Making Place: Histories & Heritage and Politics & the Body

The Fine Arts department is delighted to invite you to our 2023 MFA thesis exhibition curated by Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio. 

Making Place: Histories & Heritage on view March 27–April 7
Opening reception: March 27, 2023 from 6pm-8pm, to attend the opening please register here.

Artists: Victoria Arthur, Jenna Arvelo, Yu Cheng, Note Davis- Barney, Mengyu Han, Shaun Haugen, NoormahJamal, Jimi Kabela, Longyuan Miao, Griffin Miller, Sonja Petermann, Miranda Ratner, Lauren Rauber, Monica Srivastava, Rodrigo Tafur, Ethan Tasa, Olivia Terian, Joe Turpin, Sarah Wang Pitts, Chang Xu, Shiyu Zhang.

Making Place: Politics & the Body on view April 24–May 5
Opening reception: April 24, 2023 from 6pm-8pm, to attend the opening please register here.

Artists: U Tong Ao Ieong, Jimin Baek, Alexander Brewington, Cameron  Burgoyne, Grace Einfeld,  Michelle Frick, Tim Kastelijns, Niousha Kiarashi, Moss Loke O’Connor, Katherine McElhiney, Gonzalo Miñano Paz, Blair Peters, Daniel Pravit Fethke, William Richmond, Merlin Sabal, nikki slota-terry, Thomas Tustin, Samuel Waxman, Qiaosen Yang, Sara Zielinski.

Gallery hours: Monday–Saturday from 12pm–6pm, at the Pfizer Building, 7th Floor, 630 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn, New York 11206

Pratt Institute MFA Fine Arts presents a two-part exhibition, Making Place. The forty-one artists in this exhibition are culture makers. Through their practice and work, they are delving into making a place for their collective and individual histories and the human spirit and mind. Working in a pandemic world, making place becomes a metaphor and an action, a constant realization of one’s societal agency. Through their works, many of the artists examine its effect on the world as we know it, the environmental and economic crisis, some through abstraction and found objects. In contrast, through painting, some decide to rewrite history, and through sculptures, installations, and performances, some expose the body’s vulnerability and spirit. And a few chose to wander outside their studios and engage with the community through alternative economic and social order and value systems. The works in the exhibition derive through a multitude of experiences, texts, and visual culture critically to examine the impression and effect ideas from different cultural perspectives. 

Inevitably, some art incites conversations that address ethical bio-cultural practices, political ecology, and the issues in representing the landscape, the body, and its histories. Others put to the forefront of their work the conversations around correctional facilities’ morality, treatment of our bodies, and navigating oppression and trauma, asking us to put into question the systems in place for more accountability and healing. They approach these through action-based works, sculptures, paintings, and installations. More subtle conversations about object making and what is to take space and make space for them, us, in a saturated world of excess. Some artists create a vortex into which one can momentarily exist in a digital world, or is it, in fact, the state we are inhabiting? In contrast, others imbue their work by exploring light as their subject, bringing awareness to the subtle shifts in time, space, and the self.

Frantz Fanon forewarns in The Wretched of the Earth, “each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity”. That’s what this intercultural and intergenerational group of artists in both exhibitions, Making Place: Histories & Heritage, and Making Place: Politics & the Body, continue unearthing its opaque mission with clarity within their practices, developing cultural images that will define our generation. Their works will make other images and alternate places that create the universes many of us and generations to come will experience. To gain self-representation, as they navigate questions such as who don’t I see?, the personal becomes political, the psychological becomes political, and the existence of their works continues making places. —curator, Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio.

Pratt Institute MFA Fine Arts
Pratt Institute’s interdisciplinary MFA program in Fine Arts provides advanced education for artists supported by a distinguished faculty, exceptional facilities, and a supportive community of peers. Driven by exploration and enriched by the abundance and inspiration of New York City, Pratt’s critically engaged faculty respond to each student’s individual practice, fostering their development within the diverse cultures and myriad practices of contemporary art-making.  Faculty and students build close relationships through structured studio visits, seminars, and informal conversations. These relationships create a vital community and supportive network that endures long after graduation. The curriculum is both rigorous and flexible, offering wide latitude for exploration while fostering critical perspectives and a deeper understanding of the histories, issues, cultural, and transdisciplinary contexts that inform art practices today. 

Pratt shows 2023
Pratt Shows are public exhibitions and presentations by Pratt Institute’s graduating classes. Representing years of research, exploration, critical thinking, creative inquiry, problem-solving, growth, production, practice, and accomplishment, the shows celebrate student work leading up to Commencement in May.