painting& Drawing fellowship for Massachusetts Cultural council (2020) Additionally, Han has been featured in Boston – Art Review Issue 01, Eagle Tribune (2018), New England Home, Boston Globe, Tupelo Quarterly, and Arte Realizzata (2021)

(Saturday & Sunday Reviews)

Kelly Knight is a visual artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. She holds an MFA in 3D Fibers from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and a BA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Kelly studied fiber arts at Swain School of Design (New Bedford, MA), UMass Dartmouth, and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. She actively exhibits in solo and group shows in the New England region and beyond. She is an Assistant Professor, and Program Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Born in 1969 in Central Massachusetts, she has lived on Nantucket Island, and in New Bedford and Boston, MA. She currently lives and works in a gracious Victorian where she nurtures an urban garden of native plants and wild habitat, and a menagerie of animals that includes dogs, chickens, cats, doves and pond fish.

(Saturday Reviews)

Falaks Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic.

Falaks’ lived practice currently takes the roles of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by Sybil Press and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, RI, with her wife, cat, and ball python.

(Sunday Reviews)

PAST COLLOQUIA

• 2024: At the Table.
• 2023: Art, Craft + Identity
• 2022: Art After Audiences