Home Landings: 1st year MFA Exhibition

The MFA Art Practice first year show introduces our incoming cohort of five students to Stanford through an exhibition of new artwork created in the short time since arriving on campus in the fall. This group found a common thread in their diverse practices in reorienting towards and from home. Each of these artists reclaim their identities as they look closely at their places of origin and unpack the oppressive systems and intergenerational trauma that have shaped their experiences. For some, this is a transnational experience of migration, colonialism, assimilation, and language barriers. Materials play an important conceptual role across their practices whether it is adobe used in traditional architecture to heal a haunted house, a pulley that is drawing us towards honoring our chosen home, or a rope that once tied us to historical legacies of marginalization can also ground us in a new sense of peace and belonging. These artists center and give shape to the past by reimagining what home can be today. - Associate Professor Terry Berlier, Curator

Coulter Art Gallery

On View: February 21 - March 17

Monday - Friday, 11:00am - 5:00pm

Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 22, 4-6 pm

Joanna Keane Lopez (1991, Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reclaims relationships to craft architecture of land as a form of medicine, a blessing and a spell. Her work with large scale installation, vernacular architecture and sculpture is informed through the use of the materials of adobe, alíz, clay, dyes and paper and often collaborative performance. Through the passing down of knowledge of vernacular architectural techniques of the greater Southwest, Keane Lopez creates work that seeks healing and questions land use and memory that is connected to her own multi-generational roots in New Mexico. Keane Lopez has exhibited nationally at institutions which include: The Momentary of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, SITE Santa Fe, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Sarasota Art Museum and has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Wendy Liu (she/her) is a visual artist working with printmaking, drawing, and installation. Her practice explores aspects of assimilation, accessibility, and language. Currently she is researching the effects of familial immigrant relationships with their second generation children. 

Jessica Monette (1986, New Orleans) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the elusiveness of heritage and the multiplicitous implications of colonialism through the aesthetics and materiality of painting, sculpture and installations. Underpinning her work is the phenomenology of Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans, 2005), extracted through architectural manifestations that investigate historical and contemporary systems of subjugation.

Yunfei Ren (1987, Wuhan, China) is a visual artist living in San Francisco, working in installation, photography, sound and sculpture. His work centers on the immigrant experience, exploring the complexity of identity and belonging in the context of history, citizenship and queerness. Inspired by his personal experience, Ren's practice investigates the history of racial prejudice and heightens the tension between the past and the present. His work is recently exhibited at de Young Museum, Chinese Historical Society Museum, and is featured in the Washington Post.

Pablo Tut (Campeche, México, 13/09/1992) Is a multidisciplinary artist from the Peninsula of Yucatan. His works spans through multiple media such as drawing, sculpture, installation art, and cultural management. His installation artwork designs spaces that expand the possibilities of perception in public spaces — generating dynamics of spatial and ideological contrast, like oriels or constructions that are dislocated from the place they inhabit, creating new spaces to gather around and watch. The core themes of his work involve the struggles of the working class and counter-responses against the biases of colonial spaces and speeches. The materiality, presentation, and location of his projects conform to a way of involving the spectator in unstable positions— as a way of questioning the biopolitical and neo-colonial structures latent in our lives.

Installation: February 6 - 10, Deinstallation: March 20 - 21

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Coulter Art Gallery is located at 355 Roth Way, in the McMurtry Building of the Stanford campus. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle.

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