During a Q&A at the Mount David Summit, �ֲ���ý’ annual celebration of student achievement, someone asked how the seven studio art majors were feeling as they moved the fruits of their year-long projects from the relative privacy of their Olin Arts Center studios to the public space of the Museum of Art.

Every year, works by seniors are featured in the Senior Thesis Exhibition at the museum, mounted professionally and ready for viewing until Commencement.

If they were nervous, the seniors didn’t show it. Miryam Keller ’25 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, was ready for the necessary culmination of all that alone time in the studio over the course of her senior year.

“I feel like my works will now have their own relationship with other people,” Keller said. Her mixed-media work features materials collected from her beloved Maine coast. “To me, a piece feels successful if somebody is able to emotionally connect with it. I guess it speaks to empathy.”

Avery Lehman ’25 of Portsmouth, N.H., spoke of the possibility of visitors finding common ground in her mixed-media thesis project, a set of cotton quilts that incorporate photographic images, fleeting and intimate, during her final year at �ֲ���ý.

Her hope? That viewers “find footing for their own memories in these pieces,” she said, an invitation, via highly personal artwork, for individual interpretation.

“Ultimately, they’re going to look at it and they may feel something entirely different than what I intended — but that’s kind of the beautiful part of it.”

Each year, two �ֲ���ý faculty members advise the seniors as they develop a cohesive body of artistic work. This year’s advisers were Carolina González Valencia, associate professor of art and visual culture, and Susan A. Dewsnap, lecturer in art and visual culture. Michel Droge, a visiting lecturer in art and visual culture, works with the seniors as the exhibition’s lead preparator.

Titled Under the Parachute, this year’s exhibition is open through May 24. While the work is the thesis, every senior also has to write an artist statement. These are excerpted below, illustrated with another annual �ֲ���ý tradition, portraits of the artists in their Olin Arts Center studios created by Phyllis Graber Jensen. 

Lizi Barrow — A Momentary Reprise

For Lizi Barrow of Winchester, Mass., who is also a major in environmental studies, the act of painting is an act of inheritance. 

Her work presents a lineage of women — her grandmother, her mother, and herself — linked by love, memory, and the quiet intimacy of ordinary moments. Her work reimagines family photographs taken by her grandmother, Nina Ravenscroft Norton Smith, of Barrow’s mother during her lifetime. 

“I engage with my grandmother’s photographic representations of moments in time, my mother’s retelling of these moments, and my own childhood memories to visually combine the memories and lived experiences of three different generations of women.

“My paintings depict ordinary moments of stillness, where the safety and comfort of Home lulls the subjects to sleep. I invite my viewer to take part in these peaceful moments, offering a momentary reprise from the chaotic world outside of the frame.”

Miryam Keller — Cycles of Salt and Memory

In her mixed-media compositions, Miryam Keller of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, who is also an earth and climate sciences major, starts with ocean water collected from places along her beloved Maine coast — such as Higgins Beach, Pemaquid Point, and East End Beach — to capture rhythms of nature and memory.

Each piece begins as a circle of ocean water on mat board, into which she introduces ink and crushed minerals. As the salt water evaporates, pigments settle, salt crystals bloom, and the paper distorts.

“Using water, my work bridges our emotional and physical experiences in the landscape. I aim to create an environment of unstructured observation and stillness that invites presence and reflection. Through each individual atmosphere, I hope to draw attention to our relationship with bodies of water as a point of connection and communication.

“I am endlessly mesmerized by the depths of the underwater world, and as I go deeper into its mystery I find my internal world mirrored back.”

Avery Lehman — Memory, Patched and Pieced

For Avery Lehman of Portsmouth, N.H., memory lives in fabric and photography. 

From photographs taken with from black-and-white film, Lehman printed cyanotypes — blue-toned prints often used in artwork — onto pieces of cotton canvas, from which she created quilts. The quilts depict fleeting intimacies from her final year at �ֲ���ý — friends holding hands at the beach — while challenging the expectation of perfection in feminist craft traditions.

“Using these methods, I construct or mend textiles to protect the love and care that the images hold. The gestural aspects of the pieces may allow viewers’ own memories to find footing somewhere in the work. The unfinished details of this work imply a continuation past the exhibition date as I acknowledge that this effort will persist throughout the course of my life — and that the longing to freeze a moment will never cease.”

Erin McCarthy — A Vessel Transformed

Erin McCarthy of Bangor, Maine, creates ceramic forms that begin as vessels — but they rarely stay that way, hence the name she gave her works, “Metamorphose series.” “My journey with clay has always been driven by a desire to blur the lines between functional forms and sculptural abstraction.”

“These pieces represent a pivotal moment in my artistic growth, where my personal vision reshapes the traditional techniques I’ve learned. I chose the traditional coil-building technique, constructing vessels that organically transitioned into abstract shapes [and] allowed the clay to guide the process.

“Beginning as traditional vessels, the pieces gradually evolve into abstract sculptures, mirroring my own artistic transformation. I also aimed to challenge the viewer’s perspective, highlighting the transformative power of a shift in viewpoint.”

Alex Provasnik — Stitched Disruption

Alex Provasnik of Arlington, Va., who is also a chemistry major, is well-known at �ֲ���ý for her functional ceramics. 

But for her senior thesis, she unraveled those expectations. She drilled and perforated her ceramics, then entwined the holes with embroidery thread or yarn, turning traditional pots into hand-stitched landscapes.

“Threads and fibers engulf some holes while others remain unthreaded, providing glimpses of the inside and a reminder of the labor in creating and stitching each one. This work not only steps away from these practices’ utilitarian roots but uses the fibers to interrupt the functionality of what otherwise would be a usable pot.

“The grid provides structure and an environment for geometric patterns to emerge and evolve. The process of creating these works is very rigorous and time-consuming yet also rhythmic and meditative.”

Lila Schaefer — Where the Body Meets the Room

Lila Schaefer of Northampton, Mass., creates sculptures and watercolors that combine hard-edged geometry with soft, anthropomorphic forms, evoking the interaction between the internal self and the physical world of things we expect to see everyday, like a lamp. 

The works — layered with aluminum wire, polyfill, fabric, and wood — form an abstracted domestic space: a surreal living room where emotion permeates design. 

“These sculptures challenge the pursuit of efficiency and control in our built environments, advocating instead for a more open, unpredictable approach to human experience. The ‘skin’ acts as a crucial boundary, symbolizing the interface between the internal self and the outside world.

“The materials I use reflect my interest in merging soft, handmade elements with more functional aspects of design [and] the organic, playful qualities of these pieces resist the idealized perfection of contemporary design.”

Danny Zuniga Zarat — A Divine Kind of Ache

Danny Zuniga Zarat of Houston, who is also a major in Latin American and Latinx studies, works in charcoal, performance, and video, creating alternative spiritual spaces where migration, memory, and transformation are explored through deeply personal ritual. In each medium, he emphasizes his own body as a tool of agency and power.

“This solace in my body allows me to see it as a site of agency and power. These different mediums allow me to depict and transform the suffering and the pain into works of a divine quality, always moving and charged with energy.

“I push myself to a space of explosive vulnerability, a place where I can dream outside of myself and create semi-deities that function as archetypes to personal and shared feelings. Whether strong or wounded, the figures in my work stand tall, fully enveloped in either suffering, anger, or bliss, and the viewers act as witnesses to the breathing scene.”

Spring at �ֲ���ý is when seniors get proximate to their future professional selves. They might present thesis research at off-campus academic conferences, or, in the case of studio art majors, present artwork here on campus at the Annual Senior Thesis Exhibition.

This year’s exhibition opens today, April 14, in the highly professional setting of the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art and runs through May 27.

Approaching their primetime moment in the �ֲ���ý museum, “our students are acting on that professional level” — meeting hard deadlines and taking guidance from experts — “just as they would out in the world,” says Elke Morris, a senior lecturer in art and visual culture who advised the studio art majors during their year-long thesis efforts, along with Penelope Jones, a lecturer in art and visual culture.

With expert support from faculty and museum staff, who help with the installation, lighting, and other elements, the end result “looks really great — a nice finish,” Morris says.

Three studio art majors present distinctive works in this year’s exhibition.

With a selection of drawn and painted portraits, Jordan Wilson ’23 of Medfield, Mass., focuses on capturing moments in time and all the minute details within them.

Frieda Kickliter ’23 of Mobile, Ala., is presenting large-scale colorful and geometric abstract paintings referencing architecture and nature, exploring the relationship between the tangible and the obscured. 

A collection of ceramic dishes by Tricia Ballard ’23 of Larchmont, N.Y., highlights the functionality expected of everyday tableware, and brings to mind the small joys of life.

“Three different personalities, and of course different bodies of work,” Morris says. “Each has real strength in particular areas, and they have been able to develop those, and push that forward. They listen to advice, take the work seriously, and put the effort in. And that’s what you ask for.”

Jordan Wilson 

In her artist’s statement, Wilson says her thesis is a reflection on moments in time “that came and went in passing, described by the impermanent details that made them.”

Using photos from her phone’s camera roll as references, Wilson used graphite, colored pencils, and oil paints to create portraits of the people around her, “casual pictures that are not meant to be metaphorical, symbolic, or allegorical,” she explains, but that capture that impermanence and uniqueness of a single moment.

“I like how pens and pencils feel as they glide across paper and how thick oil paint coats my metal knife when I drag it across glass to mix pigments until they’re just right,” says Wilson. “I like returning to the same image over and over again. In this way, my thesis is also the material byproduct of my time spent looking and thinking about these passing moments and what made them what they were.”

By focusing on the small details, like the fold of a sleeve, or the curve of an eyebrow, she found a sort of “stillness” that is simultaneously unsettling and comforting. That moment will never come again, but “without impermanence, time and space and life wouldn’t exist in the first place.”

Frieda Kickliter 

Kickliter uses ink and oil paint to create large-scale abstract pictures. She references architecture, landscapes, and plants for her work “to signal a sense of familiarity with the tangible world,” she says in her statement.

For her, the ink and oil lends an obscuring quality to the images; she paints lines over lines, never erasing anything, but layering the forms and perspectives, keeping “some areas more representational, thinking about the relationship between perceived, representational, and physical spaces.”

“To me, the paintings are similar to obscured memories,” she says. “They capture the fragmented recollections of multiple points in time and space.” It’s also a practice in expression, as she focuses on rhythm, movement, and “overlapping, isometric, linear, and irrational representations of space and form.”

By blending organic and architectural shapes, she creates an “abstraction of a familiar world,” leading her to “reconsider and think critically about my unique relationship and understanding of the surrounding environment.”

Tricia Ballard

Ballard’s thesis presentation is a collection of ceramic dishes, focusing on the functionality expected of everyday tableware, using white and brown stoneware fired in a reduction kiln.

Inspired by the “generous handles, untrimmed feet, and thickly rimmed pots” in work by potter Clary Illian, Ballard wants her work to “appear refined, but I also enjoy leaving evidence of its handmade quality through a thumbprint at each handle’s attachment,” she says in her statement. “On some pots, I have drawn with slip or stain on their rounded surfaces. For others, a single glaze works best to highlight the underlying beauty of the throwing process.”

Before �ֲ���ý, she worked mostly with watercolors and drawings, and she has enjoyed the tactile experience of working with ceramics, and gained an appreciation for the “subtle delights that exist within a daily routine and am inspired by homes filled with personal art. I hope the utilitarian nature of my art invites others to appreciate the connection between pottery, food, and small joys hidden in the everyday.”

Home is where the heart is, or — for many of this year’s studio art majors — where the inspiration lies.

For the first time in two years, visitors and student artists filled the halls — and both floors — of the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art to celebrate the opening of the senior thesis exhibition.

Watch as the 15 graduating studio arts majors proudly present their work to friends, family, and faculty.

Coming out of two years learning and making art during a pandemic, displacement and a search for belonging and identity is a noticeable theme in the exhibition.

Katy Boehm ’22 of Denver mapped out her own world, and provided booklets for visitors to give more context to the piece, as well as to invite questions about the city layout she created, and the names she chose.

“I liked asking viewers which house on the map they would want to live in,” says Boehm. “I loved how they’d debate back and forth and imagine what it would be like to live in the world I created.”

From pottery inspired by childhood memories, to watercolor animation of a beloved family pet, to a walk-in art installation dedicated to the life of a dear friend, the interpretation of the concept of “home” is as diverse as the mediums used.

If any one epiphany can be taken away from the exhibition, it’s that home doesn’t have to be a place; it can also be an object, a pet, or even a person. 

When �ֲ���ý studio art majors reach their senior year, they embark on a thesis project that ultimately leads them to a professionally mounted exhibition at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art. These young artists work in many mediums, but all have the same directive: to use sustained studio time to create a collection that coheres into an expression of their individual artistic beings at this particular moment in time. 

Even though the work presented in the annual Senior Thesis Exhibition is decidedly individual — the 15 artists from this year’s Class of 2022 work in paint, colored pencil, rotoscope animation, photography, and installation and collage — collective themes sometimes emerge from these seniors who are about to enter the broader world.

With this year’s group of talented young artists, who have been advised and guided during their thesis year by Senior Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture Elke Morris, there are strong commonalities thematically, many of which can be related to sharing the life-altering experiences of living in the era of a pandemic, and others which can be traced to the rite of passage of truly leaving childhood behind as they prepare to “commence” adulthood.

Consider the striking role the concept of home — where so many of us spent at least part of the pandemic, if not most of it — plays in this year’s exhibition, which opens April 15 and runs through May 28.

Anna Gouveia ’22 of Jenkintown, Pa., who also has a major in biochemistry, focuses her thesis on images of homes, presented in diptychs and triptychs. When she left home for �ֲ���ý in the fall of 2018, she had made peace with her departure, as she says in her artist’s statement. Indeed, she was “prepared for the spin cycle of trying to define a sense of home as I expected to move from place to place for the majority of my 20s.”

Instead, the global pandemic sent �ֲ���ý students back home in March 2020, Gouveia’s sophomore spring. Gouveia landed back in Jenkintown with her family, in a house that was relatively new to them and very new to her, since she’d been at �ֲ���ý when they’d moved into it.

Life came to a halt, and in the stillness, she says she sought to look deeper into the concept of home. “I am not interested in simply documenting the private domain,” Gouveia says. “I want to capture the feeling of home. That feeling is almost indescribable, but it feels simultaneously comfortable and fleeting.”

Fellow studio art major Emily Graumann ’22, who is a double major in English, also took a deep dive into home, specifically where she grew up in Wenham, Mass., using watercolor — one of her earliest artistic mediums — and rotoscope animation, her most recent, to “best capture the essence of my home and the love I have for my family.”

That family includes dogs, who have always been in her life. “Their presence within my home is characteristic of warmth, coziness, excitement, and joy. Seeing the happiness they bring to me and my family, an animation about my home would be incomplete without them.”

Family Albums

Charlotte Collins ’22 of Woolwich, Maine, went back to photographs of her childhood to spur her thesis project. “These memory archives fuel curiosity about the relationship I have with my childhood.”

She’s examining her own nostalgia for childhood, capturing “memories” that are already fading. “My work aims to question what it means for me to look back and visit these childhood archives and explore the juxtaposition of what is a memory and what is instead just a photograph in a family album.” Citing Alice Neel among her influences, Collins recognizes that her work is simultaneously keeping childhood memories alive and letting them fade away. 

Her classmate Jeremy Bruce ’22 of Portland, Maine, also depends on childhood memories to inform his work. He combines paint with ready-made images “to explore how memories exist on the cusp between reality and fantasy, as imaginative and emotional entities.” That cusp includes distortions of past life, “fusing real-life happenings with unique interpretation.” For Bruce, the canvas is a “sacred space” to document his own memories.

”In my practice, I am strongly influenced by Hannah Höch, Jennifer Packer, Mark Rothko, and Virgil Abloh,” he says. “These creators have shown me how to use vivid colors, compose expressive collages, and translate personal memories into visual artworks. They have guided my creation of pieces like Growing Pains, 2022, which focuses on the progression of my identity and mental well-being throughout my life so far, and how persisting through this progression felt uncomfortable at times.”

Claudio Jimenez ’22 of the Bronx, N.Y., lost someone dear to him, his friend Marlon, last May. In tribute, Jimenez has created an art installation built around a mélange of painting, installation art, and found objects. He has covered the walls of the museum with the words Marlon wrote to him in their first and last letter exchange.

He also created a gift for visitors, what Marlon called “sensory postcards,” paintings of “feelings of home from his childhood that came back to him every once in a while.” Jimenez wants viewers to take the postcards away with them, “so that you can take these feelings of home to your homes, and send them to other homes.”

Photographer John Loftus ’22 trained his film cameras (a Nikon F3 and a Hasselblad Xpan) on people in Lewiston and the surrounding areas who are struggling with substance abuse and, especially, those who are helping them.

Capturing imagery that is engaging and approachable, putting the “focus on the family… the support system that is most needed when fighting for sobriety,” he hopes to help change the narrative and stigma around substance abuse disorder. “I purposefully aim to avoid aspects of addiction that get a lot of attention, like the shocking, gritty, and harsh imagery associated with drugs.”

He is not just documenting people with substance abuse, but advocating for them. “The intention of my work is to help the people who are battling addiction and I am committed to a process that is collaborative and trustworthy.”

Also working in photography, Jack Ryan ’22 of Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., created a series of portraits for this thesis project, all drawn from his �ֲ���ý community, including many who are religious on what Ryan describes as “an increasingly secularized college campus.”

Ryan says he’s influenced by many photographers, but that this series in particular is inspired by Nick Ut’s coverage of the war in Vietnam as well as work by Steve McCurry, Herb Ritt, and Richard Avedon. “I aim to emulate the same raw emotion and personality that these photographers are able to convey in their work.”

Home Kitchen

The elegant, classical-influenced but modern-feeling pottery by Michael Morgan ’22 was inspired by his first experiences with ceramics in his home.

From Kingston, Jamaica, he grew up gazing at his family’s cabinet of “prized English dinnerware sets.” The dinnerware was rarely used but it was treasured, particularly by his mother, who would spend hours polishing it and making sure the glass of the cabinet was spotless “so that visitors could easily see the variety of crockery that belonged to the home. As an artist, my ceramic pieces are meant to do the same as elegant timepieces that elevate a space.” He also cites ancient Islamic forms as influences.

Another ceramics artist, Jack Fruechte ’22 of Minneapolis, rebels against the construct of art in his work, but speaks to the rootedness of home. Fruechte, who counts the Mingei pottery movement of Japan among his influences, says he’s not trying “to make a social statement or create a complex cultural narrative with my work.” Instead he wanted to make work that can be used in daily lives. “This work demands to become part of the house,” he says. “And have a purpose within your daily routine.” 

Homes Away from Home

Memories of their longtime homes inspired many of these student artists, but it also compelled others to create homages to what in the end, were fleeting homes. Helen Pandey ‘22 of Nashville, Tenn., spent six months living in Hawaii during the pandemic, a time that she says caused her to grow and evolve. She chose to create an entire body of work based on a photograph she made on Oahu. Every painting she presents is a study from that photography.

“My goal is to immortalize the dream-like qualities of my life at that time as well as the landscape of Oahu.” She used techniques drawn from the Impressionist movement, and was especially inspired by artists like Maurice Prendergast. In using dripping paint, she tries to evoke the fading of memory, linked to that window of time when Hawaii was, however briefly, her home. 

The same might be said of the approach Nick Charde ’22 of Concord, Mass., took in his thesis work, chronicling Lewiston as he experienced it in the last two years. His project draws from his surroundings and focuses on its “eclectic character” and evolving nature, old mixed with new, abandoned with revitalized.

He’s been roaming the city with his camera, focusing less on the places than on his journey to find and photograph them. Then he used a mix of mediums, including graphite, colored pencil, pen, and markers on a variety of papers (Bristol and tracing) as well as acetate film and cutouts of inkjet prints. He works in layers, which leave him room to go back and add other elements later if he chooses, in much the same way that a city grows and evolves.

“This project has allowed me to explore the city that has been my home for the past four years in new ways and under new contexts; it has given me a way of expressing my experience in Lewiston with more clarity and insight,” Charde says. He hopes his work will inspire its viewers to go see Lewiston for themselves.

While Charde was exploring Lewiston’s streets and buildings, Katy Boehm ’22 of Denver was designing her own little world, complete with homes and businesses. Influenced by the ways in which Chris Ware, Marjane Satrapi, Norman Rockwell, Jennifer and Matthew Holm, and N.C. Wyeth create work that “encourages viewers to assess imagery for narrative elements,” she uses digital drawing, pen, ink, and paper.

“Like the artists’ works that influence me, I want viewers to immerse themselves in the world I have created,” Boehm says. “I hope viewers are challenged to imagine their own living space and how their relationships and interactions exist within that space.”

Ollie Penner ’22 of Pasadena, Calif., a double major in American studies, works in mixed media, starting with photographs taken with his Fujifilm X100F camera as well as scans of grids and diagrams he finds in books and online. “I use Photoshop to layer different elements and create relationships with my photographs.” His work is inherently architectural and political. 

Penner counts Indigenous researcher and writer Marisol de la Cadena’s work as a big influence: “Their essay ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes’ inspires my questioning of the dichotomy created in Western society between humans and nature. I take inspiration from going on walks and bike rides around California and in Maine and observing textures and forms which are deemed ‘natural’ but also appear to look manufactured. I am also fueled by my ongoing uncovering of how settler colonialism has shaped the way in which we view and interact with ‘nature.’”

Home Body

Two seniors, Kate Weinberg ’22 of Wayland, Mass., and Mary Richardson ’22 of Blue Hill, Maine, focused on issues of self-confidence, validation and how we see ourselves in what one might describe as the ultimate home: our bodies. Weinberg used sculptural stoneware ceramic pieces, including vases and pitchers fired in a gas reduction kiln, to explore two main themes, starting with the female form.

“My work is an unfiltered portrayal of the female body. It emphasizes the curves, shapes, and form of real women. As a previous Division I athlete, I found myself in a community that greatly influenced the perception of my body. Since then I have found clarity in accepting and celebrating my body, and want this confidence to be emulated in these pieces.”

Her second focus is on physical connection, the chemistry between two people. In her sculptural vases, directly influenced by seeing Louise Bourgeois’s The Couple last summer at Mass MOCA, feature bodies morphing together. “It is easy to lose track of where one person starts and the other begins.” For Weinberg, Bourgeois’ sculpture embodies what it feels like to be connected to someone. “I wanted others to experience that feeling from my work as well.”

Mary Richardson ‘22’s body of work combines similar themes of womanhood, including her own struggles with an eating disorder. “I primarily use colored pencils, pen, and letter stamps. One of my pieces, Untitled, illustrates how I struggle with ‘filling others’ cups” before filling my own. The emptiness and limited palette of the piece is meant to suggest a glass of water being emptied.”

Another of Richardson’s pieces, Facetime Unavailable, speaks to her “history with male validation issues.” Like some of her classmates, Richardson, who is from Blue Hill, Maine, also focuses on childhood nostalgia, particularly poignant at this critical moment in time for all of these seniors.

“This body of work draws from this stage of my life as I reach the conclusion of my childhood,” she says. “There is something very bittersweet about growing up, but I also think that it is a very telling and metamorphic transition.”

The eight seniors participating in this year’s Annual Senior Thesis Exhibition opening May 7 have produced work that reflects on the ephemeral qualities of humanity, some of it created in mediums chosen in part because of the restrictions of COVID-19, and much of it with heavy emphasis on nature, from its most essential cellular level to the beauty — and utility —of landscapes. 

Fittingly then, these studio art majors’ work in video, animation, ceramics, and photography reflects what life in this academic year has been so far: complex, challenging, and requiring flexibility. But beyond that, what permeates the exhibition is a sense of gratitude. For one thing, these Class of 2021 studio art majors, whose thesis work has been advised during the Winter term by Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Pamela Johnson and last Fall by Lecturer Susan Dewsnap, get to have a physical show at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art, after the pandemic forced a virtual exhibition last year. 

There won’t be a lot of fanfare — the pandemic means no usual campuswide opening reception at the museum — but for the artists who are on campus, there will be a chance to walk with friends and family through the exhibition space.

This slideshow displays examples of the eight Class of 2021 studio art majors’ work in video, animation, ceramics, and photography; portraits of the artists are below.

A still from Eli Eshaghpour’s film, But at Least We Remember, showing the 1967 coronation of the last Shah of Iran.

Alex Paton, Hooch Bottle, 2020, wood and soda fired stoneware, 11 x 3 x 3 inches.

A still from Sakura, which mixes animation and footage from videos shot by Mari Sato.

Blaise J. Marceau, Untitled, 2020-21, digital photograph, 42 x 64 inches.

A video still from Old Home by Wenjing Zheng ’21.

Christopher Barker, 3 Stoneware Cups, 2021, stoneware, 3 x 3 x 3 inches each.

Carlo Cremonini, 504, 2021, gelatin silver print, 2.5 x 4.75 inches.

Laila Stevens, No. 7 (large blue with black lines), 2021, earthenware, 9 x 14 x 14 inches.

And already, as Laila Stevens ’21 of Norwich, Vt. recounts, there has been a sense of relief and joy. “I am extremely happy that we get this exhibit,” says Stevens, who works in ceramics. “I felt quite bad for the seniors last year.”

She and her classmates gathered in the museum recently to begin a vital part of the thesis, the experience of mounting a show in a professional setting. “We were setting up the furniture and laying out a lot of the photographs,” says Stevens. “It was a really fun process.” (The museum is familiar territory for Stevens, who has been an intern there all year, focused on receiving and researching a large donation of Maine art from the late Jane Costello Wellehan ’60.)

Stevens’ works will be mounted on pedestals. Like her fellow ceramicist and studio mate Christopher Barker ’21 of Burlington, Vt., who cites photos of deep space and microscopy shots of biological specimens such as viruses, insect wings, and neuron networks as inspiration, Stevens’ art is fed by her studies in science; she was pre-med before switching to an art track as a junior. 

She relies heavily on biological imagery for her inspiration and was initially drawn to creating representations of the COVID-19 virus. Over the course of the year, though, her work became more amorphous. “People have told me they remind them almost of bones under skins. I have very skeletal influences, which I think were almost subconscious.”

Beyond science, Barker’s work is inspired by American artists Terry Winters, Jasper Johns and Brice Marden. “I found myself falling into the vacuums present in their abstracted drawings and painting,” he says.

Barker has integrated those influences onto the ceramic surfaces, aiming “to pull the view beyond the solid, hard exterior and into the realm and space created by my marks.”

For Alex Paton ’21 of Charlotte, Vt., each of his utilitarian ceramic vessels synthesizes his evolving relationship and scientific inquiry into clay, and represent “inherent material life beyond the control of my touch.” They are solid now, and represent “a product of my hands and mind, but soon, they too will be weathered, broken and quietly cast away.”

Use of video that explores family history is a striking theme in this year’s exhibit. Against a backdrop of archival news footage from pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, Eli Eshaghpour ’21 of New York City uses the voices of his grandmother, uncle, and a distant cousin as a medium for an oral history of both his immediate Persian Jewish family (his grandparents immigrated to Jersey City in 1970) and family who stayed behind and lived through the revolution.

Each relative was born in a distinct political climate in Tehran, and Eshaghpour uses them in his film But at Least We Remember to produce “a testament to the randomness of history and its subsequent effects on individuals’ experiences, memories, and self perceptions.” 

After receiving a Stangle Fellowship last year, Eshaghpour thought he’d be able to travel, including to Los Angeles to meet, photograph, and interview other, distant relatives who are more involved in the Iranian diaspora. “But COVID changed that,” he says. 

Instead he uses audio recordings of his family members’voices, their scratchy tonality melding with archival film footage. Interspersed sporadically in his film are images of cellular activity, inspired by footage that Laila Stevens, his fellow studio art major, shared in a class. 

The footage looked cool, he said, but it also struck him that he could connect the lymphatic cancer of the last Shah of Iran to both his own family and the time he’s living in. “No one really knows how much the cancer played into the Shah’s decision making,” Eshaghpour says. 

The footage, plus conversations with his family, prompted a metaphor “about our immune systems, and how free speech and protesting can be part of a country’s own immune system — a protector of freedom that can heal a sick country.”

For Mari Sato ’21, of McMinnville, Ore., “animation has become my escape.” It’s helped her navigate uncertainty. “I read, watch, and listen, as I go about my life with my art in mind. In the mornings, after drinking coffee and considering the day ahead, I go to the studio or to my desk, and I pick up a pen.” 

The results are a short film called Sakura, a playful mix of animation and live-action video from footage she’s taken at and away from home, including audio from feral cats meowing in Indonesia. “All are sentimental,” Sato says. “I focus on the feelings they emit.” 

Wenjing Zheng ’21 has been studying remotely from home in Wuhan, China, and her five-minute experimental, highly naturalistic film Old Home is heavily influenced by legendary French filmmaker Agnes Varda as well as Zheng’s own deep exploration of her grandparents’ lives in Qiankeng Village, the “old home,” a Chinese idea that describes “the place where your family and previous generations originated.”  

She spent days walking on her grandparents’ farmland, learning how to identify every plant “and understand how much effort my grandparents exert on them.” She had imagined that this rural area, where all the residents wake at 6 a.m. to begin their farmwork, would be relaxing and tranquil. “But it turned out things were not as I assumed. It is a plain life, a cycle of waking up, working, and going to bed. Many scenes of my video show the repetitions of cooking and gardening.” 

There are two still photographers in the exhibit, Carlo Cremonini ‘21 of Cambridge, Mass., and Blaise Marceau ’21 of Waban, Mass.

Marceau’s images join landscapes with figures, mixing realism and artifice, trying to create a sense of mystery and narrative. He fills his spare time with mountain biking, hiking, fishing, and camping in Maine. 

“Capturing the natural beauty of the wilderness through photography goes hand in hand with my passion for the outdoors,” he says. His spin on the form is to keep the identities of his subjects hidden. “This puts more focus on the figure as a whole.”

Cremonini has traditionally worked in 35mm film photography. In fact, the digital course he’s taken during the final semester of his senior year is the first non-analog course he’s taken. But his thesis work is focused on pinhole photography he began while at home in Cambridge last spring after his study abroad program in Florence shut down. 

“Very much a product of the times,” he says. “I no longer had access to a darkroom.”

He could set himself up with little more than a camera built from materials at hand (a paint can works well) and make his prints in a closet. Displaying this work from equipment that could cost only $30, rather than meticulously processed and printed work from 35mm film, is a form of advocacy. “This feels a little bit more like guerrilla photography, which I like because the barrier for entry is very low.” 

Carlo Cremonini

He appreciates the kind of images it yields. “You get this kind of blurriness,” he says. “You get these expressions because people are stuck in time, so there is this kind of reminder of the past, those old photographers where people look very posed and serious, but of course the subjects are very contemporary.” 

He’s presenting the work in its negative form, and asking viewers to use their smartphones to invert them (under accessibility settings). And Cremonini is looking forward to having a chance to interact with visitors to the museum, just in case they fumble with those settings, and or better yet, want to talk about the art. “I think I would get a lot out of hearing people’s feelings about the work.”

For this art born out of a time of isolation and confusion, ending on a note of connectivity is truly a reward.

For Pamela Johnson, the associate professor of art and visual culture who has guided 15 senior studio art majors through the second half of this year’s thesis process, the work she’s looking at now has proven prescient.

There are echoes of the comforts of home, which many if not most of the students returned to in March, but also dystopian and imagined worlds, disequilibrium and emotional intensity.

“Given the reality we are now living in, the work that our seniors developed and the vision they offer us is even more essential to protecting and celebrating our humanity,” Johnson says. “We need art now more than ever.”

�ֲ���ý Communications multimedia producer Theophil Syslo interviews a range of senior artists to hear them reflect on their artwork, and on creating artwork in an unprecedented time.

Each spring, the Senior Thesis Exhibition opens with fanfare and with hundreds of people walking through the physical space of �ֲ���ý Museum of Art to witness a triumph: the artistic visions of the year’s studio art seniors, now realized through a range of dazzling artwork.

This year, like so many other changes due to the COVID-19 global health crisis, the exhibition is online, featuring images and statements from each senior.

That means none of the collective experience of walking through a space together, or the “hugs and laughs and tears” that make the museum come alive with ambitions realized and creativity on physical display, says museum director Dan Mills.

In February, Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Pamela Johnson, adviser to the Class of 2020 studio art majors, works with her seniors in an Olin Arts Center studio space. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But it’s been gratifying for him to be part of the team of faculty and staff that expanded the online presentation this year. “We offer our heartfelt congratulations to these artists, and invite others to carefully view, and reach out and congratulate them as well,” Mills says.

The hope is that, as the online exhibition reaches viewers near and far through social media and other means, gestures of congratulation and support will flow digitally to the 15 seniors.

For Carolina González Valencia, the assistant professor of art and visual culture who guided the seniors during the fall semester, it’s been particularly special to witness the upward trajectory of this group of artists, some of whom were in the first class she taught on arriving at �ֲ���ý in 2016, “Drawing and Intention.”

The hands of Celia Feal-Staub ’20 of Putney, Vt., work the potter’s wheel in Olin Arts Center in February. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She invites the seniors to remember their studios as they were in the first days of classes in 2019, empty and ready for their work.

“Treat the new journeys you will find ahead with the same bravery, excitement, rigor, kindness, and community building as you did while doing these theses,” she says. “Remember, that it is all about practice, and mark by mark you will start to create what leads you ahead.”

Still, what has been undeniably painful is the way this annual process was cut short, Johnson says, when the college quickly moved to remote learning in March.

With little ability to plan, students had to break down their studios and pack up their work, some of it not quite finished, and head home to locations where for many, there could be no dedicated space to create art. (Issues of equity become more readily apparent outside of Olin Arts Center, Johnson noted.)

Some of the seniors’ artwork was damaged in transit. Other pieces had to be left behind altogether.

Grace Smith ’20 of Williamstown, Mass., works on artwork in her Olin Arts Center studio space in February. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As painful as it has been to know that her students — like all seniors — have lost a piece of their senior year, Johnson hopes they hold on to how they persevered in a time of disruption.

“Our arts students will help show us the way forward.”

“Our students in all the arts at �ֲ���ý are creative and resilient,” Johnson says. “By definition they are great problem solvers. The arts teach you to work devotedly without ever being certain of the outcome.

“Our arts students — our musicians, theater artists, poets, writers, dancers and visual artists — will help show us the way forward, and revive our spirits along the way.”

Ariel Abonizio of Cuiaba, Brazil
“More haunting than ghosts”

“Sometimes, things feel more present when they are gone — a missing family member, an abandoned house, or a single sock without its mate,” says Ariel Abonizio.

Through photographs, videos, and installations, Abonizio attempts to “document what is not there. I make copies of a reality that never truly existed, not even in my dreams — I make unicorns.”

Unicorn Dreams, 2019, inkjet print, 29 x 36 inches, by Ariel Abonizio.

For Abonizio, the things that are not there — such as unicorns — “often resemble apparitions, events from my past that linger on despite not being actually there. When something is forgotten, I can still feel its contours, as something still remains. It is as if silence could be louder than words.”

At other times, the opposite happens. The things that are not there afford a presence that is “unfulfilling and resembles absence. It is like seeing a fake smile or being in a house full of strangers. The moments when presence vanishes and turns to nothing are more haunting than ghosts.”

Mayele Alognon, Louisville, Ky.
“Parts of me are hidden, obscured, or spliced”

“Is there one authentic version of self, or are there multiple — even infinite — versions that are all equally authentic?” asks Mayele Alogon.

Her artwork assumes “that the latter is closer to the truth,” she says. “I am African American. I am female. I am an immigrant. I am a daughter. I am a sister.”

Working from photographs that she takes of herself, Alogon creates nude self-portraits on cardboard, starting with line drawing, then using gouache, an opaque watercolor.��

Black skin on cardboard I, 2019, gouache on cardboard, 35 x 23 inches, by Mayele Alognon.

She finds meaning by using items “that are often thrown out without a second thought. The meaning of a painting can change knowing the previous uses of the surface and its near fate as garbage.”

While wholeness is a major theme of her paintings, she presents her body “in fragments. Parts of me are hidden, obscured, or spliced. In some paintings, it may be difficult to tell where one figure begins and where another ends, because with this multifaceted process comes complexity and ambiguity.”

Celia Feal-Staub of Putney, Vt.
“To experiment with form — and also with collapse”

At first, Celia Feal-Staub was enthralled by the usefulness of the clay objects she created — mugs, bowls, pitchers, jars, plates — and the “complete and utter control” that she had over what emerged from the potter’s wheel.

“I controlled the speed of the wheel, and the pressure of my hand which pushed the clay wall out, creating a different curve each time.” But what, she came to wonder, would it feel like to lose control, “to fully experiment with form— and also with collapse?”

Gut Feeling, 2019, reduction-fired stoneware, various sizes, by Celia Feal-Staub.

She discovered that allowing a loss of control allowed her to open a door. “Rather than barricading emotion out,” she allowed a wider range of feelings to “seep into my work: anxiety and desperation and joy and compassion.”

“With a squeeze of the vessel’s neck, or push to the belly, they take on entirely new forms — perhaps forms of people in love, listening deeply to each other, enveloped in hatred, rejection, longing, acceptance or the lack of it, or empathy.”

Nick Eaton, Lake Oswego, Ore.
“When an effort is made to stop and observe”

Nick Eaton’s digital photographs are creations in more ways than one.

The end product, photographs of striped bass that Eaton caught, is one creation. Another creation are the flies that he hand-ties — using elk and deer hair, rabbit fur, and hen feathers — and uses to catch the fish.

Catch and Release #1, 2019, digital print on luster paper, 13 x 9 inches, by Nick Eaton.

Fishing and photography, he says, have allowed him to “examine my relationship with nature, and the beauty that can be seen when an effort is made to stop and observe.”

He takes his photographs shortly after catching a fish, holding it in the salt water, scales visible to the camera, and keeping its gills submerged to allow the fish to breathe.

“As I stood there in cold, waist-deep water with wet, salty hands trying to get the perfect shot, I admired the sheer magnificence and strength of this fish,” he said. “I work quickly and then release the fish back into the water.”

Fishing and conservationism share a commitment “to ensuring a healthy environment and ecosystem, keeping our rivers running cold, and preserving fish stocks for generations to come.”

Sophie Gerry of Williamstown, Mass.
“My act of remembering”

When Sophie Gerry is working in her Olin Arts Center studio, she’s thinking about home. “How do I perceive, experience, and remember the landscapes I have spent my life in?” she wonders.

Local Landscape 1, 2020, paper and ink, 12 x 7 inches, by Sophie Gerry.

Gerry’s artwork is multidimensional, evoking the woods and mountains surrounding her hometown of Williamstown, Mass., where trails sweep through shaded woods and open meadows and cut across hillsides.

“My memory of those places is strong, though the landscape shifts and evolves with each season,” she says. “Similarly, my perceptions flicker and change over time. The art I make is my act of remembering.”

Using pens, pencils, ink washes, and cut-out shapes on papers of various colors, weights, and textures, Gerry places cutout forms on top of and in front of each other, which has led her to creating paper mobiles.

“Layered images and moving mobiles both ask to be looked at from different angles,” she explains, which “begins to capture the visual experience of moving through a natural setting.”

Emma Blaire Hall of Boise, Idaho
“The messiness of the human experience”

Sculptor E.B. Hall is a “mess-maker,” she says.

Collecting “unwanted, rejected, or forgotten items” like plastic toys, articles of clothing, or even dryer lint, she creates abstract pieces that reflect — or challenge — her own experiences.

Hall counts as an influence the multimedia and performance artist Vanessa German, who exhibited at the Museum of Art in 2019–20.��

Hxmpty Dxmpty, 2020, object sculpture, 62 x 80 x 85 inches, by Emma Blair Hall.

A central piece in Hall’s body of work is an interpretation of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty.” The massive work incorporates swaths of fabrics, eggshells, dolls, and the limbs of dolls.

“Defining these as lost or found limbs is up to the viewer. Not even the King’s horses or the King’s men can put you back together again,” she says.

“Working with my hands, I am interested in the messiness of the human experience,” she adds. “The themes of my work center around my experiences with the instability in lust, love, death, and life.”

Michael Hogue of Chicago
“See brown and black people for who they are”

Portraits of black and brown faces have often been at best caricature, at worst racist, presenting�� people “as simple-minded and often subjugated,” says Michael Hogue.

“As a black man, I often feel underrepresented throughout daily life. Because of this I strive to activate and challenge the audience not only to confront the art, but the subject as well.”

Untitled, 2020, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 18 inches, by Michael Hogue.

In addition to oil, Hogue’s other drawing media includes pencil, colored pencil, charcoal, and marker. “Working within these constrictions gives the portraits a more realistic feel,” he says, citing Terrance Vann and Christopher Clark as inspirations.

Many of his portraits look directly at the viewer. “This is what I want to challenge the audience with,” he says. “This direct gaze inspires me because it is forcing the audience to confront the subject — almost as if it is a mug shot.”

Fredrick Douglass famously challenged the nation by presenting black freedom and dignity in the many photographic portraits that he sat for. Similarly, Hogue hopes “to challenge my audience to see brown and black people for who they are, rather than what people take them for.

Michael Jones of Stratford, Conn.
“Exploring the souls of my creations as real beings”

For his senior thesis, Michael Jones used ink, colored pencils, markers, and white gel pens to create characters in a fantasy world of his creation, Lezeallion.

Aftermath, 2020, sumi ink and pencil, 9 x 12 inches, by Mike Jones.

Inspired by works of epic fantasy such as Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and the Kuroko no Basuke (“Kuroko’s Basketball”) series by Tadatoshi Fujimaki, Jones created “stories of action and power” as well as “magical abilities, dynamic powers, and destructive entities,” he says.

“One of the enjoyments of making my work is creating the visions that I want to see more of in fantasy media and bringing these ideas to life,” Jones says.

“This can include characters with darker skin or anthropomorphic beings interacting in a human setting,” he adds.

“I find satisfaction in exploring the souls of my creations as real beings who face issues that can be metaphorically or literally relatable.”

Otis Klingbeil of Powell, Ohio
“Letting each new piece inform the next”

Painter Otis Klingbeil took his inspiration from Woodstock, Vt., a town that has been important to his family for several generations.

Using “oil, collage, and three-dimensional painting,” he seeks to capture “the essence of this place by simplifying and abstracting rural barns around my town.”

Vermont Barn 1, 2020, oil paint and gesso on matte board, 23 x 16 inches, by Otis Klingbeil.

Working from photographs that he took, Klingbeil sometimes makes oil paintings; other times, he works with other materials, cutting them into various shapes and glueing them “at differing heights, building them out…from the front the image is coherent, but it is more fragmented when seen at an angle,” he says.

“I think of my work as a series of repetitive studies of these barns, letting each new piece inform the next,” he adds.

Eden Rickolt of Landenberg, Pa.
“A parody of comfort and happiness”

Real flamingos are few in the U.S., found mostly in southern Florida, explains sculptor Eden Rickolt of Landenberg, Pa. “But plastic, hot pink flamingos are everywhere.”

In her work, Rickolt uses the weirdness and wonder of the ubiquitous plastic flamingo lawn decoration to examine ideas about “iconized American suburbia.”

Untitled, 2019, crayon, 9 x 12 inches, by Eden Rickolt.

“My work was initially inspired by the curiosity of what happens when the visually consistent but symbolically erratic object is physically distorted,” she says. “Whereas the ornaments are so utterly uniform and lifeless, my flamingos take on an eerie individualism.”

Rickolt’s sculptures, using a mix of recycled materials, papier-mâché, and fabric, portray “quintessential elements of the American house and yard with the goal of creating new, surreal places that are both funny and disturbing.”

“I like the idea of my sculptures resembling candy that is so sweet that just looking at it will rot your teeth,” she says. “In other words, the colors become a parody of comfort and happiness.”

Madeline Schapiro, Malibu, Calif.
“A��garden of permanence”

Working in earthenware, Madeline Schapiro reflects her own history of tending her garden on Saturdays, the red hue of the clay corresponding to the clay she pulled out of the soil in order to plant and nurture seeds. Growing up, Schapiro grew tomatoes, peaches, and lemons, along with vegetables and produce.��

Lemon, 2020, hand building with earthenware, 4 x 4 inches, by Madeline Schapiro.

But where those gardens came and went with the seasons, Schapiro aims, through her work, to make this clay lasting. With the same hands that weeded and planted, she rolls red clay, rakes it and then folds and drapes it into shape.

“My work is a garden of permanence,” she says. Her inspirations include William Morris’s botanical patterns and 19th century botanical drawings.

Grace Smith of Williamstown, Mass.
“A record of our experiences, pain, battles, and torments”

Smith paints, draws in pencil, sews, and does both embroidery and appliqué on fabric to create her expressive portraits. The mix of mediums is fitting for what she’s trying to translate, the complexity and layering of emotions.

“Most of my portraits move between multiple feelings simultaneously,” she says, which can arrive, “all at once and often confused.”

Reflection #4, 2020, dyed fabric and thread, 18 x 36 inches, by Grace Smith.

Smith’s artistic inspirations include Orly Cogan, Egon Schiele, and Gustave Klimt, the latter two known for their portraits of women, often twisted into the frame and bound by rich patterns.

There’s also family heritage in the work of this Williamstown, Mass., native, with fabrics she received from her grandmother woven into the work. “Each holds a story,” Smith says. Those stories include the generations of her family who sat in furniture that was once wrapped in these upholstery fabrics.��

The process of creating these portraits has been therapeutic, Smith says. It’s taught her to embrace scars, understand pain and look at how bodies convey emotion through movement and posture. “Our bodies are a record of our experiences, pain, battles, and torments,” Smith says.

Jeffrey Spellman of West Roxbury, Mass.
“Preconceived ideas are always incorrect”

In his still photography, Jeffrey Spellman seeks to examine the space between the familiar and the blurred.

He works with a deliberately slow shutter speed, contrary to much of portraiture today, with its emphasis on detail. He asks his subjects to move within the space he’s chosen, enjoying the unpredictability of what comes next.

“No two shots are ever the same and all of my preconceived ideas about what the shot will be are always incorrect,” says Spellman.

Untitled 1, 2019, digital photography, 30 x 40 inches, by Jeffrey Spellman.

His thesis project also includes a video that depicts the harsh realities of mass shootings by describing what to do if caught in such a situation.

“The video is purposefully devoid of human life,” Spellman says. He uses a robotic voice to give the instructions, a voice that is meant to reflect “the robotic response triggered by mass shootings in this country.”

The camera becomes a character in this video, and once again, motion is the focus of Spellman’s process.��

Haiyao Tian of Beijing
“Intimate, emotional, and meditative”

When Haiyao Tian left Beijing to come to �ֲ���ý four years ago, she brought just two suitcases with her, filled with items that weren’t necessarily practical.

There were favorite books and pictures stuffed into them, and other “useless” objects. She has no regrets. “It was the personal treasures I cherished that helped me recreate a home away from home.”

Sleeve, 2020, digital photography, 13 x 19 inches, by Haiyao Tian.

Those objects are a key part of her thesis project, which she describes as a visual diary of her room at �ֲ���ý, photographed day after day in multiple sorts of light and in varying circumstances (playing 70s rock while she’s shooting the photographs might bring a different level of energy to the image, for instance).

“I want to push the boundaries of my imagination to make works that go beyond a simple documentation of personal objects, and instead are intimate, emotional, and meditative,” Tian says.����

Tian uses wide-angle lenses and plays with shallow depth of field to create ambiguity and depth, paying homage to the work of artists like Sally Mann and Todd Hido.

But these images of her belongings, photographed in her “sanctuary from the outside world,” speak directly to the life she has built for herself. “To some extent, I would say this project is a personal portrait of myself,” she says.

Philip Wu, New Taipei City, Taiwan
“Defy the norm and provoke confusion”��

Philip Wu occasionally leaves lines unconnected in his pen and ink cityscapes, aiming, he says, to better evoke the fictional characteristic of dystopia. He keeps much of his work deliberately monochromatic, hoping to transcend the boundaries of time.

“While most of my work remains conceptual in nature,” he says. “Each work is conceived by integrating reflections of reality with fictional elements to construct a dystopian image.”

Upsurge, 2020, ink, 14 x 17 inches, Philip Wu.

Wu says he grew up being reminded that the privileges he was given should not be taken for granted, and his thesis work reflects the “experiences and devastations I have been fortunate enough to avoid suffering.”

But it also reflects hope, a “happy ground” he believes could be found. His approach is to illustrate his perspective on dystopian cities, with “a twist reflecting possibilities that human actions can incur on the environment.”

To build his versions of dystopian cityscapes, Wu relied on photographs he took in various countries, from their slums to their skyscrapers. His interest in architecture and space can be glimpsed throughout his thesis work. His goals are to “defy the norm and provoke confusion.”

In early April, Daisy Diamond ’19 and her studio art classmates unveiled their artwork��at the 2019 Senior Thesis Exhibition.

Diamond’s was a large sculpture, an assemblage of medical sutures, steel, fabric, clay, wax, and thread.

Video by Theophil Syslo

At the opening, she says, “it was cool to see how willing people are to really engage with art when you give them permission to touch things and push things.

“That kind of tactile engagement with an object can lead to a further, more intimate experience with artwork.”

As Diamond noted in her exhibition statement, she hopes that her big and wobbly sculptures will prompt racial questions around whiteness and white privilege��— “how whiteness is constructed by thousands of moments, stitches of affirmation, wobbly and waiting to unravel.”

As they amass a body of work to show in �ֲ���ý’ Senior Thesis Exhibition, what are some of the big lessons for this year’s studio art majors?

There are practical skills: Planning and time management. Understanding when to experiment and conceptualize — and when to cut to the chase and start producing. Learning to see through the eyes of people you hope to communicate with.

The 2019 Senior Thesis Exhibition��artists talk about their work.

But there are also “softer” takeaways whose value, in fact, may surpass career considerations and play directly into life satisfaction.

There’s the power of consultation, companionship, and collaboration, for example. “Especially in the first semester, we spent a lot of time looking at each other’s work,” says Flannery Black-Ingersoll of Concord, N.H., one of the 14 senior artists in this year’s exhibition, which opens April 5.

“That’s very instructional, both for how you look at your own art and what you ask questions about, but also building that camaraderie in the studio space,” she says, meaning the Olin Arts Center studios that are each shared by several students. “‘Okay, what do you think of this?’ ‘Is this ridiculous?’ ‘Do you have any ideas?’ — sort of feeding off each other.

“It’s this nice bubble of artistry, which people look for beyond college.”

And then there are the lessons that are basically good for one thing, but a highly important thing: a laugh. Stuck at one point in her work, which involves fabric, ceramics, paint, and wood, Black-Ingersoll was inspired to try to integrate cheesecloth into the concept.

For her and studiomates Jo Cunningham and Daisy Diamond, cheesecloth was The Answer — until it wasn’t. “It was late at night,” says Black-Ingersoll. “We were all freaking out because we just had this genius moment. But of course it didn’t happen.”

That’s because she subsequently heard that a thing for cheesecloth is a typical developmental stage for first-year art school students. “So I didn’t end up doing that.”

At top, Daisy Diamond works with art, steel, and fabric in her Olin studio. At left, Grace Link ’19 hangs her photographs with help from Haley Crim ’19. At right, Mickai Mercer ’19 places his drawings in the art museum’s Upper Gallery. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Pamela Johnson, associate professor of art and visual culture, advised the senior artists during the winter semester, and Penelope Jones, visiting assistant professor of art, was the fall semester adviser.

2019 Senior Thesis Exhibition artists

“It can be exciting, seeing the progress that smart kids can make in a short period of time,” says Robert Feintuch.

The smart kids in question are the studio art majors who show nine months’ worth of creative work in the annual Senior Thesis Exhibition at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art ().

Since he started at �ֲ���ý, in 1976, senior lecturer Feintuch has been one of two advisers to help student artists prepare for the show, working in tandem for many of those years with a colleague in the art and visual culture department, associate professor Pamela Johnson. The exhibiting artists in the Class of 2018 are the last Feintuch will advise at �ֲ���ý.

Sophie Olmsted ’18 installs her work in the 2018 Senior Thesis Exhibition at the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art. Senior Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture Robert Feintuch, who advises the studio art majors during the winter semester, is in the background. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Feintuch, who retires this year, is himself a highly regarded painter, represented by the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City and by the Zevitas Marcus Gallery in Los Angeles. “I see teaching thesis as an opportunity to respond to students’ individual interests, while pointing them to historical and contemporary work, as well as to larger contexts that could inform them,” he says.

But, Feintuch adds, “in the end, it helps for young artists to fall in love with something.”

Those objects of love vary widely for the 14 artists in this year’s senior show — from animations made by Durotimi Akinkugbe to the kinetic grid drawings of Meghan Cleary, and from Georga Morgan-Fleming’s abstract paintings to the utilitarian pottery that Max Breschi, of Carlisle, Pa., is giving away to local residents through the exhibition.

All told, Feintuch says, “the mediums in this year’s exhibition include vessel-based ceramics; straight, digitally and hand-altered photography; drawing, hand-drawn animation, painting, and sculpture.”

The seniors’ thematic interests, he continues, “include sociopolitical concerns about gender and identity, emotional or comic responses to daily life, drawings as meditational devices, ceramics as functional and/or aesthetic objects, and sculpture as a metaphor for memory.”

With her ceramics in the foreground, Sophie Olmsted ’18 and adviser Robert Feintuch ponder the arrangement of student art in the 2018 Senior Thesis Exhibition a few days before the opening. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He continues, “My students often start with elaborate intellectual ideas that are clearly expressed in spoken or written language. Then they make the work, and the result has very little to do with the starting point. It’s not that visual work is separate from ideas — it’s that the visual works differently from language.

“I try to encourage my students to see how the visual information they get from making can be used towards a wide range of ends.”

As exciting as the exhibition is — and as portentous as it may be for the graduates who go on to careers in art — it nevertheless bears a sting for the exhibitors. “It’s very bittersweet to finish a project that you’ve been working on for a whole year,” says ceramist Sophie Olmsted ’18 of Winchester, Mass.

“I’m proud of what I’ve done — but I also feel like it’s not done,” she says. There’s more for her to explore. She adds, “It’s also exciting to see my work compared to other people’s, and see the interactions in the gallery of our hard work together.”

2018 Senior Thesis Exhibition artists

+Durotimi Akinkugbe ’18

An untitled work by Durotimi Akinkugbe (2018), pencil on paper animation for HD video (border added).

+Saleha Belgaumi '18

“Dekh, Magar Pyaar Se” by Saleha Belgaumi (2018), oil and charcoal on canvas.

+Joshua Bilchik '18

An untitled porcelain work from 2018 by Josh Bilchik.

+Max Breschi ’18

Untitled glazed stoneware works made in 2018 by Max Breschi.

+Maria-Anna Chrysovergi ’18

An untitled inkjet print by Maria-Anna Chrysovergi (2018).

+Meghan Cleary ’18

“Fastest Man Alive #1” (2018), a drawing in ink and graphite on paper by Meghan Cleary.

+Nora Dahlberg ’18

An untitled work by Nora Dahlberg (2018), made from plaster, clay, and epoxy on plastic foam.

+Stephanie Flores ’18

An untitled work by Stephanie Flores (2018), in oil stick, oil pastel, and acrylic paint on InkJet paper.

+Emily Jolkovsky ’18

“Rose 2,” an inkjet print by Emily Jolkovsky (2017).

+Kiana Keller ’18

An untitled work in white stoneware with celadon glaze by Kiana Keller (2018).

+Louise Marks ’18

“The Oldest,” an assemblage sculpture by Louise Marks (2018), made from electrical wire, found wood, wallpaper, brick, and nails.

+Madeline McKay ’18

An untitled work by Madeline McKay (2018) in acrylic, ink, marker, and graphite on Mylar.

+Georga Morgan-Fleming ’18

An untitled oil painting on canvas by Georga Morgan-Fleming (2018).

+Sophie Olmsted ’18

An untitled vessel from 2018 in matte-glazed white stoneware by Sophie Olmsted.

Sculptor Rona Pondick and painter Robert Feintuch have been an item since 1975, and have been notable presences in the art world since the ’80s.

Painter Robert Feintuch and sculptor Rona Pondick pose with some of their work at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But only since February 2017 has it been possible to see a substantial selection of both their work combined in one exhibition. And only now has that exhibition come to �ֲ���ý, where Feintuch is in his 42nd and final year on the art and visual culture faculty.

Opening with a 6 p.m. gallery talk and reception on Oct. 27 at the Museum of Art, the exhibition Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch: Heads, Hands, Feet; Sleeping, Holding, Dreaming, Dying was organized by museum director Dan Mills and made its debut nine months ago at the .

“ and each use themselves as a model, yet neither makes self-portraits per se,” Mills says. “While their work is materially very different, this approach to making work and the psychological interest in the body and gesture that they have in common fascinated me.

“I started thinking about exhibiting their work for �ֲ���ý, where Robert has taught for many years but rarely shown and where Rona has never shown. And as I was developing this idea, I realized that no one had ever organized an exhibition investigating” that common interest.

“It became clear that this is the exhibition we should present at �ֲ���ý.”

“White Beaver” (2009–11) by Rona Pondick, painted bronze, edition 2/3. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Until Mills proposed the idea a few years ago, Feintuch and Pondick hadn’t considered a joint exhibition — even though each is intimately familiar with the other’s work (they even had adjacent studios for many years).

“A few people who followed our work very closely talked about seeing relationships between the work,” says Feintuch. But, he continues, “on a superficial level, we kept seeing the differences.”

Mills was one of the ones who saw the relationships. “They believe the body speaks,” he says. “They seek to represent subjective experience and psychological states through a physical vocabulary comprising aspects such as gesture, posture, naturalism, and expressive distortion.”

Pondick’s sculptures combine forms from the human body — usually her own — with those from non-human animals. ARTnews critic Lilly Wei ascribed “disquieting psychological reverberations” to her sculptures, reverberations that “paradoxically attract and repel.”

Feintuch, meanwhile, situates unheroic older men in dreamlike settings that express vanity and vulnerability, and his work is consistently regarded as comic and rooted in psychological machinations.

“Feet Up” (2013) by Robert Feintuch, polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Now residents of New York City, they met at the Yale University School of Art. The �ֲ���ý exhibition comprises nine sculptures and a series of prints created by Pondick between 1998 and 2013, and 11 paintings that Feintuch made between 2007 and 2016.

Juxtaposing their artworks was something of a revelation to the couple. “One of the things that we’ve both been really struck by, between installing the show in Utah and then again here, is that it feels like our work goes together in a very interesting way,” says Pondick.

“Even though the work is approached so differently and our sensibilities are so different, we share so many interests that we complement each other in ways that are surprising to us. And that is both shocking and kind of intriguing,” given how long they’ve been together.

“We’re both interested in having people interpret the work,” says Feintuch — that is, look beyond the physical presence of a given piece. “That physical presence makes a lot of the meaning, but we also want people to think about what the work is about and what it feels like psychologically.

“I’ve had a wide range of interpretations of my work across the years, and none of them seem wrong to me. A lot of visual art is ambiguous in its meanings, and it’s one of the things I love about it.”

Art-historical references lend another dimension of meaning to their work. Pondick’s animal/human hybrid sculptures have a long lineage across many cultures, and Feintuch’s paintings often play with historical mythological and religious imagery.

Similarly, each combines age-old and cutting-edge technologies. Pondick employs three-dimensional scanning, computer imaging, carving, hand modeling, and traditional metal casting. Feintuch’s preparation for a painting has often mated hand-drawing from life with drawing on the computer and manipulating photographic material.

“Marmot” (1998-99) by Rona Pondick, silicone rubber, exhibition copy, edition of 6. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/ Salzburg; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

“Feintuch’s a terrific painter, whatever the subject,” Cate McQuaid wrote in a 2012 Boston Globe review. His works “wrestle with the debilitations and humiliations mortality imposes on us, but also with the possibility of grace, which we find in beauty and in hope.”

Reviewing “Heads, Hands, Feet” for Salt Lake City’s SLUG Magazine, Kathy Zhou wrote that Pondick recognizes the viewer’s “tendency to search for artworks’ distinctly human elements, and she embraces it, toying with the human form and the psychological themes it evokes in her audience.

“Her resulting sculptures are at times fantastical, at times unsettling and thoroughly difficult from which to avert your gaze.”

“Fat Hercules” (2011) by Robert Feintuch, polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Feintuch is a senior lecturer in the art and visual culture department. It’s fitting that he’s taking part in a �ֲ���ý exhibition himself during his final year as an active faculty member: Since he began at �ֲ���ý, in 1976, he has advised studio art majors as they spend their final year at �ֲ���ý making work for the annual Senior Thesis Exhibition. (For many of those years, Associate Professor Pamela Johnson has advised the seniors during the fall semester, and Feintuch during the winter.)

Pondick has co-taught with her husband at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, in Salzburg, Austria. “I’ve witnessed how easily Robert can connect in a very quick way with a student,” she says, “understanding what they should be looking at and asking them questions, so that they can start asking the questions that you need to ask when you’re in the studio alone.

“And it’s not easy to forget about your own prejudices and the way that you think, and say, ‘This is not the way I think, but how would I approach this?’ So that you can then help your students develop.”

“Which is one of the pleasures of teaching,” Feintuch responds. “It’s fun doing that.”