University of Oregon Department of Art MFA Thesis Exhibition Catalog

28 pagesEvery spring our graduating MFA candidates’ work emerges and activates the Art Department and the College of Design with an ethos of possibility and insight. Their creative research of new knowledge, or the rearrangement of old knowledge, brings with it the sense that a new day is rising. The 2021 MFA Thesis Exhibition culminates three years of independent research and experimentation by a cohort of eight artists whose various practices engage a broad range of inquiry, from expressions of the personal and diaristic to the examination and fictionalization of language, politics, and technology. While the world teetered this last year—fraught over the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, and political chaos these candidates focused on their practices as the world blurred. They’ve shaped new strategies to teach on-line, built new curriculum to communicate remotely, and cloistered in their studios articulating their practices all the while navigating crisis shared with the nation. As the pandemic ebbs I hope the MFA Graduates of 2021 move forward with a sense of not only a new day rising but a new world emerging