Emerging from a forever-altered landscape in 2021, the graduating MFA students at American University are proud to present Free Punch & Pie. This exhibition showcases artworks that investigate the artists’ intimate experiences with their personal biographies combined with more open understandings about the intersection of history, memory, place, power, and identity. Working within a range of media practices including mixed media, drawing, painting, photography, and performance, this group of artists reframes what it means to produce contemporary art in a world that has been faced with devastating loss, uncertainty, grief, and rebuilding on numerous levels. Together, they work to show that art does move forward and allows space for finding solace, hope, transformation, and inspiration from the knowns and unknowns of what life brings to us all.
Throughout this exhibition, each artist takes a unique approach to express their enthusiasm with processes of artmaking and create works that engage with positive reflection and care. There are several themes and issues that arise in their art such as the exploration of memories, emotions, and personal relationships through depicted objects and experiences, tracing patterns of domestic and spiritual labor, depicting the beauty contained within unspoken acts, and the creation of extraordinary moments from ordinary objects and environments. Others include combining the fantastical and realism to explore lived experiences and politics of white womanhood, humanity, and impulse, examining vulnerability in landscapes and bodies faced by trauma and commercial development, and engaging with humor through historical portraiture to call attention to present and past issues of masculinity, power, ego, and whiteness. Within all of these explorations, the artists reconfigure and confront what they experience, see, and feel that results in something new, imaginative, and beautiful.
By Jessica Tackes
AU Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition
Just as we settle into the challenging intimacies and critical demands of graduate school, we find ourselves leaving this cocooned community and entering a world forever changed by 2020.The global pandemonium profoundly altered our lives and transformed our studio practices.The world needs time to change and reveal itself. Let’s relish the idea that art does not stop,celebrate our work, and share some Free Punch & Pie.
www.american.edu/cas/museum/2021/free-punch-and-pie.cfm