A NOTE FROM DEAN BLISS, AUGUST 2020
It is my pleasure to introduce MassArt’s summer 2020 thesis exhibition for our low residency MFA graduates. This group of students has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to their creative and intellectual transformation over the last 2 years, and they have earned their Master’s degrees in a period unlike any other in MassArt’s history. Our low residency students typically spend three summers on campus in Boston, using MassArt studios to expand on the work done with mentors and faculty through the year. With the spread of COVID-19, their culminating residency went fully remote. This was a significant loss for the community, yet each of these graduates approached the online experience with determination and grit, and engaged in 6 weeks of rich dialogue and learning, from the safety of their home studios. This exhibition is a sign of their perseverance and commitment!
When a new body of work takes root, it often makes itself known through an accumulation of congruencies–through a kind of serendipity that nudges the artist along a particular path. Before that path becomes the work, the content of the work and the forms that support it begin to show up everywhere. The artist becomes a tractor beam for coincidence, for things that inform what’s emerging in the studio. If I were to digress on the philosophies of why this is so, Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism” might be a place to start. Bennett argues that the divisions and hierarchies between vital matter (us, beings) and dull matter (it, things) are destructive. She points to the fact that humans have a tendency to experience matter–trash, electricity, worms…all the elements and animals of the natural world–without considering how interwoven we are with them. She claims that a deeper awareness of the vitality of matter helps us use all of our senses to detect a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. It’s always seemed to me that artists often bypass these particular kinds of bias, as they are trained to gather material wherever they can, with any of their senses.
The work in this exhibition represents the culmination of that creative cycle for twenty artists. Each has spent time casting deeply for the work, discovering the lens of serendipity, and being disciplined enough to bring it to fruition. It’s a cycle that is both maddening and enlivening, yet I wish it on every one of these graduates. I’m pleased to celebrate the depth of seeking, discovery, and connection that is evidenced in this culminating work.
— Lucinda Bliss, MassArt Dean of Graduate Studies
