This essay was written by Keisha Williams, independent curator and arts administrator, after completing studio visits with each of the class of 2021 MFA candidates. Read more about the 2021 Thesis Exhibition, and pick up a printed copy of this essay.
Reflections on Creativity and Purpose
In a year that has met us as global citizens with deep challenge and separation, the arts have remained an undeniable strength that can speak to our humanity, our struggles, and our collective strength. As Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay stated on World Art Day in April of 2020, “bringing people together, inspiring, soothing and sharing: these are the powers of art”. There is a resiliency, a connection, and grounding that art can give us. Working in curating and arts administration, these truths seem inherent, deeply entrenched in the marrow of our cities and our communities. This is especially true of MCAD whose vision as a place that “transforms the world through creativity and purpose” prepares new generations of emerging artists to engage and inspire communities.
Speaking with the graduates in the MFA class of 2021 as they prepare for their final thesis presentations, there is a clear sense of purpose they have found within their artistic practice. Their time at MCAD has pushed them to interrogate the meaning of their work, their lives, and their truth. I was struck by their openness, honesty, and vulnerability when sharing their intentions and inspiration. Many of the students have had significant pivots within their practice during their MFA, shifting to a place more open, more intimate, and more connected to themselves. They have strived to use their artistic practices to connect to their existence, personal truth, passion and gain a deeper sense of knowing to grow their work. Although they may realize it in different ways, all of the emerging artists of the class of 2021 seem dedicated to a shared vision with MCAD working to understand their creative purpose.
Jocelyn Suzuka’s practice seeks to plug into inherited legacies and the complexities of belonging, rejection, family tradition, and generational trauma related to her Japanese- American heritage. Her work speaks to a desire for belonging to self, culture, and to define her truth. This ancestral connection is the through-line in her work. From the photo archive of her great-grandfather to the stitches used in the creation of her plush animal guardians, she excavates the past and brings raw compassion into everything she does. Human touch takes on wider meaning within her practice, revealing deep levels of caring and love. With mindful stitches passed down through generations she imbues her creations with intimate comfort and deep understanding. Themes of protection and vulnerability are so inherent that they almost become their own characters in her practice. They emerge as both sentinel and specter, speaking to dualities of cultural abandonment and desire for connection. Her work exudes a gentle strength uncovering her own sense of legacy and purpose.
Centering her own experiences and narratives of loss – loss of self, family, and culture – interdisciplinary artist Alondra M. Garza uses her story as a bridge and border within her work where she can explore the complexity and duality of the immigrant experience. Her installation work has allowed her practice to find a deeper connection to self, resulting in the nuanced and vulnerable telling of her life as a Mexican American artist. Her work shares the story of a dweller of two worlds, one of both physical and cultural distance, but also one of strength and adaptability. As Garza says, “a bridge is a division but also a unification of two cultures”. She seeks to dispel generalizations of the immigrant experience in a more personal and at times intimate examination of her own life and the complexities of living in two worlds. Color, shadow, darkness, and wire take shape in her work to display irony, challenge stereotypes, and fight against the generalized narratives often projected onto the immigrant communities of the United States.
Yao Jian is an illustrator dedicated to delightful illustrations and character-oriented stories. Her work is created by observations from daily life, childhood memories, and points of human connection. Her books center on how to process emotions, something that she sees as a central lesson in the stories she tells. Careful and intentional use of vibrancy and color are used to create imaginative spaces that foster connections, spread happiness, hope, and positive energy with her readers. Creating her work through a place of joy, she wants her stories to be told in a comforting and positive way, while still dealing with complex ideas. Reading her work and viewing her illustrations you can sense the deep connection she feels toward the concepts of family, home, shared human connection, and happiness. While her inspiration is personal, she wants to ensure that her stories are universal. Emotion, happiness, playfulness, and resilience are central narratives in her stories. Leaving space for her readers to develop their own understanding, her characters grow and learn to possess a positive attitude for whatever they encounter. When reading her work, there is also a sense that each story helps Jian grow into herself, her practice, and her ultimate purpose even more. What makes her work so captivating is that while her stories are oriented towards children, there are universal truths that can connect with readers of any age.
Using collage to examine his place as a fat gay man within gay male culture, Kyle Bredain’s work unpacks body image, acceptance, and finding place. His early work grappled with body image in gay male culture through the idealized body, sourcing images from magazines to question the belongingness of bodies that existed outside of the celebrated chiseled physiques found in popular media. Transitioning his focus to his own body offered a liberating paradigm shift allowing for objectivity and fostering space where non-idealized bodies can exist and be celebrated. In his collages softness, curves, and hair become a work of art, challenging and dispelling stigmas. Shifting to a more personal exploration of self has been cathartic for Bredain, transitioning away from a place of anger and exclusion into a more gentle, honest, liberating, and freeing space without judgment. As he affirmed when speaking to me “there is a space for fat gay men, even if we’ve had to make it for ourselves”. Now a tone of celebration, joy, and tongue-in-cheek humor exists, showing a deeper understanding of his existence and positionality. His most recent works take his body off the wall, allowing a new layer of physicality. Experimenting with scale opens a conversation about how we view our bodies, how society views bodies, and creating an encounter where society can no longer overlook fat bodies.
Zhangruo Sun is a graphic design and illustration artist whose practice is rooted in symbols and metaphors. She has a unique ability to creatively play with letters and symbols to conceive inventive combinations that result in eye-catching graphics. Whether it is designing a shared alphabet of English and Chinese letters or a set of illustrations that depict life during lockdown, there is a great intention, order, and whimsy that shines through. Rooted in a practice of graphic design, illustration became a way for Sun to explore more freely, discovering new truths about herself and her practice. Illustration became a space where she could process her emotions, current events, and environments, offering moments of reconciliation and self-analysis. The result has been a sort of psychotherapy that allows her to bring personal experiences into artistic practice. Operating as a sort of visual diary, clever illustrations utilizing metaphor and symbols allow Sun to hide secrets, document moments in time and find “peace and love” in her daily life. These secrets are never revealed to her audience, giving her both a sense of relief and cheeky pleasure.
Finding influence from his early career in the Navy, Darren Schneibel’s work is informed by a technical approach to aesthetics. This early life experience has transitioned into an artistic practice of advocacy with deep connections to his former Naval career in intelligence and perhaps fueling his interest in truth-telling. That passion has become fully realized in his thesis shedding light on contemporary ethical issues of exploration and exploitation surrounding government and private companies. Schneibel’s work carries with it a desire to share truth and an awareness of one of the most incomprehensible spaces – space itself – a realm which few understand, and even fewer have entered. Utilizing similar aesthetics to those within the intelligence community, his careful attention to detail within his work becomes a bridge for exposing the often-ugly truth with his audience. His work prompts you to intuitively interact with the wider issues of lesser-known open-source information on the 21st-century colonization of space. What his work reveals is that we should be aware, we should ask questions, we should challenge the access and money being spent on space exploration, and we should advocate for more accountability.
Trina Fernandez uses photography, found photos, collage, and installations to create moments of connection. Utilizing pop culture symbols of the past, she creates accessible entry points where the viewer becomes the camera, seeing reality from her perspective. Her installations are large-scale spectacles that engage audiences but dig deeper and you will find an extremely personal narrative. Truth and vulnerability are foundational in her work, building in various levels of access and connection to her inner thoughts. Her installations speak to human experiences that we do not acknowledge or talk about, those ugly truths and lies that we tell ourselves. Openness, honesty, connection, love, loneliness, and isolation are all unpacked with intentional subtlety of visual and written elements. Her final work at MCAD will be a reexamination of the work created during her MFA. An opportunity to recontextualize vulnerable and intimate moments in a new way. Her life-size sculpture dresses will share a mix of feelings, emerging out of moments of sadness and celebration. By reforming past material, they take on new meanings that are often the opposite of their original intention, allowing her works to be processed in new and cathartic ways. Her work speaks to the movement of energy, of complex moments, creating an installation that provides a whole picture of self, perhaps the picture you do not see until the end of a journey.
Finding influence from the queer club scenes of Shanghai, interdisciplinary artist Alejandro Zhang’s work is a pursuit of a “digital utopia” and safe space where queer identity can become fully visible. Creating immersive psychedelic club environments using video, sound, and performance he celebrates the club spaces of queer Chinese communities. These immersive environments interrogate ideas of queer space, queer reality, and the audience’s understanding of queer identity as they interact with his work. To Zhang, clubs are one of the few spaces where queer communities can thrive in China, expressing their identities in environments created by and for them. Speaking truth and claiming visibility is central to his work. Using his own queer body as artistic medium is an unapologetic stance, a claim for visibility and recognition so often denied to queer Chinese people. Through his work, he takes the viewer back to that moment in a Shanghai club where he discovered space to truly be himself and the ability to show his own identity on the dance floor. At MCAD, he’s been able to grow his artistic practice, but ultimately, he’s found truth, freedom, and a sense of purpose. That sense of clarity of self is something he hopes to bring back to the club scenes in China where queer identity can thrive, but also inspire his community to speak up, share truth and hopefully, one day bring their identities and truths outside of the club.
Discovering yourself through creativity and purpose can be deeply personal, but pushing to find that spark can be transformational. As President Sanjit Sethi stated in a February 2020 interview with the Star Tribune, MCAD has a unique role to challenge future creators and change-makers to find their purpose and truth. It exists as “a place to educate the next generation of cultural leaders. It does it through fields of study like printmaking, sculpture, furniture design, product design, painting, photography, a variety of mediums, but does it in a way that understands that these are individuals that are going to go out and do remarkable things in the world.” Although creativity and purpose may manifest in different ways, from speaking truth to power, connecting stories with their communities, or defining their own existence, I see a growth of self that each emerging artist in the MFA class of 2021 will take with them as they depart MCAD. That is perhaps one of the greatest lessons anyone can learn.
Keisha Williams
Independent Curator
Curatorial Department Assistant and Artist Liaison in Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art
kwilliams@artsmia.org
