Class of 2019 Thesis Catalogue by cusoa

Published on the occasion of the 2019 Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program MFA Thesis The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery Lenfest Center for the Arts April 28– May 26, 2019 © 2019 The artists and Columbia University

Columbia University 310 Dodge Hall, MC 1806 2960 Broadway New York, NY 10027 arts.columbia.edu/visual-arts Design: L+L (landl.us) Typefaces: Raisonné Sailec Printing: JS McCarthy

CONTENTS JESSICA MARTINEZ

JAMES MCCRACKEN

JEFFREY MERIS

DANTE MIGONE-OJEDA

BAT-AMI RIVLIN

EMMA SCHWARTZ

PAULINE SHAW

JACQUELINE SILBERBUSH

HINDA WEISS

102

KIYAN WILLIAMS

106

XIRIN

110

COCO YOUNG

114

A YOUNG YU

118

From the Dean

122

KATE LIEBMAN

From the Chair

122

RUHEE MAKNOJIA

About the Curator

123

KATHARINE MARAIS

Appendix

123

From the curator

PRISCILLA ALEMAN

NICOLE BURKO

VIVIAN CHIU

VIKRAM DIVECHA

RAFAEL DOMENECH

TRAVIS FAIRCLOUGH

ANNETTE HUR

NOAH JACKSON

ESTEBAN JEFFERSON

TAEJOONG KIM

SUSANNA KOETTER

SASKIA KRAFFT

RACHEL LABINE

I LOVE MY IGNORANCE OF THE FUTURE THE 2019 COLUMBIA MFA THESIS EXHIBITION “Will you allow as a certainty that we are at a turning point? — If it is a certainty it is not a turning.1

1 Maurice Blanchot.

In Maurice Blanchot’s “The Infinite Conversation” a chapter called On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return asserts that one can never know when one is in the middle of a turning point. In the same chapter, Blanchot reminds us that Nietzche later revised his own statement ‘I love my ignorance of the future’ to ‘I love the uncertainty of the future’, in a way allowing for a more palatable version of the first statement. Either way, the idea is that the only thing we truly know, is that we don’t know. Of the significance of the statement, Blanchot relates, “do not be impatient to the point of anticipating by a too resolute seeking what is in store for you. Do not simplify. But there is this uncertainty; the ignorance borne by the hazardous traits of the future. 2 {…} It is safe to say that uncertainty of the future looms especially large throughout the 2nd year of Columbia’s MFA program (or any graduate program for that matter) be it for the preparation of the thesis exhibition itself, or for the coming aftermath of the MFA program — or a nice cocktail of both! It is a particularly trying time when a certainty of many details must be secured amidst feelings of great uncertainty. Fortunately for art students, ‘the unknown’ should by now be a dear old acquaintance, returning as they do each time to blank pages and canvases, empty screens, and unformed material. The studio becomes a place to gamble with the unknown. It is a brave act that often goes underappreciated. Learning to love the unknown echoes Rebecca Solnit’s rumination on the ‘unforeseen’ in her book, Getting Lost: “How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.

“On the Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return.” The Infinite Conversation. Translation and foreward by Susan Hanson. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 82. University of Minnesota press, Minneapolis and London. Page 264.

2 Ibid, 280.

To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the para doxical operation that life most requires of us.” 3

3 Solnit, Rebecca,

A relentless anxiety over the collapse of things supposedly ‘known’ met with the unknown future of global politics, environmental crisis, economic instability, infuses the minutiae of our daily lives. Learning to live with the unknown, or even relish in it, may be but one way out. During the course of my visits where I witnessed great dedication, resiliency, and true catharsis, I conclude that there is a lot to learn from the position of a graduate student. As these artists embark on the beginning of their ‘un-programmed’ life, I hope that they will make a conscious effort to continually and purposefully ‘get lost’ in the value of not-knowing, and that they will feel a sense of pride in meeting the unforeseen head on. In her book, Solnit also reminds us of Edgar Allan Poe’s edict: “in matters of philosophical discovery… it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely”.4 In this estimation, the post-thesis gamble for all students becomes, ‘how does one get lost better?’

Getting Lost, Penguin Books, 2006. Page 128.

4 Ibid, 126.

It has been an honor for me to witness how each of the artists has been practicing this work with their thesis projects, during the many studios visits this position allows for. This marks the third iteration of thesis shows I have curated for the Columbia MFA department — the first in 2009 and the second in 2016 (Obama’s first year in office and then the year Trump came into office). In retrospect, it no doubt feels like those were the ‘turning point’ years, though one can argue, as Blanchot did, that the turning points are continually happening. Nevertheless, the 2019 graduating class has their own set of turns and potential trajectories that I look forward to looking back upon in ten years time as well. Their thoughtful, hard work on the thesis will carry them through longer than they can know at this time. Take note: As many of these projects may likely continue to form beyond the date of this thesis exhibition, only to be fleshed out further and more elaborately, in various iterations and in specific locales…. or they may suddenly change course entirely. Herein lies the thrill of the unforeseen. Regine Basha March 15, 2019

PRISCILLA ALEMAN Priscilla Aleman graduated from The Cooper Union with her BFA in Sculpture. Upon graduating she continued her art practice in Miami working with archae ologists, while establishing the historic preservation committee in Miami-Dade County. Aleman’s work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Margulies Collection, The Deering Estate, Young Arts Foundation, among other venues. She has participated as Artist-inResidence at Mildred’s Lane, Wheaton Arts, VCU Summer Studio Program, and has received numerous grants including Columbia University Dean Travel Grant, The Benjamin Menschel Fellowship, and is an alumnus for the U.S. Presidential Scholar Program.

in both archaeology and horticulture. By having an understanding of the landscape’s past traditions and its environmental layout, I begin to design my own sacred arenas. The sculptures allow me to investigate signif icant figures and symbols, their transforma tions, and how these transformations shape our understanding, meaning, and function of an environment.

www.priscilla-aleman.com

My studies at Columbia University look into the correlation between the natural environment, the architectural layout of cities and the formation of communities. My training as an archaeological technician influences my methodology for creating sculpture installations, enabling me to conduct an intimate investigation of history, nature and culture, and its relationship to the region. I am interested in how our understanding of sacred moves from its original position as a site, into place with symbolic meaning. In my art practice I construct sculptural effigies, replicate artifacts, and collect from my environment, utilizing archives and research facilities

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An Archaeological Romance, 2019 Ceramics, collected seeds from Montgomery Botanical Center (eggfruit, mangrove, sea grape, Live Oak), pressed mango leaves 30" × 30" × 6"

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BOT TOM

OPPOSITE

Terracotta Scatter, 2019

Terracotta Scatter (Detail), 2019

In studio, 2019

Ceramics

60" × 30" × 6"

NICOLE BURKO Nicole Burko was born in Toronto Canada in 1987. Her work is informed by her own explorations of the ocean through freediving — the act of taking a single breath of air and descending into the ocean as far as humanly possible. The resulting psychological landscape paintings investigate the vastness of the natural world through an intimate lens.

Part of my practice is the first-person explo ration of underwater caves. Experiencing these spaces through freediving is both mental and physical; a diver is at once keenly aware of their surroundings and deeply entrenched in their own mind. As the mammalian dive reflex takes over, blood shifts from the extremities and the heart rate slows, to as low as ten beats per minute creating a euphoric state. This euphoria gradually turns to tension and discomfort as the body becomes more and more hypoxic — the urge to breathe growing more painful with each second. When I resurface, I take the experience of the ocean into my studio. Diving provides an opportunity for translation. Like the Romantics who've inspired me, I imbue my artwork with stillness, longing, and the experiential sensations of that accompany the difficulty of transcribing the vastness of the natural world — all of which I feel in the deep sea. These ideas are less pictorial and perhaps more emotive than traditional landscape paintings, exploring the spatial and psychological aspects of freediving.

A BOVE

Descending Towards the Unknown, 2018 Copper plate etching 13" × 18" NEXT SPREAD

The Distance Between Us, 2018 Copper plate etching 4.5" × 6"

VIVIAN CHIU Vivian Chiu (b. 1989) is a visual artist who works primarily in wood. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Hong Kong, Vivian attended the Rhode Island School of Design where she graduated with a BFA in Furniture Design (’11). Her work utilizes repetition and labor-intensive processes to not only create visually dynamic work but also to pay homage to her family’s history in factory labor. Vivian has been an Artist-in-Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Sculpture Space, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, amongst others. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Milan, and Hong Kong. www.vivianchiudesigns.com

What is the weight of tension? What is it like to have two opposing concepts within the same body? As a queer Asian woman interested in ideas of (in)visibility, I use methods of laborious deconstruction and reconstruc tion of materials such as wood, acrylic and photography to reveal and conceal the female body. I am interested in the tension created by combining contrasting forms and concepts into a single object. How can a grid be changed into a body? How can the body be defined through the grid? What is the weight of your subconscious?

Drawing from personal experiences and histories, I create abstract optical sculptures and images to engage with the viewer through ideas of perception, disorientation, and camouflage. How can you expose something in the process of hiding it? Repetition and labor-intensive methods are used not only as catharsis to alleviate psychological narratives, but also to pay a conscious homage to my family’s history and toils in factory work.

A BOVE

Level, 2019 Video 10:40 minutes LEFT

Looking, 2019 Inkjet print 72" × 40" NEXT SPREAD

Weight, 2019 Poplar, braided string 96" × 96"

VIKRAM DIVECHA Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha works between New York and Dubai. His conceptual practice has developed around what he calls 'found processes’. By realigning socioeconomic relationships Divecha creates affective situations that raise questions about ethics and value. He generates site-specific projects, public art, collaborative works, video, photography and drawings. Exhibitions include Living Room: UIT (Use it together), ISCP, New York (2019); Co-Lab, Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE (2017), Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play, National Pavilion UAE, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah (2017); Minor Work, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2017).

For his thesis exhibition Divecha presents ‘Gallery 354’ (2019), a project that reflects upon the namesake gallery within the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s southwest wing. Taking the subdued lighting at Gallery 354 as a departure point, this project meditates on light, retina and perception to create shifting subjective positions—the objects on display, the museum, and the artist, become actors in its narrative thread. Formally playing with light and darkness, questions on presence & absence, image making apparatus & spirit nature become evident. Photography becomes a medium, metaphor and material to complicate our understanding of time and space. While representation and capture is the notion generally associated with photography, an elusive nature is posited through a series

of aesthetic gestures, raising questions about agency and effect of the Melanesian objects on display. The sparse but immersive installations explore the materiality of darkness, positing the darkroom as a space for imagination. Sight, sound and smell engage the viewer, while the lyric essay format is employed to stitch a series of encounters at Gallery 354. There are repeated but futile attempts to seek the spiritual, which are possibly thwarted as they are conducted through the shortcomings of a modern lens.

Negative Heaps (of designated waste), 2015 Porcelain tiles Dimensions variable

Warehouse Project, 2016 Wholesale goods, warehouse 82 (3444 sq. ft.) Alserkal Avenue, Dubai 14 March–11 June, 2016

Bathing Boulders, 2017 4:3, HD video, silent, color, single channel 04:24 minutes

Fee Transfer, 2017 Ink on acid free fine grain paper 8.27" × 11.69"

RAFAEL DOMENECH Rafael Domenech’s work extends from bookmaking, collage, and sculpture. Working from repurposed natural, industrial, and mass-produced objects, Domenech’s work is often responsive to the context where the work is created and its exhibition site. He understands the urban habitat as a convoluted, selftransforming, and revolting force continuously generating knowledge, ideas, and language. After experiencing cultural and geographical dislocation, daily walks through the city (to create a personal photographic archive) are fundamental for the construction and understanding of the new landscape. Domenech's works are part of collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Perez Art Museum, Miami, Bass Museum, Miami Beach, and The Bronx Museum, New York.

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Untitled (Super-flat landscape, no space between the end and here), 2017–2019 Plastic bag, archival adhesive, laser print on paper 98" × 67" NEXT SPREAD

Objects that belong to the floor, 2019 Plexiglas, LED bulb, electrical wire, wrapping plastic, laser print on paper Dimensions variable

TRAVIS FAIRCLOUGH Travis Fairclough (b. 1990, Paterson, New Jersey). Travis earned his BFA in Painting at SUNY, Purchase College in 2014. He currently lives and works in New York making paintings and ceramic sculptures.

Fire and Ice By Robert Frost Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

ANNETTE HUR

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Kisaeng, 2019 Oil on canvas 70" × 59.5" N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

Slower Time, 2019 Oil on canvas 80" × 68" N E X T S P R E A D, R I G H T

Untitled, 2019 Mixed media 13" × 9.5"

Dream Writing 1. My child gets away from me, she jumps in the car and starts driving. I should feel fearful, I should feel so scared of her getting into an accident, she may die, she may kill people. I don’t know what she is trying to do by driving, where she’s going, or what she wants. I do not fear anything. I wait. She hits three men on the street. She made the turn towards them. I run towards the car, not to the men she hit, I hold my child in my arms knowing that she is fine. I feel fine. 2. I see an art in a dark room. I actually don’t know if its an art. I was dragged into the room somehow, don’t remember by who or why. I’m just going to call the thing ‘art’. The art is trying to show me something, but I can’t tell what it is. The art is a box, big enough to fit a dozen bodies in. It looks so old, almost some kind of a relic. The top opens. I feel fear to look in. The shadows of figures in the room are watching me, waiting for me to look into the box. ‘I’m not going to look.’ Not because I am afraid of dead bodies or ghosts or... anything really. I just know there is something that I do not want to see in the box and maybe my heart will stop beating. Fear engulfs me and I look above instead. The wall where abstracted mountains-or just the profusion of green nature-are painted. This room is too dark! But the painting is also sunless. I just feel it is full of impasto, coarsely painted. My eyes are fixed on the painting but they imagine something else in an attempt to not think about the inside of the box. I never looked. 3. I am very tired, half-asleep. Can’t really see or move but I know it is you, lying down next to me. You touch me on my waist, then my thigh, then my intimate area. My blurred eyes see you leave and I think maybe I am dreaming. No. There’s you again lying on a bed. I see your soft breasts, I lay down on them. I want to be pleased. But I have to run, I have to run and please someone else. For what reason? I run and run until I am told to prepare tea for the other person. Someone I know, someone I’ve missed, someone I also want to be pleased by. Oh man, preparing tea takes too long. My hands are restless out of anxiety. I don’t know if it is the right tea. He leaves. He leaves through an opening of a crazy architecture that looks like a Serra’s sculpture or maybe more like the largest concert hall in Thailand I’ve seen in a picture . He says bye. No he just waved his hand. I drank the tea. 4. It is a place I’ve never seen. So Bright, warm but cool, blue skies, pleasant air with almost a color of orange embracing everything. Everything is in peace. In a far distance, there are other people, working, cooking, maybe gardening. The brightest pink. It is pink that I have never seen before. “Hi Granpa” I can’t speak further. He is wearing the pink shirt, looking healthier than ever. He is looking into a lens that leads to nowhere it seems. So carefully. He gently taps on the bench and I sit next to him. We are under the shade. I start crying, I want to say something. Something like ‘I miss you, I am sorry, what are you looking into, where is this place, are you coming back’. He goes ‘shhhhh’, still looking into the tiny lens. He says, ‘ Stop crying, you shouldn’t be sad, there is nothing to be sad about’. I feel that he is actually looking at us through the lens. My family. Just people. Who are still in agony. I am sorry, see you later, I love you.

NOAH JACKSON Noah Jackson (b. 1995, Provo, Utah)

Interstate 8 Modest Mouse Spent 18 hours waiting stoned for space I spent the same 18 hours in the same damn place I'm on a road shaped like a figure 8 I'm going nowhere, but I'm guaranteed to be late You go out like a riptide You know that ball has no sides You're an angel with an amber halo Black hair and the devil's pitchfork Wind-up anger with the endless view of The ground's colorful patchwork How have you been? How have you been? How have you? How have you? I drove around for hours, I drove around for days I drove around for months and years and never went no place We're on a pass, we're on pass I stopped for gas, but where could place be To pay for gas to drive around Around the Interstate 8 You go out like a riptide You know that ball has no sides You're an angel with an amber halo Black hair and the devil's pitchfork Wind-up anger with the endless view of The ground's colorful patchwork

How have you been? How have you been? How have you? How have you? Songwriters: Eric Judy / Isaac Brock / Jeremiah Green

ESTEBAN JEFFERSON Esteban Jefferson was born in New York in 1989, and never left. Prior to attending Columbia, he was an artist-in-residence in LMCC’s Workspace program, as well as a recipient of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s Studio Immersion Project (SIP) fellowship. Esteban has recently participated in exhibitions at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; The New Gallery, Charlotte, NC; and No Commission Art Fair, Miami, FL.

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Petit Palais, 2018 Video Installation 05:17 minutes N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

Grandma, 2018 Found Photograph Roughly 5" × 3.5" N E X T S P R E A D, R I G H T

Grandma, 2018 Found Photograph Roughly 5" × 3.5"

TAEJOONG KIM Taejoong Kim (b. 1986, Daejeon, Korea) is known for his poetical landscapes and experimentally related installation works. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the U.S. He was invited to be an artist in residence at Paris Lee Ungno Residence (FR), Kunsthalle Goeppingen (DE), and Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (PL). He is the recipient of grants and awards from Foam Magazine (NE), The Jewish Museum in NYC (US) and Goethe Institut (DE), etc. Taejoong Kim lives and works in New York. He is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

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BOT TOM, LEF T TO RIG HT

Limited Edition — Swan Lake, 1st, E, 120, 2018

Limited Edition — Swan Lake, 2018

Pigment print

Performance, lighting, sound

27" × 40"

20:00 minutes

Foresta — Stella #2–1, 2019 Pigment print 71" × 40"

Foresta — Stella #2–2, 2019 Pigment print 71" × 40"

SUSANNA KOETTER Susanna Koetter was born in 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, and has spent the entirety of her life along the coast above the Long Island Sound. In 2013, they received a BA in painting from Yale University, and attended the Yale/ Norfolk School of Art in the Summer of 2012. Prior to Columbia, Susanna lived in Providence, RI, where they worked as an educator and a cook. The pursuit of their work is rooted firmly in print's capacity to tell time. She is interested in how print can indicate “before” and “after” the event of its own making, and how the work can reveal passage in and of itself.

that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded.

www.susannakoetter.com

Two poems by two men, both named Robert: THE PASTURE I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too. I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun’s going down whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is. — Robert Duncan (1960)

— Robert Frost (1915)

Only in the wake of death can figure turn to ground, like the shifting yin and yang — is this what they mean by changing states?

OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

To my father, whose rest forms the field of my vision: Everything is for you.

SASKIA KRAFFT Saskia Krafft grew up in rural Germany near the world’s largest automobile plant. Raised amongst car mechanics and construction workers, she witnessed the forces that transform raw materials into consumer products. The land and the people that live in it are solely dedicated to agriculture and commercial use.

Saskia’s projects originate from field trips to places remote and natural, densely populated and cultured. These observations led her to study drawing and sculpture at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences. She is interested in questions surrounding humanity’s impact on complex ecosystems, the material relationship between urban and rural geographies, proposing that the ‘wilderness’ we are interfacing with is already human-made.

RACHEL LABINE

Rachel LaBine is an artist working in painting, installation, and performance. She was born in North Dakota, where at age 3 she began plotting her escape, and practicing ballet. As a teenager she watched the movie Fargo and, unable to hear the accent, missed the joke. Her work tends to invoke an elsewhere, animated by holding scale, legibility, and longing in a slippery grip. In 2010 she received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She moved to Brooklyn the day after graduation, and to Los Angeles a few years after that. Currently she intends to stay in New York for a while. rachellabine.net

By Turns Diffuse & Binding, 2019 Solo exhibition at Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, OR Photo: Mario Gallucci

A BOVE

OPPOSITE

Taut stem, blithe spirit, 2019

By Turns Diffuse & Binding

Oil on wood panel

(Glass stain), 2019

10" × 8"

Lighting gels, tape, vinyl

Photo: Charles Benton

Dimensions vary depending on sun

KATE LIEBMAN Kate Liebman was born in 1991. She graduated from Yale College in 2013. Through painting, printmaking, drawing, and animation, she explores mediated images of contemporary and historical events. She lives and works in New York City.

I want to address you, reader, if you are in fact still reading and looking. I want to ask you something.

I want to ask you if you’ve ever uploaded an image to google maps streetview? I want to ask you what you do when you’re faced with a camera? I want to ask you who you think was meant to see these images? I want to ask you is now a phrase that’s stuck in my head but I’ve run out of questions to ask you.

I want to ask you if you think that seeing leads to understanding? I am not convinced. And yet it sometimes feels like the entire world hinges on the belief that seeing something will lead to understanding something. There are titles of books I have read parts of or books I have thought about reading that sit on my shelf that seem to take up the issue of vision and knowledge. I find these titles very appealing, but the text inside them very challenging. I want to ask you what shape you think the landscape is, and what shape you think surveillance is? I want to ask you if you’ve ever seen small stones on top of a grave? I want to ask you how you think time works? I want to ask you if you think these images are romantic?

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A Month Ago, 2017 Stills (monoprints) 01:19 minutes video, projected and looped N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

After Goya, (stills), 2018-2019 84 colored pencil drawings on vellum, projection

Battle of Algiers, Scene 1, 2019 Oil on canvas 51" × 69"

RUHEE MAKNOJIA Ruhee Maknojia is a New-York based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, and installation. She was born in Texas in 1993 to immigrant parents from India and Pakistan. Maknojia gradu ated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Visual Arts and Middle Eastern Studies. Her experience of growing up in America in a home that is culturally Indo-Iranian is the lens through which she sees the world. Her work is heavily influenced by the aes thetics and philosophies of the Persian garden and what it means to open the gates between an internal space of serenity and an external world of chaos.

My work and research deals with the concept of the internal and the external, the esoteric and the exoteric space. In Persian philosophy, the garden is often described as a symbolfor paradise on earth, in contrast, the external space (outside the garden) is the wretched and chaos of the world. The garden’s purpose is to provide a place for protected relaxation. My work is trying to create an internal space of serenity, yet it is being constantly shaped and reshaped by the infiltration of the exoteric life. In my process of making, I often imagine my loved ones buried below my feet, while above, my hands are trying to create an incubated space of tranquility.

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Animal verses man before the king of jinn (Garden series), 2018 Oil paint, mixed media Three 96" × 48" wood panels, with attached 10" × 8" wood panels

Rising Sun in the Garden, 2018 Oil paint, mixed media on canvas and wood panel 96" × 72" × 48"

A BOVE

The Grand Debate, 2018 Video animation 05:00 minutes LEFT

Detail, Dancing in the Sun, 2018 Oil on canvas 96" × 150", with attached 10" × 8" wood panels

KATHARINE MARAIS Katharine Marais is a painter, poet, and ballerina. She enjoys working with the music scene, and has directed / danced in a music video for Weezer. She recently did a live dance performance at the Lever House Art Collection. Katharine’s real, literary, and ‘art’ narratives are intertwined, with stories moving from reality, to poems, to dreams, and back. Literature, poetry, and linguistic experimentation unfold online at a place called th_Eroses. Two of the main characters are Laila and El Toro (a flower painter, and a bullfighterturned-cherry-tree). People describe the paintings as “dignified ecstasy”, “feminine”, and colorful. Email me: katharineannemarais@gmail.com

dew-drenched seams whose floppy girlishness belies an elegiac howl for sanctification, for the triumph of Flower v. Fading Light, in an unending battle where beauty always dies, where the poet's pen is the only weapon, the only hope — Roses, queenly, but no less desperate for an offering — a lifetime spent as The Muse has left the rose clinging, lurking in poets' gardens, unfolding silently before the easel among crusted cadmiums and ultramarines, pools of caustic turpentine and linseed. Her feet ache from years on the modelling stand, but her comportment is eternally regal. The Poets have made her corolla a crown, and by their decree she has been canonized. (!) (a full-body shimmer).

www.katharinemarais.xyz

Laila is a passionless painter of flowers. She documents them in cool, objective detail without the slightest poeticization of an amorous corolla. She does not wonder their names. She renders them with a botanist's accuracy in black ink. She paints, files her paintings in the order of their completion, and never looks at them again. Irises, sprouting out the cathedral windows like Leonard Cohen's children of Suzanne children of the morning / leaning out for love / and they will lean that way forever Downright smoochy in lettuce-edged petticoats, florid conch-shells with

In a moment of spontaneous affection, a particular fondness as she flicks through years of memories — a pleasant afternoon perched in Van Gogh's bedroom, the desert hospitality of O'Keefe — yes, they have been kind. Would the moon deign to reflect the light of the sun? The poet's offering has become her lifeblood, her daily bread, her raison d'etre. In Laila's gaze she is the eternally new moon, black and full of possibility, the tide that never rises, the well of ink whose blackness contains innumerable images yet unpainted.

JESSICA MARTINEZ

out inside the mulberry tree, 2018 Archival inkjet print

blue for our lady, 2019 Archival inkjet print

A BOVE

tiny tuna, 2019 Archival inkjet print OPPOSITE

cuerpo de dulces, 2018 Archival inkjet print

JAMES McCRACKEN JR. James McCracken Jr. is an internationally published and exhibited artist and photo grapher based out of Brooklyn, New York. His work explores the trappings of our cultural identities and the disappearing vestiges of communities that he has lived in. Themes of political and social justice, along with investigations of family, religion, and home recur throughout his projects. James' most recent project examines the complexities of the United States prison system and commoditization of prison labor. James’ work has been exhibited in multiple solo exhibitions throughout New York City, and many of the photographs are held in private and public collections.

JEFFREY MERIS Jeffrey Meris was born in Haiti in 1991 and grew up in the Bahamas. Meris received an A.A in Arts and Crafts from the University of The Bahamas and a B.F.A in Sculpture from Temple University in May 2015, after being awarded the prestigious Harry C Moore, Lyford Cay Foundation Art Scholarship in 2012. Meris is the recipient of Popopstudios Junior Residency Prize 2010, Central Bank of The Bahamas Art Competition winner 2013, Guttenberg Arts Artist in Residence 2016, Halle 14 A.I.R 2017, among others. Meris has exhibited and spoken in multiple locations including Port au Prince, New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Leipzig, and Wakanda. Meris is an MFA Candidate (2019) in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Often the material and conceptual processes in the work refract my reality, plaster reproductions of my body that mechanically destroy themselves much like I want to be freed of the violence of interpellation (Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, 2019). In Where the Line is Drawn (2018), I attempt to empty the ocean of its water, fixing the geographical fracture that runs in my familial ancestry. Working across sculpture, video, drawing and performance, I try to find buoyancy. Until the water settles, I’ll float on. Displaced. Wondering. Who am I?

I was displaced at birth. Shot into a violent world that continuously reiterated the who are you? the where are you from? and what are you doing here? I am trying to make sense of it without being cynical or overly didactic but in a way that allows for something more embodied. My practice is an attempt at orbiting these immense questions that keep me up at night; who are you? I was born in Haiti, grew up in the Bahamas and now I am a (constant) migrant living in America, but what does this say about me other than the state of my body even before my existence? When the ripple settles does the ocean remain the same? What happens to the water level when it too is displaced?

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I Am of A People, 2019 Skywriting Photo credit: James Mercer N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

Now You See Me; Now You Don’t (Weight), 2019 Perforated sheet metal, mild steel, hydrocal cast, AC motor, sponge, scale, roofing paper N E X T S P R E A D, R I G H T

Now You See Me; Now You Don’t (Installation View), 2019 Perforated sheet metal, mild steel, hydrocal cast, AC motors, roofing paper, various found objects

DANTE MIGONE-OJEDA Dante Migone-Ojeda is a Latinx artist living and working in New York City. His work responds directly to the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, in particular her book Borderlands. Through this lens, he explores issues of liminality, identity, and translation as they pertain to the Latinx diaspora. Trained as a printmaker, his work explores a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and new media. He received his BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently completing his MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in New York.

Marginalized existence requires naming as a means of owning, transforming, and creating space. Poetry, and by extension art, name the imaginary and thus create radical possibilities. My practice employs this framework, responding to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa; a formative queer Latinx feminist thinker, activist, and poet; to conceptualize and give form to an experience forged in the places between. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, printmaking, and poetry, I build upon the themes in her book Borderlands, particularly her ontology of the Acquired, Inherited, and Imposed facets of identity. By probing the inherent tensions of these subject positions, represented in both my work and life by the rural landscape, urban life, and the history and traumas of the immigrant other, I create a visual language for the contingent identity of the US born Latinx. Moreover, I focus on the dialectic of rigidity and flexibility, and

its relationship to code-switching. My transformation of charged materials, such as chains, concrete, and wax, embodies this code-switching, carving out new space for Latinx identity independent of, but in relation to, the hegemonic borders around it.

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Untitled (Blossom), 2019 Etching 20" × 28" N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

Cabello, 2019 Chain, resin 84" × 72" × 4" N E X T S P R E A D, R I G H T

Espina, 2019 Chain, resin 96" × 24" × 24"

BAT-AMI RIVLIN Bat-Ami Rivlin (b.1991) is a sculpture and mixed media artist based in New York City. Her work focuses on found materials that explore bodily functionalities in different social and artificial spaces. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as David & Schweitzer Contemporary, NARS Foundation Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Time Square Space, and Knockdown Center. Rivlin is the recipient of awards such as the SVA Bronze Casting grant at the MANA Contemporary Ben Keating Foundry, the David Berg Foundation Scholarship, and the Artis Fund Scholarship. Her work was featured in publications such as ArtSlant, Peripheral Vision Arts, and BTR Today.

and material as they perform their broken practical purposes. The used objects retain aspects of their manufactured forms, thus pointing to the process of deterioration that products and bodies undergo. The expression of material exhaustion and decline in my work, usually shunned from social spaces such as the home, reasserts a material reality, and points to the inevitable progression of age. The material, slowly overtaking the identity of the object, eats away at the utilitarian form, leaving it in the in between space—not inanimate nor alive.

I construct ‘bodies’ out of scavenged furniture, home appliances, and other common products. These objects, which we experience on a daily basis: a mattress, bathtub, or sofa; are tailored for the human body and thus inherit some of its properties. The objects intertwine and act upon each other; constraining, puncturing, pushing— probing their material forms. The forms investigate their own ‘flesh’, exposing their inner structural configurations and fillings; springs contorting out of a mattress, foam slipping out of a sofa. In their failed attempts to perform bodily functions they become amalgamates of material domesticity, assemblages of fragmented utilities, unraveling in form

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Untitled (Sink, fan, garbage bags, towel), 2019 Found object sculpture 15" × 44" × 51"

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Untitled (Fence, foam, springs, LED, ballast, chord, polyfil), 2018 Found object sculpture 40" × 75" × 100" LEFT

Untitled (Bed frame, tarp, duct tape, foam), 2019 Found object sculpture 51" × 47" × 36" O P P O S I T E PA G E

Untitled (Mattress, foam, wire), 2018 Found object sculpture 35" × 35" × 25"

EMMA SCHWARTZ Emma Schwartz was born in 1992 in Toronto, Canada and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and is currently in her second year of the MFA program at Columbia University. Most of the paintings I have made in the last year have low relief figures built up on the surface. Lately I have been making rubbings of the reliefs which then turn up in other paintings. For myself, in the studio, there is a threshold between the familiar and unfamiliar. I am looking for the membrane between the two, the surface tension of the container that separates them.

Balmy Party, 2019 Pencil on paper 11" × 8.5"

Untitled (figure study), 2019 Pencil on paper 11" × 8.5"

Visitor, 2019 Pencil on paper 11" × 8.5"

Goodnight Cap, 2019 Pencil on paper 11" × 8.5"

PAULINE SHAW Pauline Shaw is an artist working in sculpture, installation, and video. She was born in Kirkland, Washington and grew up between Asia and America. In 2011, she received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She currently lives and works in New York City. www.pauline-shaw.com hi.pauline.shaw@gmail.com

JACQUELINE SILBERBUSH Jacqueline Silberbush (b. 1989) is an American artist living and working in New York. Silberbush uses a range of traditional photographic practices to characterize coming-of-age and the development of self-awareness. Her work has been exhibited in New York and abroad, at locations that include the Jewish Museum, the TANG Museum, and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. Portfolios of her work have appeared in PDN, Vice, National Geographic, and the Washington Post. In addition, she has spoken about her work at the International Center of Photography and on NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show, with Bruce Davidson. JacquelineSilberbush.com

This project is an ode to life— this messy, disgusting life that both suffocates us and gives forth beauty in equal shares. I am showing you these images because I have seen in them emotions I have felt. They assemble real moments into a fictional narrative that tells a true story. I hope the work here will give you a taste of some of the many ways life has elated, wounded and baffled me.

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HINDA WEISS Hinda Weiss is a photographer and video artist based in New York. Her works are compositions of landscapes that are charged with local histories and merge places and times into non-existing yet very familiar environments. Weiss has received numerous awards and prizes including the Outset Contemporary Young International Artist Award and the Artis Exhibition Grant. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and video screenings in venues such as the Tel Aviv Museum and Palais de Tokyo and can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, The Shpilman Institute, and other private and public collections.

museum is a unique time capsule of an early 20th century European historical exhibit. Using techniques of collage and video adaptation, Weiss rearranges the museum’s exhibits into a reconstructed landscape of the Valley of Decision, the Tomb of Zechariah and Silwan neighborhood — utilizing the glaring bright Middle East sun to inscribe in stone an imagined dystopian image that resonates to shattered visions of the past.

Among Graves and Ruins, multi-channel video installation, 2019 Across an unmarked border, in a building created by colonial ambition, archaeological findings expose relations of power and broken dreams. A long wooden table with animal bones, a large storage jar with scrab (6 in number), a jug and a bronze toggle pin — may have stood in a niche or served as a tombstone. A Blessing for pardon on Judgement day. Before Common Era. Jerusalem. For Among Graves and Ruins, Weiss filmed in and around the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, formerly called the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Established by the British Mandate in 1938, with funding from the American John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the

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Among Graves and Ruins, 2019 Video frame

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TOP

BOT TOM

After the Deserts Goat, 2017

5846, 5851 and 5852 vs. the

Installation view,

Population and Immigration

Herzliya Museum of

Authority, 2018

Contemporary Art

Installation view, Ludlow 38, New York City

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Postcard from Tel Aviv, 2015 Video frame

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KIYAN WILLIAMS Kiyan Williams is a multidisciplinary artist from Newark, New Jersey working fluidly across performance, painting, sculpture, and video. Kiyan earned a BA from Stanford University and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, and more. Williams was selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter and is among the inaugural cohort of artists commissioned by The Shed, a new art space in NYC. They were invited to re-perform Bruce Nauman’s “Wall-Floor Positions” at MoMA and PS1 for the artist's recent retrospective. Currently, Williams is a fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum.

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Dirt Eater, 2019 Sculpture Soil, clay, steel, patina, bricks, wax, kanekalon, incense, mycelium, wood and steel armature 72" × 36" × 36" Photo: Kyle Knodell Installation view, In Practice: Other Objects, SculptureCenter, New York, 2019 N E X T S P R E A D, C LO C K W I S E FROM TOP LEF T

kiyanwilliams.com

Dirt Eater (Detail), 2019 Sculpture Soil, clay, steel, patina, bricks,

My recent body of work unearths diasporic histories and trans/gressive subjectivities. I excavate soil and debris from sites of loss within the Black Diaspora: the ruins of slave castles and sugar plantations, the last addresses of my great grandmother who migrated from St. Croix to Harlem in 1934, and a low-income residential building in West Harlem demolished by Columbia University. To borrow the words of Saidiya Hartman, “I am intent on tracing an itinerary of destruction.” Working primarily in sculpture, video, and perfor mance, I am attracted to materials that are silent witnesses to the historical and ongoing dispossession of Black people in America.

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wax, kanekalon, incense, mycelium, wood and steel armature 72" × 36" × 36" Photo: Kyle Knodell Installation view, In Practice: Other Objects, SculptureCenter, New York, 2019 Patron Saint of the Boy Girls, Banji Cunts, and HoodFags, 2018 Sculpture Soil, human hair, wooden beads, candles, incense, moss, mycelium 60" × 36" × 24" Dirt Eater, 2019 Video Still HD Color Video with sound 07:29 minutes

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XIRIN Xirin is a performance artist whose work reclaims romantic tropes, emphasizing the ways idealistic notions of attachment cause pain. She often uses the form of the duet to explore how larger social power structures locate themselves within intimate relationships. Recently, Xirin has performed at The ‪Jewish Museum‬, ‪Knockdown Center‬, and ‪Pioneer Works‬. Her writing is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, Vestoj, and PAPER magazine. Alongside Kembra Pfahler, she frequently organizes performance art events in New York, known as Incarnata Social Club. xirin.info

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Chambre, 2018 Esteban Jefferson & Xirin Collaborative 35mm photograph B ELOW

Hope Eats the Soul, 2019 Xirin & Sebastian Live performance and film Photograph by Antonio Barrera

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COCO YOUNG Coco Young (b. 1989) is a French-American artist from NYC and Marseille.

When I was in first grade I visited Marie Madelene’s grotto in the Sainte-Baume Mountain with my school. I went back there last summer with my mother. We got into an argument at the bottom of the mountain and proceeded to climb to the top without speaking. I remember the wet stalactites slowly dripping onto the floor of the cave. There is only one dry stone in there, the one that Marie Madeleine would sleep on. She allegedly lived in this grotto for the last thirty years of her life. Like many New Yorkers I take the subway everyday. It’s a substantial part of my life, the space in-between where I was and where I’m going. The NYC subway is a gentle giant that is neglected and falling apart. The other day a mysterious drop fell on my head from the ceiling of the 14th street and 6th avenue station. If you look up in many subway stations, you can see pollution stalactites that seem to be simultaneously expanding and melting over time. I have some recollections of being breastfed: the warmth, the metallic taste (I think I was breastfed until pretty late). I learned about Remus and Romulus in elementary school. In Marseille they were a big deal because the city once belonged to the Roman Empire. They were kept alive by a She-Wolf who breastfed them. At the time I didn’t understand the dif ference between myths and history and

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actually believed that Remus and Romulus survived because of the wolf’s milk. It is a fact, however, that Remus and Romulus went on to birth western civilization that is now, as we know, falling into ruins.

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A YOUNG YU A young Yu is a Korean American artist based in New York City. She works primarily in site-specific installation, sculpture, and film. The artist is interested in the personal and cultural translation of the Korean diaspora through fictional re-imaginations of ritualistic practices and new ways of inhabiting space. The artist explores the relationship between the sacred and play and is invested in methods of translating visceral experiences into a cinematic language.

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Floating Hanbok, 2018 Organic material, plexiglass, resin, foam, glass, pigment, urethane rubber, silicone, fabric, cement Dimensions variable N E X T S P R E A D, L EF T

Norigae Series, 2019 Organic material, wool, norigae, resin, foam, glass, pigment, Korean silk, beads Dimensions variable N E X T S P R E A D, R I G H T

Norigae Series (Detail), 2019 Organic material, wool, norigae, resin, foam, glass, pigment, Korean silk, beads Dimensions variable

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MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN There is no greater pleasure for me as Dean than attending the thesis events for the four programs that comprise the School of the Arts — Visual Arts, Writing, Theatre, and Film. The School of the Arts offers our students the depth and breadth of Columbia University’s intellectual traditions, as well as access to New York City’s multifarious cultural events. We invite you to join us for a theatre production, film screening, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, theatrical reading, or a visual arts exhibition such as this — a spectacular showcase for our graduating MFA students working in all forms of visual production. The Thesis exhibition in Visual Arts is the culmination of two years of hard work. It is the moment at which the students (soon to be alumni) choose how to represent their creative time at the School of the Arts. Twenty-nine artists will graduate this month. Their work will be varied, unexpected, at times profound, and full of exuberance. We are thrilled that the Thesis Show will once again take place at the Lenfest Center for the Arts. We hope you will visit the show, as well as attend the varied events that take place at this site throughout the year. I know you will find access to this new work exhilarating. Carol Becker Dean of Faculty Columbia University School of the Arts

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MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR OF THE VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM On behalf of the faculty of the Visual Arts Program I welcome you to the 2019 MFA Thesis Exhibition. Our thanks go to Jennifer Mock, Interim Director and Chief Curator of the Wallach Gallery; the entire staff of the Wallach; Lauren Weigel, General Manager of the Lenfest Center for the Arts; the Lenfest staff; and Mary McGee, Executive Director, The Forum. Special thanks are owed to our intrepid curator, Regine Basha, for returning this year to guide our students through the process of mounting such an ambitious show. In Visual Art we have an amazing program administration and staff who tirelessly dedicate their care and attention to our students: Andrew Brehm, Safety Coordinator; Nathan Catlin, Neiman Studio and Project Manager; Peter Clough, Assistant Director of Visual Arts Instruc tional Technology; Carrie Gundersdorf, Director of Academic Administration; Frank Heath, Safety Manager; Cary Hulbert, Assistant Studio Manager, LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Kai McBride, Photography Facilities Manager; Laura Mosquera, Manager of Academic Administration; Marie Tennyson, Associate Director and Gallery Manager, LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Rider Urena, Senior Manager of Visual Arts Facilities; Claire Valdez, Program Assistant; and Patrice Washington, Prentis Hall Facilities Manager. At the School of the Arts our great thanks go to Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty, Gavin Browning, Director of Public Programs and Engagement; Sarah Congress, Executive Assistant to the Deans, Faculty Services Coordinator; Jeffrey James Keyes, Assistant Director, Student Affairs; Laila Maher, Dean of Student and Alumni

Affairs; Christina Rumpf, Director of Communications; Trenton Pollard, Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs and the Artists' Resource Center; Peter Vaughan, Director of Motion Picture and Information Technology, and Jana Wright, Dean of Academic Administration and Planning. Most importantly, we thank our students. Without you there would be no exhibition and we would not be gathered here today. We have been through a lot together in the last two years. Your perseverance has been an inspiration to all of us. It has been a privilege working with you, learning from you, and to trying our hardest to support you in all that you aspire to do and all that you deserve. We pledge to continue this support now that you are leaving our program and joining us as colleagues in the field. Yours, Matthew Buckingham Associate Professor of Professional Practice Chair, Visual Arts Columbia University School of the Arts

ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF THE ARTS Columbia University School of the Arts awards the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts, and Writing and the Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies; it also offers an interdisci plinary program in Sound Art. The School is a thriving, diverse community of talented, visionary, and committed artists from around the world and a faculty comprised of acclaimed and internationally renowned artists, film and theatre directors, writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, playwrights, producers, critics, and scholars. In 2015, the School marked the 50th Anniversary of its founding. In 2017, the School opened the Lenfest Center for the Arts, a multi-arts venue designed as a hub for the presen tation and creation of art across disciplines on the University’s new Manhattanville campus. The Lenfest hosts exhibitions, performances, screenings, symposia, readings, and lectures that present new, global voices and perspectives, as well as an exciting, publicly accessible home for Columbia’s Miriamand Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

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VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THE ARTS The Visual Arts Program attracts emerging artists of unusual promise from around the world. They comprise a vigorous community, working alongside an exceptional faculty at a world-renowned research institution in New York City. Contemporary art has become increasingly interdisciplinary. To that end, the Visual Arts Program offers an MFA degree in Visual Arts rather than in specific media. The two-year studio program, taught by internationally celebrated artists, allows students to pursue digital media, drawing, installation, painting, performance, photography, printmaking, sculpture and video art. Visit arts.columbia.edu/visual-arts.

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ABOUT THE CURATOR Regine Basha is a curator, audio producer and writer. Since the late 1990s Basha has curated for contemporary art institutions as well as independently producing projects for private and public spaces nationally and internationally. Her exhibitions, public projects, and writing is mostly chronicled on bashaprojects.com. She is also the producer of her family audio-archive, Tuning Baghdad for Clocktower Radio. Basha’s inventive approach often has her working closely with artists to consider the very specific context and format for the development of new work. This may take the form of narrative dinner projects with Michael Rakowitz (Dar Al Suhl), commissioned sound installations in public spaces throughout Marfa (The Marfa Sessions/Ballroom Marfa), or a large-scale group exhibition in a heritage building in the Bronx (When you cut into the present, the future leaks out / No Longer Empty). In the past decade, she has devel oped exhibitions and writing on artists such as Daniel Neumann, Nina Katchadourian, Paul Pfeiffer, Basim Magdy, Hope Ginsburg, Dario Robleto, Stephen Vitiello and Daniel Bozhkov among others. For the past two years, she has been Director of the Pioneer Works Residency, most recently she joined the Civitella Ranieri Foundation as Senior Program Officer. Basha sits on the Executive Board of Art Matters and is graduate of Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

THE MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH ART GALLERY The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery advances Columbia University’s historical, critical, and creative engagement with the visual arts. Serving as both a laboratory and a forum, The Wallach Art Gallery offers opportunities for curatorial practice and discourse, while bridging the diverse approaches to the arts at the University with a welcome broader public. We present projects that: are organized by graduate students and faculty in Art History & Archaeology or by other Columbia scholars; focus on the contemporary artists of our campus and communities; or offer new scholarship on University special collections. Established in 1986, The Wallach Art Gallery is the University's premier visual arts space. The gallery has presented critically acclaimed exhibitions, and is a platform for a dynamic range of programming and publications that make lasting contributions to new scholarship. The Wallach Art Gallery also animates other university spaces as opportunity arises. Always free and open to the public, the Wallach Art Gallery operates in close relationship to the Department of Art History and Archaeology, School of the Arts, and the University Libraries (particularly Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library), which hold Columbia University’s collections.

DONORS Columbia University School of the Arts is supported in part by contributions from alumni and friends of the arts. These gifts provide student fellowships, educational programming and awards. For more information or to make a contribution to the School of the Arts, please contact: Roberta W. Albert Associate Dean for Development 212-854-7724 ra481@columbia.edu

The Visual Arts Program would like to extend special thanks to its contributors, and recognize those for whom fellowships and awards have been named: Anonymous (3) Bruce Antelman Artis Gary L. Bandy Ramona Bronkar Bannayan Alan J. Barnes Alexander E. Barnett Professor Jackie Battenfield Michael B. Bogdanow Renee Borkow Naomi F. Bossom Chester A. Boterf, Jr. Peter A. Boysen Dr. Kerstin Carlvant-Boysen Joseph B. Breed IV Professor Susanna J. Coffey Jacob Arthur Collins/ The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund Katharine Ann Dufault H. Hartley Platt DuPont Gail Ellison Candia Fisher Karen Hesse Flatow The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

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Lee and Maria Friedlander Family Foundation B. Joyce Frazier Norman M. Galinsky Allison Ginsberg Nancy Gregory Claire A. Heimarck Taryn Brooke Holloway Gail J. Hood Henry Hood Philip H. Isles, Jr. Eric Javits Family Foundation Susan R. Johnson Caryl Roberts Kahn Edward J. Kimball Dong Kingman Dennis Scott Klainberg The Kraus Family Foundation Emily Fisher Landau Leonard A. Lauder Dwight E. Lee Robert Lehman Foundation Alexandra Lerman Toby Devan Lewis/The Toby Fund Madeline P. Long Mariposa Foundation Eddie Samuel Massey Nicola Lopez Matthias Lukens Raymond T. & Ann T. Mancini Family Foundation Trust Penelope Manzella Meredithe Mastrella Katherine Mary McVety Barbara Meise Professor Elizaveta V. Meksin Laura Mosquera LeRoy Neiman Foundation Professor Aliza K. Nisenbaum J. Michael Parish Jonathan Prince, D.D.S. Gerald M. Rosberg Arthur S. Rosenbaum Lauren Rosenkranz Sheryl Rubinstein

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Debora Gilbert Ryan Judith Schiff Henry and Peggy Schleiff Family Foundation Shelly Silver The SJS Charitable Trust Diana T. Soorikian Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation Robert Elbert Swigert Sally Wilson Tippman Richard L. Tooke Alexandra Van Sandy Walker Ellen Webb Joan L. Weber Stephen Whittlesey Andrew Wilson Hon Chung Woo Andrea Woodner/The A. Woodner Fund Richard Wright Quan Zhou Xianling Zhou Ann Obringer Zipkin Named Awards and Fellowships ArtIs Fellows Ramona Bronkar Bannayan Fellowship Fund George Raimes Beach Fund for Graphic Arts David Berg Foundation Fund Martin Birnbaum Fellowship Faber Birren Fellowships Donald C. Brace Student Loan Fund Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship and Prize Lucas T. Carlson Memorial Fund Quinta Carolina Fund Helen R. Elser Fellowship The Andrew Fisher Fellowship Morty Frank Traveling Fellowship Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship Fund Ellen Gelman Endowed Fellowship Jacques and Natasha Gelman Fellowship Fund Herbert S. Germaise Endowed Fellowship Marshall Glasier Endowed Fellowship for the Study of Drawing D’Arcy Haymen Fellowships

Dong Kingman Fellowships Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award Sun Liangang Arts Fellowship Edward Mazzella, Jr. Endowed Fellowship Morrocco/Mancini Family Fellowship Fund LeRoy Neiman Endowed Fellowship LeRoy and Janet Neiman Fellowship Fund Helen Hartley Mead Platt Prize Marguerite P. Roche Endowed Fellowship Joan Sovern Endowed Sculpture Award Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Fellowships Three Arts Club Endowed Fellowship TOMS Scholarship Visual Arts Graduate Fellowship

VISUAL ARTS FACULTY & STAFF Full-time Faculty Gregory Amenoff, Matthew Buckingham (Chair), Gabriel Camnitzer (2018-19), Dana DeGiulio (2018-19), Katherine Hubbard (2018-19), Jon Kessler, Nicola López, Miya Masaoka, Leeza Meksin, Aliza Nisenbaum, Shelly Silver, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Vu-Daniel Mentors Mark Dion, David Humphrey, Michael Joo, Ralph Lemon, Suzanne McClelland, Matthew Ritchie, Kiki Smith, Sable Elyse Smith, Rona Yefman, Craig Zammiello Graduate Adjunct Faculty Shirly Bahar, Jennifer Coates, Susanna Coffey, Lizzy De Vita, Ajay Kurian, Ken Okiishi, Pamela Sneed, Sara VanDerBeek Visiting Critics Elia Alba, Yevgeniya Baras, Michael Berryhill, Lucas Blalock, Mónica de la Torre, Liz Deschenes, Abigail DeVille, Rochelle Feinstein, Moko Fukuyama, Lia Gangitano, Alan Gilbert, Ben Hagari, Peter Halley, Josephine Halvorson, Marc Handelman, Maren Hassinger, Chrissie Iles, Tomashi Jackson, Cheyenne Julien, Tom Kalin, Lucy Kim, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leigh Ledare, Sam Lewitt, Liz Magic Laser, Dean Moss, Sarah Oppenheimer, taisha paggett, Karthik Pandian, Kembra Pfahler, Sara Reisman, Em Rooney, Josh Siegel, Jamie Sterns, Lumi Tan, Lynne Tillman, Jess Wilcox, Didier William, Andrea Zittel Visual Arts Staff Andrew Brehm, Interim Safety Manager Nathan Catlin, Master Printer and Studio Manager of the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies

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Peter Clough, Assistant Director, Visual Arts Instructional Technology Carrie Gundersdorf, Director of Academic Administration Carolyn Hulbert, Assistant Studio Manager of the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies Kai McBride, Photography Facilities Manager Laura Mosquera, Manager of Academic Administration Marie Tennyson, Associate Director and Gallery Manager of the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies Rider Urena, Senior Manager of Visual Arts Facilities & Prentis Hall Claire Valdez, Program Assistant Patrice Washington, Manager of Prentis Hall Facilities

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Class of 2019 Thesis Catalogue

Articles inside

COCO YOUNG

KIYAN WILLIAMS

KATHARINE MARAIS

HINDA WEISS

BAT-AMI RIVLIN

JEFFREY MERIS

RUHEE MAKNOJIA

KATE LIEBMAN

SUSANNA KOETTER

NICOLE BURKO

ANNETTE HUR

RAFAEL DOMENECH

NOAH JACKSON

From the curator

VIKRAM DIVECHA

PRISCILLA ALEMAN