Art and Art History MFA thesis exhibition

The 2020 thesis exhibition features the artworks of MFA candidates in Columbia College Chicago’s Art and Art History Department. This exhibition, scheduled to take place at the Glass Curtain Gallery, has been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. In response, the Department of Exhibitions, Performance, and Student Spaces (DEPS) has created an Artist Profile Series providing an in-depth look at the projects alongside interviews that provide a deep glimpse into the artists process. Participating artists include: Julia Arredondo, Mary Gring, Rebecca Grace Hill, Selena Ingram, Maria VanDyken Li, Skye Murie, and Andrew Shoemaker. 

Julia Arredondo
Julia Arredondo is currently launching an independent media channel, QTVC Live!, which focuses on live arts sales by underrepresented makers. Formally trained in printmaking and specializing in artistic forms of independent publishing, and heavily influenced by the small, family-based businesses she grew up around, Arredondo founded Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press as her entrepreneurial debuts.

Mary Gring
Mary Gring combines performance, video, projection and sculpture to create immersive multimedia installations about health, illness, and self-care. Through a willful repetition of actions, text, mark-making, and audio, Gring attempts to regain some control over her illness to reach a place of radical self-acceptance. Her performances, videos, sculptures, and installations serve as a way of re-establishing boundaries. 

Rebecca Grace Hill
Rebecca Grace Hill’s work focuses on reframing personal narratives, especially ones of grief, pain, or loss. Collapsing Distance: A Correspondence is an autobiographical 30-year narrative that explores meaningful places, significant life events, and the connections and synchronicities among them. This work examines the impact of increased mobility and globalization, and proposes material objects as a tool for resilience. 

Selena Ingram
Selena Ingram is an artist and researcher whose work explores the ways in which overlapping physical, social, and cultural ecosystems surround our bodies. Fragile Morphologies of Pulp Bodies is an installation of handmade paper that functions as a mirror to the ongoing interchanges between our bodies, water and domestic environments.

Maria VanDyken Li
In Cantonese for Midwestern Wives, Maria VanDyken Li reflects on the complexities of her family’s simultaneous regional and global identities. This illustrated dialogue between her and her husband presented as an interactive multimedia sculpture offers a contemporary representation of companionship, and in their particular case, an intercultural marriage.

Skye Murie
Skye Murie is a theatrical producer, director, multidisciplinary visual artist and illustrator who is interested in telling stories that deal with issues of feminism, friendship, family history, intergenerational trauma, queer identity and belonging. Her collaborative, design driven performance project: Collector is a dark comedy and features shadow puppetry, dance sequences, and elements of slapstick and clowning.

Andrew Shoemaker
Andrew Shoemaker works in digital media and sound, enjoys long walks on the beach in google maps, and playing the electric guitar. For this exhibition, he presents Internet: The Aesthetics of Laziness (and/or Competition), aka, sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to hang out with your friends and have fun, aka, if we can’t form bonds with people at least there have been 12,800 bonds formed by glue, aka, untitled various noise altering items.

MFA in Fine Art
The Fine Arts MFA offers students mentorship from professional artists/educators, professional practice development, and opportunities to teach while engaging in national and international conversations on contemporary art. With world-renowned galleries and alternative spaces in the nation’s third-largest city, Chicago is an ideal and affordable location for artists to develop their studio practice while building industry connections. The program’s entrepreneurial focus will ready students to succeed at the intersection of creative and business practice while learning from studio artists immersed in their fields. Designed for students working in diverse materials, concepts, and techniques, the program offers an interdisciplinary experience and a collaborative space for critique and professional growth. The MFA program includes on-campus studio space, access to the college’s 15,000-square-foot fabrication facility, and mentorship from notable faculty artists, including: Adam Brooks, Paul Catanese, Joan Giroux, Duncan MacKenzie, Melissa Potter, and Folayemi Wilson.

About Columbia College Chicago
Columbia College Chicago is a private, nonprofit college offering a distinctive curriculum that blends creative and media arts, liberal arts and business for nearly 7,500 students in more than 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Dedicated to academic excellence and long-term career success, Columbia College Chicago creates a dynamic, challenging and collaborative space for students who experience the world through a creative lens.

For more information, please visit colum.edu/artmfa or contact the MFA Program Director, Paul Catanese at pcatanese [​at​] colum.edu.