extraordinary circumstances, during a global pandemic no less! I begin by underscoring the highly challenging and completely unexpected circumstances that have defined your graduate experience because I want to remind you that these circumstances are evidence of your determination and unwavering commitment to your practice and to each other, which will no doubt continue to guide you… but toward what end? Graduate school can be a grueling, somewhat introspective, and at times lonely experience. From a faculty’s perspective it’s about challenging students to critically interrogate their practices and themselves in order to better understand their personal stake in the content and to shape the work’s relationship with audiences. Success requires a surrender and willingness to trust the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing exactly what you are doing. By passing through this rigorous process that we call graduate school students inevitably transform their studio work. Or as Nico Lima would describe it they Compost it! Nico’s studio art practice (and perhaps his entire life) is about composting, a process that maintains the life force of dirt. Nico knows it is also a way of surviving the devastating effects of late-stage capitalism. Ultimately for Nico, art is a collaborative process of sustaining life across species and ecosystems. Like composting, art school is about putting something back into the environment of culture and back into the body of the artist, in order to make both more sustainable. Nadia Martinez’s skill at controlling materials and transforming them into graceful delicate forms of expression has been awe-inspiring to witness. Needless to say, surrendering this control did not come easy
ction of form is celebrated so that the life force of matter can ased and shared across a terrain. It’s about creating the ons for generosity, which is the new aesthetic form that Nadia ating in her practice.
lass of 22, aka Marabuntas collective, we celebrate your gence from this process of surrender, of decay and rmation, and we can’t wait to see what sprouts from your compost.
audience’s sake, let me offer a few words about this unusual ame Marabuntas Collective. Being the researcher I am, I t up and discovered Marabuntas is a term for large social yes large stinging social wasps! In fact, that does describe Linane’s swift but stinging interventions into patriarchal es that operate just below the radar so as to be tolerated, and under the proverbial rug. A wasp sting creates a big red mark that is difficult to ignore likewise Maiyan’s posts s calling out the social inequities of patriarchal behaviors. As s stickers suggest composting is a dynamic process and what uces is directly influenced by what you put into the mix!
m Marabuntas also refers to another group of insects, a rmy of ants on the move, eating anything and everything in its hat sure sounds like Tori Jackson in the library, consuming fter tome to enhance her understanding of critical race theory roots of white supremacy, particularly as it has infiltrated education system. Tori is the unusual ceramicist who believes kage and uses knowledge as a tool to reshape individuals, onal structures, and vessels alike.
ntas is also a slang term that refers to an “ill-tempered
continue to circulate within the domestic spheres of families, effectively perpetuating white privilege generations after generation. Marabuntas: No more obedient good girls please! Marabuntas is also the name chosen for a software that was developed to allow anonymous person-to-person communication. It was specifically developed to ensure freedom of speech and protect against censorship. Syed Hosain’s paintings are directed toward a similar outcome. His dramatic seemingly abstract surfaces invite a closer look were details of the politics of war torn regions and the unfixed histories and Western domination of the Middle East appear. To be clear Syed’s work does not preach, it creates cracks in the thick surface of the global West, where a different Islamic future becomes possible. Marabuntas Collective a graduation speech would not be complete without some sage Advice, so I have three points: First, Use your turn signals! They will let the people around you know where you are trying to go. If they can, most people will help you to get where you want to go or at the very least get out of your way. The world is rich with potential and paths that we could never imagine or plan for, and when you let the world know where you want it to go you unleash this rich potential of support and assistance that I for one believe defines the human species. Secondly, prepare to fail…yes I know you have heard this NUGGET at VCFA many times before. We often talk about failure as an opportunity for growth, change and insight because if you’re brave enough you can look into your failures and catch a glimmer of your future.
es it get such a bad rap out there in the rest of the world? ere’s the rub, not all failures you encounter will be your own. in the underbelly of these other failures is the loss and ointment that grows out of promises of success that never uit. These failures will steal your time and attention. Your lodged in your creative spirit, and this is a fierce and powerful but it is also quite fragile. In fact creativity needs to be hat fragile in order to remain vulnerable and open. Stay ble but strong in yourself and with each other.
as my colleague Dont Rhine so powerfully reminded us earlier ek, VCFA is an incredibly supportive community that can be ed toward great accomplishments. As a graduate you now to a network of alumni that spans the globe. Reach out, stay ted, take care of each other and you will take care of yourself rocess.
Marie Shurkus Faculty, VCFA MFA in Visual Art
DANIEL NELL
lly scripted spaces. How might these messages have shaped ntities, sense of possibility, and relationships with others? s the aesthetic of wealth distracted us from seeing and nting injustice?
ctice is guided by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ advice to he camera around and put the lens on the white lived nce, expose toxic whiteness and make it visible.” The artwork ructs and re-contextualizes scarves, wallpaper, silver cups, g books, and architecture to encourage audiences to see the uths that simmer beneath the surface of everyday objects. art pieces reveal how possessions and appearances give white ed people a false sense of superiority that damages others as themselves.
s on an oversized 8x8 foot organza scarf look luxurious from nce, but horrifying up close, prompting the question: Does repetition also normalize ugly behaviors that become ed? If so, how do we get each other to identify and question A Damask wallpaper containing icons of white cupid garden ents appears decorative at first. But for those willing to see it, miliar icons participate in arrogant, violent and self destructive hite people hide behind innocent surfaces and get away with the time.
mments made by white privileged women in March 2020 “Does the cleaning lady still need social distancing?” are cut r the mouth of white paper Covid masks - when does rity become more of a priority than compassion, empathy
dark emotions such as rage, devastation, eroticism to the point where it destroys them? Mothers pass on the suppression of feelings and privileged identityformation to the next generation of curious children, eager to please, who soak them up like a sponge. How are trusting children even more vulnerable to internalized narratives in design objects? A typical child’s coloring and word-tracing book encourages viewers to form their own conclusions about how children learn violence and white privilege, perpetuating systems of inequity. Museum display cases contain silver baby cups as artifacts of the ‘White American Aristocracy’ species. Formal text labels describe how their owners’ cruel actions were hidden by beautiful appearances. How did the babies grow up that way? This installation invites a critique of how our cultural institutions have overlooked the truth under the facade of our culture, and the patrons of our ‘great works of art’ have often been exempt from accountability. My artwork invites others to join me in conversation with the ghosts under the surface of our art and design world.
Patterns Wallpaper, 2022
, 2020 Voices, 2020
her artwork, teaching, and anti-racist activism have been central to her management of arts education programs in CBO’s, after school programs, high schools, colleges and museums. In 1999, she published a critique of diversity initiatives at RISD and peer institutions for her Masters Thesis (Arts Administration at Teachers College, Columbia), for which she was invited to serve on their RISD’s Board of Trustees for 6 years. After managing education programs at CooperHewitt Museum, she directed a national nonprofit for urban teens called Sweat Equity Enterprises (SEE) with hip hop entrepreneur Marc Ecko while completing a doctoral fellowship at NYU focusing on the connection between creativity and resilience in adolescents. After serving as Vice President of Public Allies (founded by Michelle Obama), the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in 2015 Nell returned to teaching art, design and art history at an independent high school in her neighborhood so that she could focus on her artwork and publishing a book. Throughout this time, Nell’s art practice has included photography, painting, artist books and installation. She has exhibited in Washington, DC, Providence RI, and New York City galleries such as Tastes Like Chicken, Trestle Gallery, Yaf Gallery, Clover Gallery, produced over 20 art commissions, and her work is in several private collections. She has been selected for residencies such as Diversity & Museums with Claudine Brown (1998), Kipp Retreat in Bali (2014), and the American Academy in Rome (2019). Nell has been invited to speak about issues of diversity in design at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), National Art Education Association (NAEA), RISD, Cooper-Hewitt Museum and the Aspen Institute. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two teenage kids and a large community of chosen family.
HOSAIN SYED
Destiny, 2021
Syed draws on real and imagined narratives of the present and colonial histories. Process and material driven, Hosain builds up rich surfaces on canvas creating a tension between recognition and obliteration. He also works into found surfaces, like old encyclopedias and history books, reworking images with additive and subtractive layers of paint, obscuring factual information and imagery to highlight multiple readings and meanings of text and image. Hosain’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Walker Art Center, Jack Tilton gallery NYC, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Hosain received a BA and an MA from the University of Karachi. Hosain is also an assistant professor of painting at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. Syed Hosain was born in Pakistan and lives and works in Bloomington, MN.
ACKSON
TORI
h surfaces, chemical reactions, transformative process, and g material. A forgiving material that accepts the pressure put and redirects itself organically. Demonstrated by the pressure of ms closing over a lump of clay. As the distance between hands , the clay jets forward, spreading beyond the hands’ edges. the forcing surface the clay will choose which direction to curl, if o itself, as the material often rolls over the edge and holds onto d it just escaped. With clay’s forgiveness, you can also modify re applied on the walls to save wheel-thrown work seconds before In class, I refer to this as the ‘emergency wobble’, where the clay you a signal that your direction is causing the clay to lose control. nter of the clay has shifted, and the potter must decide to release e or hold strong support.
s many ways to tell you something is not progressing correctly, our bodies can send warning signs to our brains that we are ing proper care. Also similar to our makeup as humans, clay can its own flaws only to be revealed when things have progressed e point of repair. As humans living through a pandemic, as soon as on a call, ‘How are you?’ is one of the first questions. Many of us ur standard reply that we are doing fine, acknowledging the n as casual conversation instead of a moment to decipher the of experiencing compounding traumas. As both a student and or entering my third pandemic year, I began to question the toll pidly moving through fear, grief, and trauma takes on all of us. I how we can recover from deep rooted illness, and if we can ommunally?
aker I can generally state that I feel something during the making s. In creation there is an exchange between myself and the m, and neither artist nor material remain as we were before. I he entirety of my graduate program exploring this exchange and o describe it. Occasionally this involved meditating with clay, l manipulation to the breaking point of both body and clay, g a range of emotions to determine my touch, listening to clay as I nd studying its changes when my presence is removed. This AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAA
and if they would also feel something. Though the COVID-19 pandemic shut off access to typical exhibitions, I
understood the value in continuing to make art for the presence of future spaces and audiences. But after four semesters of virtual learning and
exhibiting, I found myself unable to keep making and writing about things I hoped to happen, concepts I hoped would be understood, or experiences I hoped people would have. My expectations for the future have been crushed so many times that I’m forgetting to feel what is actually
happening in the present. I struggled to ground myself amidst the chaos.
In preparation for what would be the first and final in-person exhibition of
my graduate experience, I returned to what clay, myself, and my audience might have in common; a need for the ground.
In my current body of work, Please, Touch the Art, I invite the audience to become participant, co-creator, and co-learner of the various ways in which clay and objects can meet us in ground and in our feelings. The
recliner from my studio sits central in the gallery as a homing device,
where a ceramic weighted blanket awaits to sooth a body. A cluster of
handheld clay forms is available for observation or to be carried around
the gallery as fidget objects that improve active viewing. The objects can
also be placed on receiving piece, a base of clay made to support various compositions of handheld forms. A selection of sculptures, bag of bags,
sit on top of drawing paper next to a heat gun and various carving tools. The audience is encouraged to touch, break, melt, draw with, smell, and reform a clay body that I developed with the intention of continued
manipulation and varied physical form. A pillar of the gallery displays
speculari 2, the second piece in a series whose title means to look around. I installed this work to reflect the artwork of all of the other artists in the gallery. A look around at what we collectively brought to show, from two years of hard work, intense living, collective creation and survival.
l Test Tiles, 2021 Touch the Art (receiving piece), 2022
d 2 and Untitled 3, 2021
Comfort, 2020 Touch the Art (bag of bags), 2022
James Madison University in 2017, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a concentration in Ceramics. Tori will graduate from Vermont College of Fine Arts in February 2022, with a M.F.A. in Visual Art. She is a licensed K-12 art teacher and has been teaching all-levels ceramic courses for four years. Tori recently completed a term on the Board of Directors for the National Art Education Association, presented at five national art education conventions, and published numerous articles in NAEA News. Their artwork has been exhibited in Charlottesville, Crozet, and Harrisonburg, Virginia. Featuring a new clay that Tori developed, her current body of work explores the relationship between objects, senses, and the moment of encounter.
NICHOLAS
LIMA
and consumer culture. Systems of fertility, decay and transformation are central themes in my work, including the use of seeds, soil, fungi, and vegetal elements. My research is nourished by a fascination with compost on all levels: biologic, economic and social. Composting is an ethics of collaboration, reinvesting waste into renewal; converting byproducts into dynamic ecology. I think of seed as currency, or as an idea of value worth exchange. Seeds hold cultural and ecological value, but their true value can not be stockpiled, only broadcast. I want my work to feed conversations and actions towards generating new, (Com)post-capitalist models for society and nature.
ent images:
f Contents, 2022
printmaking and installation using living materials, such as worms, molds, and germinating seeds. His work investigates regional cuisine, terroir, agricultural infrastructures and sustainable models for living. Nico received his BFA from UMass Dartmouth in 2005, and his MFA from VCFA in 2022. Nicholas teaches printmaking at the Littleton Studio School, in Littleton, New Hampshire, and exhibits throughout the North East. When not working in the studio, Nico can be found hiking and sketching in the woods, or planting fruit trees on his one acre permaculture homestead.
MAIYAN LINANE
ge to define these experiences. The work explores -identified accounts of online harassment and violence. e towards women in the technological age is now ed by the omnipresence and hyper-speed of technology ering it at gigabytes per second. In my piece, The Sticker , I examine exchanges of online interactions to expose a violence within this particular language and behavior women. Screenshots capture messages documenting flashing, slut-shamming, stalking, rape threats, revenge arassing, abusive and sexual explicit content. The images dence of violence. Even in examining the use of flattering ge: when the recipient did not respond with gratitude, the ge changed to insults, name-calling, or even threats. The became an accessory to the violence. Given the blurry ry between online and offline spaces, it is imperative to and document this behavior. In order to bring the virtual hysical space, I printed off the screenshots and made to stickers. I relied upon a social and visual function by participants to place the stickers in public spaces. I asked rticipant to take a picture of the sticker, share the n, along with a thought, feeling, or story. The panying personal thoughts give dialogue, context, and ation to a chosen location. One participant shared the
being ones that mirror each other. In the evolution of this project, I have created another body of work titled When Did My Body Not Become My Own? I asked participants, who shared the screenshots of harassing and abusive messages, to wear the texts on their bodies. I printed the messages onto tattoo transfer paper. I documented the process in photographs. I printed multiple slides of each photograph onto translucent vellum. The work continues to challenge value systems under and patriarchal society and asks how to show the omnipresence of something invisible? The images on their own are transparent, only by its magnitude of layering does the body and words become visible.
opposite College page: of Fine
Arts (VCFA). Maiyan has been included in various local and national exhibitions, including TOGETHER, a virtual show in September of The Sticker Project, 2021 2020, and an exhibition she curated titled When Did My Body Not Become My Own? in Meridian, Idaho, in December of 2021. While Maiyan came to VCFA with a background in metals, mainly working in body adornment and small sculpture, she has expanded her practice to address social issues — using her immediate community in her work. In doing so, her work has evolved into a combination of language and visual imagery. Her work also uses elements of collaboration, photography, and research surveys. Her recent work looks at the physical and virtual realms as one. She documents online accounts of female-identified experiences of psychological assault and how misogynistic violence becomes facilitated by hyper-speeds of new technology. Maiyan currently lives and works in Boise, Idaho, as a Metalsmith. She owns a business designing and creating fine jewelry. She uses adornment of the body to make statements in her jewelry and her art practice.
MARTINEZ
NADIA
ndpa's molienda, his artisanal sugarcane mill and plantation, nd my sweet and happy place—a wonderful space to escape verything happening around me. In that memory, I found a new g for the concept of 'sweetness' that went beyond something uld be experienced with one sense. Remembering my family g together to make from scratch something sweet, I realized e sweetness that I was looking for was found in community, ns, and laughter. My project, The Promise of Sweetness, les the growing of sugarcane from seed to plant in an effort to this happiness.
ny years, Capitalism has promoted a narrative of happiness,
the message that "money, traveling, possessions, and lifestyle
ppiness." We've been conditioned to believe and embrace these
haping our understanding of the good and happy life, or the
life' on the idea of wealth and what it can provide. Yet, this belief
n challenged by current events.
body of work, I'm questioning the idea of "instant gratification."
siting a happy memory, instead of relying on contemporary
ves of happiness and sweetness, I revisit a personal happy
y and ask myself: what made me feel so good and so
aneously? Using a similar lens of happiness and sweetness, I
thers to do the same.
fort to frame these questions, I used raw materials such as
nd its derivatives to create ephemeral sculptures and
tions that are literally composed of sweetness. Some of the
material is fragile, transparent, and colorful to resemble
sculptures change and melt over time. And The Promise of Sweetness, because of the ephemeral nature of this work, I'm documenting the process and physical changes that occur in the pieces with Polaroid pictures. Polaroids have similar characteristics to sugar—they both
give instant gratification, can be affected by temperature and humidity, and continue to change. As part of my desire to share the Promise of
Sweetness with others, viewers are invited to take small packages of sugarcane seeds and small pieces of unrefined brown sugar, which is just like the sugar my family used to make. This gift is part of a
different economy; in exchange, I ask them to share some of their sweet memories with me.
Although I have a personal investment in the theme of sugar, my larger goal for this project and my oeuvre is to explore the connections and relationships we create with each other around objects and through
social exchanges. I hope that my work will prompt viewers to consider how larger cultural conditions shape our beliefs and values. In the
sugar series, I am creating alternative narratives designed to question
the cultural conditions that make us feel good. In this regard, my work
creates a conversation with artists Jill Magid and Félix González-Torres, who, like me, ground their work in generosity. In their practices, Magid
and Félix González-Torres each use their personal investment with their subjects and projects to address social issues while also inviting people to participate in their work and potentially think differently about these issues
d (Something Familiar), 2021
d (Fragmented Memories), 2021
d (Givers and Takers), 2021
e of Sweetness (The Journey), 2022
studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in New York, and in 2022, she completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Nadia works with diverse media, including printmaking, mixed media, painting, sculptures, and installations. Nadia has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in individual
and group exhibitions at the National Academy Museum, NY, NY; 4uattro Pareti Galleria, Napoli, Italy; Zorya Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; Art Basel week, Miami, FL; Stamford Art Association, Stamford CT; Södertälje
Konstforening, Stockholm, Sweden; Salon Supercable de Jovenes XVI con FIA, Caracas, Venezuela; ArtLima, Lima, Peru; Pinta Art Fair, NY, NY; The
Hub Center for the Arts, NY, NY; Macy Art Gallery at Columbia University, NY, NY; Printmaking Council of New Jersey, Branchburg, NJ; Arts West
Gallery, Elon University, Elon, NC; Grady Alexis Gallery, NY, NY; Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Museo del Juguete Antiguo, DF, Mexico, among others.
She has been awarded several scholarships, including The Albert
Hallgarten Traveling Scholarship, and she did an Artist in Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Nadia was nominated for Women to Watch 2018, National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC by Shannon R. Stratton, MAD’s William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, NY.
Her work is part of selected collections as the Art Bank Program of the
US Department of State in Washington DC, and other private collections in the United States, France, Peru, and Venezuela.
Nadia currently teaches and is the Faculty Coordinator at the New York School of the Arts, New York, and lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.