Image: Composite design from details of artworks by 2024 January Colloquium participants Sharon Louden, Loretta Park, and Jean Shin
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.
2024 MFA JANUARY COLLOQUIUM:
At the Table: Empathy, Community, and Collaboration
At the Table invites you to take part in a colloquium conversation about what sustains us. Here, we posit that in order to create a more just and equitable community, empathy and curiosity need to uproot ego-based values. It’s illuminating to inquire critically into who is at the table and to examine possibilities for the creation of a more equitable and just creative community.
As one means of examining the power of community, we learn from artists working with expanded / social practice. We’ve invited speakers who work as a collective, collaborate with a diverse group of creatives, and have engaged communities beyond the artworld. We explore contemporary collaborative practices for their potential to inspire radical formal, conceptual, and social innovation. We also look at artist communities critically, through the lens of power structures and considerations of “freedom.” Myths around productivity and the isolated genius artist continue to pervade assumptions about artistic identity. The goal is to more deeply understand the particular power and possibility of artistic community and to reimagine its future. Finally, we consider the expanded arts community beyond the studio, the artist’s “extended family” of curators, writers, critics, and creatives, and how these networks can sustain, nurture, and enliven livelong creative practice.
We are engaging in this discourse out of a commitment to creating a network of support – to exploring strategies for building community and for engaging as citizen artists, committed to an expanded understanding of practice and how individual makers and their work live in the worl
2024 COLLOQUIUM PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
WELCOME + SHARON LOUDEN ARTIST TALK
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life
WEDNESDAY 1/3/24 | 6:30pm | VIA ZOOM
*Open to the Public
Join us for the opening event of the 2024 MassArt MFALR January Colloquium, including a welcome from Dean of Graduate Studies Lucinda Bliss and Colloquium Lead Faculty Loretta Park, followed by an artist talk with Sharon Louden: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists and the editor of the “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” series of books. She is a visionary leader with decades of experience as an educator in academia, community builder & catalyst connecting underrepresented artists with established institutions, and collaborator by convening initiatives with siloed stakeholders across the non-profit and business sectors.
*Contact gradprogram@massart.edu for password info.
PANEL DISCUSSION #1
Collaboration as Art Practice: Making, Thinking, and Working Together
THURSDAY 1/5/23 | 3-5pm | VIA ZOOM
*Open to the public
Collaboration as Art Practice: Making, Thinking, and Working Together brings together artists who create work as collectives, and who work with a variety of creative people and community members. In this panel discussion, we explore how collaboration expands our abilities for empathy, grace, and creation. Moderated by Loretta Park, the panel discussion features Darren Alexander Cole, Evelyn Rydz, and BSisters Khaleghi.
Image courtesy BSisters Khaleghi
*Contact gradprogram@massart.edu for password info.
KEYNOTE LECTURE: JEAN SHIN
THURSDAY 1/4/24 | 6:30pm | VIA ZOOM
*Open to the Public
Jean Shin, born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the US, is a widely-exhibited Brooklyn-based visual artist who transforms accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity and community engagement. Shin’s work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions..
Images Courtesy Jean Shin
*Contact gradprogram@massart.edu for password info.
PANEL DISCUSSION #2
Beyond The Studio: The Expanded Art Community
FRIDAY 1/5/24 | 12-2pm | VIA ZOOM
*Open to the Public
Beyond The Studio: The Expanded Art Community brings together art critics, writers, curators, and artists for a panel discussion. We explore how different creatives in the arts collaborate to foster the art community. Moderated by Loretta Park, the panel discussion features Chenoa Baker, Gabriel Sosa, and Emily Watlington.
*Contact gradprogram@massart.edu for password info.
2024 COLLOQUIUM VISITORS
LEAD FACULTY / PANEL MODERATOR
Loretta Park (b. 1988, Goshen, NY) holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BA from Bowdoin College. Her work has been exhibited at The MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Boston, MA (2023-24); The Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University, Boston, MA (2023), Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Boston, MA (2022); Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL (2021-22); New System Exhibitions, Portland, ME (2019); Ray Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2018); and Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2017). Reviews of exhibitions including the artist have appeared in Art New England, The Boston Globe, and Korean Daily. Loretta currently works in the Boston area and serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Compass Faculty Mentor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
SPEAKERS
Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists and the editor of the “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” series of books. She is a visionary leader with decades of experience as an educator in academia, community builder & catalyst connecting underrepresented artists with established institutions, and collaborator by convening initiatives with siloed stakeholders across the non-profit and business sectors. Sharon graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Louden’s work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. (WEDNESDAY OPENING EVENT)
Jean Shin, born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the US, is a widely-exhibited Brooklyn-based visual artist who transforms accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity and community engagement. Shin’s work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions. (THURSDAY KEYNOTE LECTURE)
PANELISTS
Behnaz and Baharak Khaleghi (BSisters Khalegi) are multimedia artists and collaborators originating from Iran. They currently live in the Bay Area, where Behnaz pursued her MFA at the University of California Berkeley, and Baharak pursued hers at San Jose State University. In their practice, deploying an array of mediums, they seek alternative ways of making feminist art in a Middle Eastern context, usually paying attention to the potentials of humor and pleasure while simultaneously embracing the aesthetics of disgust. They push against taste to develop new categories for beauty, what is pleasurable and libidinous for women as defined by women, offensive to male taste and its ownership. (THURSDAY PANEL)
Darren Alexander Cole is a moving image sound artist born in Kansas City, Mo. Cole researches emerging technology as he explores the meeting place of art, technology, and social justice. Cole is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computational media at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (THURSDAY PANEL)
Evelyn Rydz is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, site-responsive installations and participatory community projects. She has focused her artistic practice on interconnected bodies of water, highlighting the complex relationships between personal histories, human impacts, and threats to natural and cultural ecosystems. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, Brother Thomas Fellowship, SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Artist Resource Trust Grant, Visual Arts Finalist of the Cintas Knight Foundation, and most recently of the 2020-21 U.S. Latinx Art Forum Charla Fund and the 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. Rydz received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is currently Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. (THURSDAY PANEL)
Chenoa Baker (she/her) is a curator, wordsmith, and descendant of self-emancipators. In addition to leading the exhibition program at ShowUp (previously Beacon Gallery), she worked on: Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Peabody Essex Museum; Simone Leigh at ICA/Boston; Simone Leigh; and Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas at MFA/Boston. Her autobiographical-style art criticism appears in Hyperallergic, Public Parking, Material Intelligence, Studio Potter, Boston Art Review, and Sixty Inches From Center among others. (FRIDAY PANEL)
Emily Watlington is a critic, curator, and assistant editor at Art in America. She writes on topics including art, design, disability justice, and feminism. She is a Fulbright Scholar who holds a SMArchS in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. Her writing has been assigned on syllabi at universities including Oberlin, New York University, and Harvard; has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Baffler, Mousse, Frieze, and Another Gaze. It has been translated into German, French, and Croatian. Recently, she contributed to the exhibition catalogs Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995, Sheida Soleimani: Medium of Exchange, and An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art. In 2018, she received the Vera List Writing Prize in the Visual Arts, and in 2020, the Theorist Award from C/O Berlin. (FRIDAY PANEL)
Gabriel Sosa is a Cuban-American artist, educator, and curator. Sosa works at the intersection of drawing, public art, and community engagement. His work has been shown at Fitchburg Art Museum; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, Cuba; Tufts University Art Galleries; A R E A, Boston; and Museo La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia. He has participated in residencies at Lugar a dudas, The Art & Law Program, Materia Abierta, Urbano Project, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Mass MoCA and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Most recently, he was named as one of The Makers by WBUR, a series highlighting creatives of color making an impact in the region. Sosa is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art Education Department at MassArt, and Deputy Director of Essex Art Center, a community arts nonprofit in Lawrence, Massachusetts. (FRIDAY PANEL)
GUEST CRITICS
Elisa H. Hamilton is a socially engaged multimedia artist. A 2023 Brother Thomas Fellow, she holds a BFA in Painting from MassArt and an MA in Civic Media from Emerson College. Her work has been shown locally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and she has created participatory projects for institutions including ICA Boston, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Currier Museum of Art.. (SATURDAY REVIEWS: FIRST YEAR STUDENTS)
Tova Katzman is a photo and video artist currently based in Austin, Texas. In 2017, after graduating from MassArt, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to pursue an art and research project on the intersection of daily life with the Panama Canal. She remained based in Panama for six years as a freelance photographer and community project facilitator. Her work has been shown internationally and she has participated in various talks in places such as the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Contemporary Art Museum of Panama, TEOR/ética in Costa Rica, and the 46th National Artist’s Salon of Colombia. (SUNDAY REVIEWS: SECOND YEAR STUDENTS)