“The New School is, at its heart, a contradiction: at once an intricate and disorderly bureaucracy, a monolithic institution, a scrappy insurgency, a venerable newcomer, an official dissident. Perhaps its inherent tension is what makes The New School a site of possibility, which is also always the site of inevitable failure. It is where we group in the crevices of power: where we are complicit and compromised, within and against, always ambivalent, unable to resist and resistant nonetheless.”
-Macushla Robinson and Anna Harsanyi, “In the Historical Presence (An Essay in Tenses)”, 2019
This exhibition, Making Time, invites us to reflect on the ways we define ourselves beyond the immediacy of daily tasks and institutional demands. It asks: how do we carve out space for ourselves and our own creative impulses amid the pressures of deadlines, spreadsheets, meetings, and the relentless pace of institutional life? How do we reclaim the time to connect with what truly matters to us as individuals?
For many participants, Making Time has offered the chance to reconnect with their creative practice after time away, while others are sharing their work publicly for the very first time. In both cases, the act of showing becomes a way of re-establishing one’s relationship to making, and of bringing that practice into dialogue with colleagues across the university. Relationships and friendships have taken root across departments, reminding us that creativity is not only about individual expression but also about building community.
Across all themes, what emerges is a portrait of staff as multidimensional creators— not only in what they make but in how they navigate labor, identity, and imagination. Their work is testimony to the fact that creative practice is not separate from our roles, but deeply intertwined with the lived experience of working within and alongside an institution.
Making Time asks us to reconsider the value of time itself—not only as a resource to be managed, but as a medium of transformation, care, and possibility.
co-curator
Molly Davy
childhood & MEMORY
This theme explores memory not as a static archive, but as a shifting, sometimes dreamlike realm where nostalgia, discomfort, and wonder intermingle.
Personal archives, inherited objects, and sensorial materials are used to make memory tangible.
The works in the exhibition conjure the textures, sounds, and emotional terrain of childhood to navigate how early experiences shape creative identity.
Essay by Molly Davy
From The New School Archives: a doodle drawing on the back of a fax.
As part of our research for this exhibition, we turned to The New School Archives to search for documentation of the creative practices of staff. We hoped to find traces of how staff have contributed not only to the daily functioning of the university, but also to its creative and cultural life. What we encountered instead was a notable absence. While the collections are reflective of faculty and student work across the decades, as well as institutional milestones, the presence of staff is strikingly faint. Their absence underscores how certain forms of labor, though essential to the life of the university, often slip from the record of institutional memory.
Where staff do appear, the traces are fleeting yet meaningful. In administrative and institutional correspondence, their names surface as coordinators and facilitators in the background of larger decisions. For example, in the 1980s, staff were acknowledged in invitations to holiday parties, credited with helping to organize gatherings that contributed to the social life of the university (Parsons School of Design Administrative Offices Collection | Box 1, Folder 3) . Following September 11, 2001, a Human Resources invitation for a staff support session appears – one of the rare moments where staff were directly addressed as a community (Announcements and invitations, 1930-2004 | Box 2, Folder 1). The former school publication Parsons Paper includes occasional references to staff members, though these mentions remain brief (Parsons [newsletter] | Box 2 Folder 27).
For a curator, this silence is significant. The archive does not merely reflect history; it shapes the narratives we construct about who matters within an institution. The limited representative traces encourage reflection on the broader dynamics of visibility and recognition, and inspire an intentional effort for us to work with The New School Archives in documenting this exhibition. By foregrounding staff contributions, we aim not only to recover overlooked histories in the archive, but also to begin reimagining a space that more fully honors all those who sustain and shape the life of an institution.
PLAY AS Creative Strategy
This theme reflects work from the exhibition that experiments, improvises, and explores materials as tools for creative inquiry, generating meaning through unexpected processes and open-ended engagement.
Here, play is not framed as an escape, but as an essential mode of engagement—one that resists rigidity, welcomes contradiction, and broadens the possibilities of creative practice. It pushes against norms, sparks curiosity, and reimagines the potential of art.
Creative essay by Ella Desmond
Goals for Frequently Asked Questions
6 items
Where will my performance be saved?
In a space to contain your experience.
When is my performance understood? Continuously, or as your manager’s.
How do I prepare for my performance?
No. The check-in refers to the performance.
Would you comment further?
I would, if reasonably practicable.
Why am I facing forward?
That’s normal. That is expected.
What is one fun fact you can share about yourself?
You’ll be able to view it at any time. Thank you!
Ancestry & Lineage
This theme invites reflection on how identity is shaped by what we inherit—stories, landscapes, rituals, and silences passed down through family, culture, and collective memory. Works in the exhibition mine personal and historical archives, engaging with ancestry as layered terrain to navigate, question, and reimagine.
Excerpt of an interview with Jonathan Yubi, Molly Davy, and Shannon Finnell
EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN YUBI
WITH CURATORS MOLLY DAVY & SHANNON FINNELL
M: So if you could invite anyone to a dinner party – a dinner party of the mind, right – who would the people be?
J: So it’s funny, I rented this book from the public library. It’s called America After the Fall – what an ominous title, but it’s referring to America after the Wall Street crash, and America during the throes of the Great Depression, sort of thinking about that, and what American art emerged from that. I’ve been playing with that in my mind a lot. What is American Art? What is Americana? I’ve always found it to be a very solitary, very lonely idea, America. Americanism, this idea of exceptionalism, of individualism, it’s lonely.
J: There’s this melancholy that I’ve seen, if you think of traditional American artists, if you think of Andrew Wyatt, of Edward Hopper, these quintessential American artists, their work is so sad. And it translates into American life now, like, if you look at a family raised here versus a family raised, I’m gonna say Ecuador, because that’s my scope of of experience, my family is a very extended family, uncles and aunts and cousins and grandpas and here it’s like a mom, a dad, one or two kids, maybe an uncle, and that’s that, that’s the extent of family life. And so I think that sort of translates into the art, into media, videos, music, painting, sculptures. There’s this very sad loneliness to American work.
M: It makes me think so much about a collection like the Whitney or even MoMA too. First thing that comes to mind is [Andrew] Wyeth’s Christina’s World, or something like it. These paintings show so much space and expanse, and it’s one single person alone, crouching in this position, you know, and completely overwhelmed by the rest of the canvas is that what you’re kind of thinking in terms of loneliness?
J: Yeah, yeah, there’s solitary figures. Sometimes there’s one or two people in a painting, and even when there are a lot of people, they seem like they’re alone. They’re together in a space, but they’re alone within their own world.
S: So when you think about the amount of people in your paintings, do you think about the community and the community that you are in when you paint all those people, and would you invite them to your dinner?
J: I would love to. My mom raised me in a big community. We had a house where we had people flowing in and out. And I’m going to tie this back to inviting people to a dinner party. I swear I just remembered that was the original prompt.
M: Don’t worry about it.
J: Alright, it would be Diego [Rivera] and Frida [Kahlo] together, not alone – I want them as a package deal.
J: I would invite and I’m gonna – this guy here [holds up book], Eduardo Galeano, this is a translated version of his book. My father-in-law introduced me to his work. He’s a writer, my father-in-law, and he loves, of course, books. He introduced me to this book called Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. It’s about Latin America and how despite it being a resource-rich country, it has many poor regions. It’s about South American countries full of poverty and how it got that way and spoilers: It was The Imperial Powers. So I would love to talk to him. I would love to pick his brain.
J: And then, of course, I’d invite you both Shannon would probably do some karaoke? Yeah, probably Diego and Frida doing karaoke with you. I’d probably pop open a bottle of wine and hang out talking with Molly. And yeah, that’d be the dinner party. Each of you would need to invite one other person.
M: Okay, that’s something. So if you’ve provided this list, Shannon, who would be your plus one, knowing that these were the guests?
S: Well, as someone who reads a lot, I was immediately thinking about, Oh my gosh, hold on.
J: Not so good being in the hot seat, is it?
S: I know, I know, I just always get this name–Gabriel García Márquez. I feel like a little bit of surrealism and magical realism in there, so to link the artists with this historical writer might be nice. Or if we wanted more of a contemporary author, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, she wrote this beautiful book called Mexican Gothic, and it’s a spooky, magical horror book and a beautifully written book. But she’s more contemporary, which might be nice to add to the dinner.
M: I like that. I’m just taking notes on our guests. A lot of them.
J: My internet connection is unstable. I’m gonna move out of this room.
S: That’s okay. It gives Molly a moment to think about who you would invite as your plus one.
M: My guest would be José Clemente Orozco. He would fit really well into conversation with these other people for many different reasons, but also, I feel like I want some institutional history and knowledge of what it was like to work at the New School in the 1930s.I don’t think he was even formally paid for [the mural]. He kind of did it out of the goodness of his own heart.
J: We could maybe ask him why he didn’t paint a bigger mural.
Grief Transformation Phases &
Grief is not a fixed state but a process—one that moves through silence, rupture, reflection, and renewal. This theme grapples with creative practice as a way to mark loss, channel memory, and trace the shifting contours of transformation. Works in this exhibiton engage with sorrow not simply as absence, but as a space of potential, where healing, change, and deeper understanding can take root.
Excerpt from interview between Luke Alan Davis and Megan Stroech
Luke
Give me all of that! But yeah. And then and having conversation with with friends, they’re like, oh, I can’t. And I’m like, is your attention span that, like, it is very interesting that like.
Megan Yeah.
Luke
People now like we, we just moved so quickly on to the next thing and there’s no, I don’t kn- investment. I don’t know. I’m almost. And I’m kind of OK with And and maybe that’s also I think that’s also part of it is like being able to sit with something that’s uncomfortable. Am I also think now so? Also, sorry I didn’t bring this up earlier, but I… think So I lost both of my parents in the last four years due to cancer and then a mix of diabetes, alcohol and a broken heart, but like I did put a pause on a lot of my making because of that, but it was because of, you know, I was still journaling and I still had all of that to, like, go back to but I think this attention span of just kind of like being able to sit with grief and fully feel it and not try to like cover it up and I feel now I feel like I have a well of stuff to then pull from because I have allowed, I’ve allowed my attention span to just kind of like…Sit. And think and process and I mean really kind of go through that full grieving, whatever. But then now I’m like, OK, there’s still life around that. And where, where do I..? How can I make and move from here? Yeah.
Megan
I uhh, yeah. I… I lost my mom. Just over 2 years ago now to cancer. And I know exactly what you mean. Like I, I reached this point where I was just like well, having to go back and forth to care for her, but just like feel like ok, these are - this might be the last Thanksgiving. This might be the last whatever. And so I was going back and forth to Texas so much and just not having that constant routine of like studio time and then when she passed it was just like I kind of felt like she is… like, what is the point? What is the point of any of it? And it was really hard to even get back in the studio…to want to do anything. But then yeah, like with her being gone, I think I’m now realizing how much she has always been a part of my work. Sorry, I’m not - I’m not trying to get emotional, you know. But I know, I know. Being able to sit with it and I think, I mean this.Thankfully, in some ways it is like my first like very big loss and so I truly never knew what it was like until it happened.
Luke
Yes.
Megan
And now realizing how much our culture just wants to move on. Like they say, I’m so sorry. They send you flowers or they bring you food and then it’s like you’re immediately supposed to be OK. And even I feel like if I’m at work or I’m with friends and I like, bring up something that makes me think of my mom, I almost feel like people just want to move past it because they’re afraid that it’s going to make me upset or something and yeah it’s just, it feels so different now, like being on this this side of things. And I feel so much more that I can relate more intimately with other people because you’ve experienced this and like we’re [you and I are] both young, you know? It’s this place where we’re not super young, but we’re not old enough to where it’s normal that you would lose your parents already. And so it’s kind of this weird place.
Luke
Exactly, yeah.
Megan
I thought my mom would be here for this.
y Cles
Re-sourci n g & lairetaM
In a world defined by overproduction and waste, many artists reclaim discarded materials not only to reduce harm but to reimagine value, beauty, and utility. Their practices reflect a commitment to material consciousness—where sourcing, process, and transformation are as central as final form.
Works in this exhibiton propose a material practice rooted in awareness, adaptability, and care.
One new - 2024 June 6, 2025
1 hour : 2 fixed lamps, one small zap
One old - 1950s?
Creative essay by Hannah Baker and Eva Warne
Our Separate Lamp Adventures since Meeting
Eva: Coffee Shop Community Board - After how much I enjoyed our meet up to perform lamp surgery, I was interested in this sign that appeared at my nearby coffee shop.
After reaching out to the number, I texted some info about what materials they needed and how to go about fixing it. I was hoping to meet up to teach them a bit more, but hopefully they got the information needed to fix their lamp.
I am very passionate about keeping objects, for environmental and sentimental reasons.
The idea that I can help prevent an object from going into a landfill is what motivesme to fix or repurpose household items and found objects. This also motivates my art practice. Using found materials, family heirlooms, offcuts, discarded hardware, past unfinished projects, & anything that has future value in
Designing lamps or adding lighting to objects adds an element of functionality that always inspires me.
My past work and my piece for the staff art show ….
Hannah:
I am also on a lamp prowl, nearly everywhere I go. Lampshades are also my mind and I am looking for a match for the lamp I made with Eva!
One of the lamps actually needs another repair, the original elements we were working with are too damaged to be safe.
Meeting up with Eva Parts 1 and 2: Hannah’s thoughts
Part 1:
Eva and I jumped into lamp fixing with a few simple tools. There are a couple rules of thumb: there is a gold screw and a silver screw that connect to each side of the cord. The cord has two tubes that are joined together that can be split without exposing the wires. The smooth side of the cord goes to the gold screw and the ridged to the silver. I came up with a mnemonic to help me remember: silver hair comes with wrinkles (ridges). Gold is just the other one.
We tested a couple of iterations of connections to see which parts of my old lamp were not working. We got faked out and it seemed like all of them worked but when I took them home, alas, one piece really was broken. Good news: it was installed on the lamp that does not yet have a lamp shade and my previously broken lamp is now working perfectly.
I have spent time in the woodshop before, but never while actually working on a project. I was so grateful for the chance to use some tools and talk through the process with Eva.
Part 2:
Perhaps this is a lamp show?
What are the collective ages of all the objects in Eva’s piece? Could be shown on the exhibition label.
Taking videos of the egg and the egg breaking. Just generally I need to document my own practice more effectively. Looking at some of Eva’s intergenerational tools made me think about noting the date on works that I make and creating a more intentional archive of things I do and try. Glaze combos, notes on clay bodies, etc. I am great at aspirational lists, but not as proficient at reflective ones.
Meeting up with Hannah: Eva’s thoughts
Egg Throwing:
Breaking The Egg:
QUEERNESS EXPANSIVE IDENITY &
Queerness is not a fixed identity, but a way of seeing, feeling, and making that resists containment. This theme draws from queer experience to explore fluidity, multiplicity, and the radical act of self-definition. Works in the exhibition challenge dominant narratives, creating space for transformation, ambiguity, and the invention of new forms of being.
Visual essay by teke cocina and Emma Fashing
Intersections Fractals of Experience |
This theme honors work that lives in multiplicity—layered, interdisciplinary, and rooted in intersecting identities and experiences. The work in the exhibition reveals complex constellations of influence, emotion, memory, and form.
Like fractals, these practices repeat and evolve across scale and theme, reflecting the richly entangled nature of lived experience.
Essay by Gummy Nichols on the work of Joe Hosking
GABRIELA
Gabriela is an interdisciplinary textile artist based in New York. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, she graduated from Wellesley College in 2023 with a B.A. in Studio Art and Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently a staff member and Master of Fine Arts student at Parsons School of Design.
Her work explores traditions of handicraft. Through examining textile-based practices of South West Asia and North Africa, she seeks to ultimately confront ideas of family, loss, and diaspora. By integrating both analog and digital methods into her practice, she hopes to create a contemporary, intercultural expanse in which the motifs and decorations of the Levant may inhabit. Her work often intersects text and image, with a particular focus on preserving objects, places, and moments found in the digital landscape. While she is primarily a weaver, she also works with various forms of soft sculpture, quilting, embroidery, and printmaking.
BAKER
Hannah Baker is a ceramist working out of Mouse Ceramic Studio in Brooklyn, where she first started lessons in 2021. She typically creates fit-for-purpose pots, but has dabbled in both decorative and fine art pieces.
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cocina
teke cocina is a interdisciplinary artist living in New York City working primarily in printmaking and book arts, often in iterative series. A lifelong New York State resident, he received his BFA from the University at Buffalo and MFA from Purchase College. His work is about dogs peeing, violence, closeness, affection, confusion, memory, public space, hands, books, queer life, trees, finding faces, Goltzius, photography, friends, lovers, horses, cartoons, feet, portals, stars, face swapping, imaginary bodies, type, etc. You can often catch his work at local Art Book Fairs, including his favorite, the New York Queer Zine Fair. He is listed on the White Columns Curated Artist Registry since 2023. He currently works at Parsons Making Center in the Printshop.
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Curt Confer is a visual artist who uses his body to translate language into slow sequences of movement, inviting visitors into a shared space to reflect on themes of loss, memory, and interconnectivity. Using texts from queer theory, philosophy, and poetry, Curt interprets these texts through the frame of his body, moving quietly or whispering within live tableaus made of light, sound, and found materials. His work also includes drawings and videos that further his exploration of how embodied knowledge is held onto and exchanged.
Curt graduated from Hamilton College in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University in 2007. Since then he has exhibited at several institutions and galleries including Columbia University, The School of Visual Arts, Carrie Able Gallery, and Site:Brooklyn, among others. Curt currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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LUKE ALAN
DAVIS
Luke Alan Davis b. 1991 (Oklahoma, USA)
Performer, photographer, & conversationalist based in Brooklyn, New York. His creative practice is a continuous dialogue between the realms of memory/nostalgia, performance, & identity.
In search of belonging.
lukealandavis.com
@___lukedavis
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ELLA
DESMOND
Her studio practice spans traditional and alternative printmaking mediums, performance, video and creative writing. Desmond has been a faculty member at the Parsons School of Design since 2019, where she teaches in printmaking, artists’ books and illustration. She is a three-time recipient of the Parsons Staff Development Fund. Desmond has also led workshops at the Peters Valley School of Craft and MoMAZoZo in New Mexico. She will be teaching a course on artists books at Marymount Manhattan College in Fall 2025.
Ella Desmond is a multidisciplinary artist, printmaker and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she received her BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University in 2013 and her MFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2017. Desmond’s work has been shown most recently in an exhibition at the LICA Art Space (2025) and the public art festival Terrain Biennial: Mycelium Connection in Newburgh (2023).
elladesmond.com @alliheardwasella
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EMMA
FASHING
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Emma Fashing is a self-taught artist who enjoys experimenting with paint, wood, clay, and found materials. Her work is inspired by relationships in her life and moral dilemmas. She is affirmed and influenced by many folk and outsider artists. The second child of five, she is originally from Missouri/Wisconsin. She received her Bachelor of Social Work from UW-Madison in 2013 and a Technical Diploma in Cabinetmaking from Madison Area Technical College during the 2020 Pandemic. She has been in Brooklyn, NY since 2016 and will pursue her Master of Fine Arts at Parsons in Fall 2025.
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LACIE
Lacie Garnes (she/her) is an artist, educator, and arts worker specializing in photography and experimental film. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, exploring themes such as familial landscapes, surveillance and voyeurism, and queer belonging. Lacie holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Bowling Green State University. She has taught and worked at prominent institutions, including Parsons, SAIC, and SVA. In her free time, Lacie enjoys flyfishing and creating art inspired by the rivers she visits.
@laciegarnes
GAUVIN
Tanner Gauvin (they/he) is a visual artist based in New York and Boston. In 2018, they graduated with a BFA in Painting from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts with two minors in arts leadership and sociology. During their time at BU, they studied painting and art history abroad in Venice, Italy. After graduating, they worked as a Teaching Assistant and Studio Coordinator, ad interim, for Harvard University’s department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. Gauvin is currently working as a Program Administrator in the School of Art, Media, and Technology working particularly with BFA/MFA Fine Arts and MS Data Visualization programs.
In their work, rooted in painting and installation, they seek to combine digital media, objects, and graphic forms with painting and human touch in a language that oscillates between them while forcing them together.
tannergauvin.com
MARÍA DEL MAR HERNÁNDEZ
GIL DE LAMADRID
María del Mar Hernández Gil de Lamadrid is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist and educator based between Puerto Rico and New York. Using photography, video, and performance as a creative and conceptual process, her work approaches ideas of home and memory, colonial history, and climate change in a Caribbean context. She is a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, from Parsons School of Design, The New School, NYC, and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.
mariadelmargil.com @lamadrid_gil
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Photoville, Brooklyn, and Pingyao International Photography Festival, China. Recently, she participated in the group exhibitions I come from a place…, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Under Our Feet As Above Our Heads, The Revival Romanesque Row House Gallery, both in New York. Her work has been featured in Nueva Luz Photographic Journal and LatinX Spaces magazine.
KASIA
Memory exists between reality and fiction, between the past and the present. Kasia Hope is a Polish artist who creates structures and objects that are gateways into the ephemeral world of memories, grounding them for others to experience. Through different mediums and scales, she creates interactive, narrative environments.
She has been included in multiple shows at the 25East Gallery in New York, NY. Her recent exhibitions include Scythia International Textile and Fibre Art Biennial, Scythia Fibre Art, IvanoFrankivs’k, Ukraine (2024); BBLAUR Double Digits, We Are Here, Brooklyn, NY (2023); multiplayer, Retramp Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); solo show a home for us, Officina Neukölln, Berlin, Germany (2022); multiple shows throughout her residency at Textilmidstod, Blönduós, Iceland (2022). Currently based in Brooklyn, she is a technician, professor, and MFA Fine Arts candidate and The New School. Hope received her BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021.
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JOE
HOSKING
Joe Hosking has always been inspired by the creativity and kindness of his mother who was a graphic designer and a draftsman. Growing up he watched her doodle on the notepads stacked next to their phone and, from an early age, he could tell she was really good. Her drawings were faces, profiles and full faces. Hosking studied and copied them closely, and that’s how he learned how to draw eyes, noses, mouths – people.
She put him to work—at age three and a half— on the family’s Christmas card, a job he still has to this day.
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JILLIAN
Jillian Hurley is an interdisciplinary fibers artist and designer. She has worked in a range of industries relating to art, education, textiles, and design since earning her BFA in Fibers from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a concentration in weaving. In addition to her studio manager position, Hurley is a part time faculty member; teaching Weaving and Textiles.
Hurley’s professional experience and personal practice has inspired her work, which investigates the interplay between making as research, conceptual sculpture, craftsmanship, and utility.
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CASEY
KAUFMAN
Casey Kaufman is a multidisciplinary photographic artist in Brooklyn, NY. Casey’s work engages in the connections between photography, memory and political history. In an effort to understand his Jewish origins and family history in the United States and their relationship to American historical narratives, Casey uses his family’s photos to highlight the critical role photography plays in constructing history and how we perceive the past.
From loved one’s clothing to family photographs, Casey uses a mix of materials to encourage one to think of the images missing from national and historical canons as well as asking how and why some photographs are confined to the past while others are propelled in our constant present. Casey earned his BA from American University and his MFA from the Parsons School of Design in NYC.
caseykaufmanstudio.com @coffeecaseman
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KEITH JERNIGAN
WALKER
Walker Keith Jernigan (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist known for integrating painting, sculpture, and installation art. His work challenges perceptions, exploring complex social issues through self-referential modes of production. Based in Brooklyn, Jernigan has gained recognition through exhibitions in Italy and the U.S., such as ‘Spacing Place | Placing Space’ (2014) and Broken Artist Dreams (2018). His practice examines the interplay of memory, fantasy, and reality, often employing painting as a metaphor for body and mind. Notable exhibitions include ‘Art as Experience’ (2023) and ‘Gathered V’ (2022).
walkerkeithjernigan.com
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SIVAN
KNOWLER
Sivan Knowler is an object fetishist born in New York but raised in a suburban town with a population smaller than some cruise ships, with a BFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Their work often wades through the wide soft boundary between objects and art. It covers a large range, from lampshades made of trash to printmaking to furniture to playing on their homemade electric violin, with a focus on blending it all. Siv is a magpie for new processes and resents the necessity of sleep. They love learning, grids, translucency, the inhuman scale of our power infrastructure, and edible rocks.
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MCCONNELL DEIRDRE
Deirdre McConnell is an artist, writer, and educator living and working in Queens. Her practice is multidisciplinary and grounded in material exploration. She has exhibited at Lorimoto Gallery, Calico, Supermoon Art Space, Arts@Renaissance, Camel Art Space, A.I.R. Gallery, St. Cecilia’s, and BETA Spaces, along with other national and international venues. She received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA (honors) in Studio Art and English from James Madison University. She was a visiting student at Slade College of Art in London. She was Summer Fellow and later Artist-inResidence at Ox-Bow School of Art.
Deirdre views arts learning as transformative to society and is passionate and devoted to education as a creative and social practice. She has taught in museums, classrooms, shelters, studios, and gardens. She currently teaches undergraduate students at Parsons, where she is also Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs + Curriculum.
deirdre-mcconnell.com @deirdre_mcconnell
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SAM
MORRISON
Sam Morrison is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and occasional visual artist and writer based in New York. His work negotiates the sometimes tenuous union of formal training and self-taught/DIY musical practices; it builds on formative years and experiences in jazz and improvised music, and has encompassed contemporary composition, electronic music, African and Caribbean traditions, and leftfield approaches to song form. Sam plays in the long-running collectively led instrumental band Thee Reps (whose most recent release is Cryptocartography, 2025) collaborates with several songwriters, and is writing and arranging new solo and ensemble music. His connections to visual art and design include experience as an exhibition preparator and in album and poster design.
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LAUREN
Laurenrosephillips.com
Lauren Phillips (b. 1993, Sacramento, CA) is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2019. Through sculpture, Phillips explores themes of repetition, continuity, and legacy. Her work traces how personal experience is shaped by family memory, inherited culture, and the stories passed down through generations.
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JASMIN
RISK
Jasmin Risk is a NY-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. Their work has been exhibited and performed at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery (NY), The Zetland Basement (UK), Recession Art (Brooklyn), Dixon Place (NY), Dye House 451 (UK), The Glasshouse (NY), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn), among others. Risk’s work is featured in numerous publications, including Girls Get Busy Zine and Luma Quarterly.
In 2013, Risk co-founded HAG Collective, a post-post feminist curatorial performance and poetics project with Clara Lipfert. Their performance Parasite is documented in Emergency Index Volume 3 (Ugly Duckling Presse) as well as The Play In The System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance, Anna Watkins Fisher, (Duke University Press, 2020), among others. Risk earned their BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons in 2016, and their MFA in Textiles at Parsons in 2023. Risk is a recipient of the 2022 MFA Council of Fashion Designers of America scholarship.
jasminrisk.com @jasminrisk
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S. PHAFA
S. PhaFa Roy is a Haitian-American artist, illustrator, and maker from Brooklyn, New York. Her work blends cultural narratives, personal style, and fashion into vibrant visual storytelling. Using watercolor, colored pencil, ink, marker, acrylic, gold leaf, and felt, she explores identity, heritage, and community with meticulous craftsmanship. Alongside her creative practice, PhaFa serves as Assistant Dean of Academic Operations & Community Engagement at Parsons School of Design, where she fosters an inclusive culture and manages strategic initiatives that enrich academic life.
phafaroy.com @phafaroy
Whether in the studio or educational leadership, PhaFa is dedicated to inspiring connection, creativity, and collaboration—bridging artistic expression with the structures that sustain it.
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JACKIE
Jackie Slanley, a first-generation Vietnamese American artist based in Brooklyn NY, crafts narratives using laser-cut plexiglass as her medium. By intricately cutting and assembling plexiglass with nuts and bolts, she constructs a cinematic gradient composed of layered, tinted transparencies. Using images of plant life, animals, and landscapes sourced from public archives, Slanley delves into the intersections of fiction, botany, biology, and technology.
Having been an artist in residence at the OxBow School of Art and a sculpture fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, Slanley has shown her work nationally and internationally, with exhibitions in NYC, LA, Kansas City, Washington D.C., and Austria. She’s been in international print publications including ArtMazeMag, WOW Magazine, and Suboart. She holds a BFA in Painting and Visual Art from Hunter College and an MFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute.
SLANLEY
Employing vector software, she translates these inspirations into digital renderings that draw from images rooted in myth and scientific history. She often engages in work that explores where sculpture and materials meet historical symbolism. Through each sculpture, she is engaged in world building by creating her own biome.
ALEC
In works across sculpture, drawing, and sound, Alec Snow (b. 1997 Southwick, MA) explores how the material properties and aesthetic attributes of specific environments work to create, sustain, and uphold the mission and values of the spaces and communities that reside within them. In particular, Snow is concerned with the materials and aesthetics commonplace in the rural-familial spaces of their upbringing. They investigate the role played by these materials and aesthetics in creating environments which are at times supportive, yet simultaneously alienating and prohibitive to themself and other individuals who occupy and pass through them.
Snow’s work is based in a redeployment of these materials and aesthetics into speculative structures and forms. This process and these works pry at a guiding question: if, in their initial use, these materials and aesthetics were responsible for composing and sustaining at times hostile environments, what can their reconfiguration, reapplication, and redeployment bring?
alecsnow.com
@alecnsnow
Jordon Soper (b. 1996) is a New York Citybased photographic artist, educator and transgender woman from Downeast Maine. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
RUTH SOPER
Embracing a range of contemporary photographic techniques, her practice concerns narratives of human origins as they weave through myth, religion, and natural history. The work is motivated by the question of where we come from and the competing urges to embrace and dissect that mystery.
jordonsoper.com
@jordonruthsoper
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STROECH
MEGAN
Megan Stroech lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Stroech received an MFA in Printmaking with Exceptional Merit from Illinois State University in 2012 and BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Recent exhibitions include: Prints of Darkness (NYC), Blah Blah Gallery (Philadelphia), Peters Valley School of Craft (NJ), Undercurrent, (Brooklyn), The Cooper Union (NYC), EXPO Chicago, ROCKELMANN& Partner (Berlin), Field Projects (NYC), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), and has been featured in two volumes of New American Paintings Magazine. Stroech has been an artist in residence at The Cooper Union, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Wassaic Project, Chicago Artists Coalition, ACRE and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Stroech was the recent recipient of the Parsons School of Design Staff Development Grant where she is Part-Time Faculty in Art, Media and Technology and Assistant Manager of Print Media.
meganstroech.com @meganstray
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WARNE
EVA
Eva Warne is a multidisciplinary designer and maker based in New York with a diverse array of fabrication skills, from wood and metal working to glass casting and CNC programming.
Their design focus comes from the value they find in furniture’s inherent functionality. Warne’s work walks the line between their two main interests: Absurdist Design and Traditional Woodworking Techniques. They aim to create a space that embraces both ornamentation and functionality, while bringing attention to how humans treat and live alongside their possessions.
Warne’s work often asks: What drives humans to form sentimental bonds with inanimate and often inconsequential objects? And, furthermore, how can we preserve this relationship?
evawarne.cargo.site
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LEAH
Leah Wolff (b. 1984) is a New York–based visual artist and co-founder of Meta Meta Meta LLC, a collaborative arts organization in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2011 and her BFA from RISD in 2006. Leah has participated in artist residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design, Cooper Union, Wassaic Project, Bat Yam Artist Colony Project (Israel), Byrdcliffe, and the Vermont Studio Center. She was also a recipient of the Two Trees Cultural Space Program. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Scaramouche Gallery and The Dirt Palace, and in group shows at The Jewish Museum, IPCNY, Smack Mellon, Wallach Art Gallery, Planthouse, Denny, and others.
DILLON
Dillon Yruegas (he/él) is a queer trans mixed coahuiltecan/xicano theatremaker from his ancestral lands in Central Texas. He holds both a BFA in Theatre and a BA in Spanish from Texas State University. He is the Academic Communications Coordinator for Parsons School of Design, a Steering Committee Member of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and a former Fellow for HowlRound Theatre Commons.
On stage, off stage, and online, he has collaborated with theatre companies and cultural institutions across Turtle Island.
YRUEGAS
Recently, he was a selected playwright for the New Roots Queer Artist Residency at Walhalla Farm, Breaking the Binary Festival, Texas State University’s Black + Latino Playwrights Celebration, SolFest, Company One Theatre’s PlayLab, Trans Theatre FestMadison, and the Boston Theatre Marathon.
As an actor, his most recent credits include Feast For the Dead and From Above for the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, Shape Shifter at Long Wharf Theatre, and Lottery Boy at SolFest.
dillonyruegas.crevado.com
List of Works GABRIELA AWAD
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Oak Hill - Digital Collage, 2024 digital collage
Oak Hill, 2024 textile, 25” x 20”
HANNAH BAKER
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fig. 3 Mini bowls, 2022-2023, clay
Mug, 2023, clay
Birdhouse, 2023, clay
teke cocina
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gatekeeper hercules or: 1000 tiny holes, 2022 Screenprint on Arches 88, 15” x 22”
Pinkwashing, 2024, Screenprint on French Insulation Pink, 19” x 22”
Cloud Gazing I: Pollution Screenprint on BFK Rives Grey, 15” x 22”
CURT CONFER
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“The Beginning of Dreaming”, 2021, video for projection, dimensions variable
“Iridescent Transfer (for Fred Herko)”, 2023, live installation, 2 hours, steel, aluminum, light, light filters, fan, dimensions variable
“Possibility (from Martin Duberman’s Stonewall)”, 2023, colored pencil on paper, 24” x 19”
