If you walk into the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition expecting a finale or a big conclusion, prepare to encounter something else—something quieter and less resolved. A residue. A gesture mid-motion. An echo.
When I walked into the opening reception on April 11, I was immediately haunted by my own MFA thesis exhibition from a year ago. I walked out thinking the same thing I did then: an MFA show is never an endpoint. This year’s VCUarts graduates didn’t synthesize their two years into finished works—they made visible the process of moving through limbo. This isn’t closure. It’s what lingers. What seeps out. What sticks with you after the lights go down and the degree is framed.
Held across both the Anderson Gallery and the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) from April 11 to May 11, the exhibition features 26 MFA candidates working in Craft/Material Studies, Graphic Design, Kinetic Imaging, Painting + Printmaking, Photography + Film, and Sculpture + Extended Media. It is the first time the exhibition has expanded to the ICA, and the shift feels significant. This simultaneous, full-institutional format—curated by Egbert Vongmalaithong (ICA), guest curator Misa Jeffereis (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis), and Chase Westfall (VCUarts Qatar)—amplifies the show’s reach and spatial rhythm. It opens space. For uncertainty. For fragmentation. For labor.
Every work feels as though it is going through something. Nothing is static. Nothing rests. Materials pull at the body and the eye—there is tactility, motion, repetition, lightness, weight. I watched as people crouched, knelt, leaned close, tilted their heads. They talked about the work, but conversations drifted into childhood, design, regret, ambition. In this sense, the exhibition succeeds not only as a presentation of graduate work but as a situation: a place where ideas germinate rather than bloom.
What struck me is how much of this show is grounded in craftsmanship and labor-intensive making. VCUarts has long been known for its rigorous studio practices, and that ethos is present in every room. However, despite the diversity of media, something else unites this exhibition: a collective commitment to concept. Every artwork appears underlined by an idea. Whether explicitly political, historical, autobiographical, or relational, each piece signals its critical framework.
And that’s where my questions begin.
What does it mean that so much contemporary graduate work insists on conceptual grounding? Is there still space for artwork rooted solely in formal play, material pleasure, or aesthetic inquiry? We are, in many ways, at a point of great openness—where boundaries between media have eroded, where process, research, and participation are all valid forms. But perhaps the opposite has also happened—perhaps in becoming conceptually inclusive, we have unconsciously erected a new standard. Has the MFA—as both a degree and a container—come to imply that art must speak, respond, and problematize?
Maybe that’s not surprising. We live in a time of urgency—social, interpersonal, institutional. To make art without acknowledging that context can feel irresponsible, even indulgent. But I also wonder what is lost when the insistence on critical framing becomes habit rather than choice.
I kept returning to the idea that art positions itself to displace. To create a felt awareness of friction—between what is and what could be. But I wonder, too, if we are now so aware—so saturated by discourse, politics, crisis, history—that we are afraid to let anything go unspoken. Even the sensorial. Even the joyful. Even the futile.
The exhibition left me with the feeling of liminality—an apt state for artists on the verge of graduation, yes, but also for art itself in 2025. The work was full of memory, of sensing, of excavation. It operated in the spaces between disciplines and between opacities. There was performance. There was intervention. There were moments of light and shadow—literal and conceptual—that asked the viewer not to look at the work, but with it. And still, the show resonates. In part because it doesn’t offer answers, only residues. What stays is not a single image or piece. What stays is the sense of having passed through something carefully, together, without being told exactly where to land.
During my visit, I spoke with a woman named Wendy, who works in product design—her practice adjacent to, but not inside, what we call fine art. She told me that coming to exhibitions like this reminds her to shift, to re-approach. “It brings me back,” she said. I understood what she meant. We spoke, too, about the impulse to go back in time and do things differently—to revise the past. But maybe the only reason we have that new perspective now is because of what we lived through. That conversation echoed others I’ve had with peers after graduating from my own MFA program. Again, we return to the feeling of limbo—a show like this is not the conclusion of an MFA. It is what permeates after. What remains. What sticks.
The 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition features the work of: Alex K. Bacon, Rasim Bayramov, Catherine Chen, Debra Dowden-Crockett, Amy Duval, Molly Garrett, Tariye George-Phillips, Häsler Gómez, brooklin grantz, David Guarnizo, Madeleine Herisson-Leplae, Aleckxi Hristou-Dorhofer, Aya Khalife, Sina Khani, Yvonne LeBien, Lars Mattingly, A. Neuscheler, Rebecca Oh, Tyna Ontko, Diego Pablo Málaga, Hannah Rotwein, Anne Sarachan, Suzy Slykin, Quinn Standley, Weitong “ShanMu” Sun, and Wren Tiffany.
Their work stretches across surfaces and ideas, suspending us in a state that mirrors their own: somewhere between formation and emergence. The exhibition does not tie a bow on the MFA experience. It permeates it. What’s on view is not what has been completed, but what is carried forward.
This is not the cherry on top. This is the weight in the hand after the gift is gone.
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