Written by Alexis Schramel | Pictures by Eric Butler

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Congratulations to our selected MCAD MFA alum and current students David Ruhlman ’20, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa ’21, Anda Tanaka ’22, and MacKenzie Mitzuk ’23! They have been selected for The Suzy Greenberg MFA Exhibition at Soo Visual Arts Center. The MCAD MFA program is collaborating with Soo Visual Arts Center this year on a joint juried exhibition featuring both MCAD and UMN grads and alumni. SooVAC has a strong partnership with MCAD from it’s foundation beginning in 2001 by alum Suzy Greenberg ’98 (1968-2012), whose mission created a nonprofit art space that connects our community with fresh, under-represented and provocative art. This year’s juror was Nicole Soukup, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at Mia.

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About the MCAD Artists:

Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa was born in Kyoto, Japan and graduated from MCAD in 2021, and is a recent recipient of a 2022 creative support grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Jocelyn’s work explores her mixed identity and longing to be more connected to her Japanese roots, often incorporating the traditional Japanese sewing method, nami nui (波縫, nami nui, or “wave stitch), a skill passed down from generations of her mother’s family.

MAC is an MFA candidate at MCAD, and recently received a MFA Trustee Scholarship, and a Central Minnesota Arts Board Individual Artist Grant. MAC’s paintings are inspired by the fantastical explorations of childhood media, using color and an inherent sweetness to passively conceal darker narratives.

David Ruhlman received his MFA in from MCAD in 2020 and is currently working as an art instructor. David’s work reflects living as an outlier, and a childhood raised in a religiously unconventional household where signs and prophecies surrounded him. Throughout his practice he now develops his own sets of codes and visual language seeking to transform the ordinary into the transcendent.

Anda Tanaka is an MFA candidate at MCAD and has recently exhibited at Crossings Gallery (Harvard Ed Portal) in Boston and Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis. Anda centers her work around the notion of smallness, lifting up the repetitive, cyclical practices of domestic life. Her studio practice is a microcosmic ecosystem of intentional cycles of material and conceptual (re)generation. The byproduct of one project creates material for the next, ultimately her practice is in resourcefulness, sustainability, and care.

Exhibition Runs: February 26 – March 26, 2022