2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis
Installation view, Apparition: 2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Photo: Carol Green.
MFA in Visual Art Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis The MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis educates artists who will define and change the future.
Led by Associate Professor and Chair Tiffany Calvert, the program is home to an inclusive, close-knit community of makers and thinkers and offers students a site of rigorous inquiry, humanity, and intellectual generosity. Students enjoy access to all the resources a tier-one research institution provides, including making spaces, funding opportunities, and programs that support their diverse and
MFA in Visual Art Faculty Jamie Adams Josh Azzarella Heather Bennett Lisa Bulawsky Joe deVera Amy Hauft Meghan Kirkwood Arny Nadler Patricia Olynyk Jack Risley Cheryl Wassenaar Monika Weiss
collaborative creativity.
2026 MFA in Visual Art Students The MFA in Visual Art professionally prepares students for a thoughtful approach to the field of contemporary art that nurtures sustained, lifelong engagement while recognizing myriad pathways and definitions for a career in the arts and culture. Learn more about the MFA in Visual Art program at samfoxschool.washu.edu.
Program Leadership Tiffany Calvert Associate Professor Chair, MFA in Visual Art
Amy Hauft Director, College of Art and Graduate School of Art Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman Jr. Professor of Art
Carmon Colangelo Ralph J. Nagel Dean, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
Emily Eid Zain Almutawa Levi Anthony Walker Violet L. White Dallas Spears Yitian Chen Zach T. Johnson Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇 Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu) Tianqing Xu Shiyao Fu Emilia-Qian Shen Brittni Mosby
Essay
Editors
John Yau
Caitlin Custer Emily Hellmuth
John Yau is a poet, art critic, freelance curator, and publisher who began publishing his poems and art reviews in the late 1970s. He has written for many journals published in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, as well as written catalog essays and contributed to museum publications. The
Photographers Tiffany Calvert Carol Green
author of monographs on Joe Brainard, Jasper Johns, Catherine Murphy, and Liu Xiaodong, his book of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom:
Designer
Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (2024), received an
James Walker
American Book Award (2025). His awards for criticism, poetry, and contributions to culture include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
Exhibition Identity Design
in Poetry, a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from France, a
Cora Trout
Jackson Prize in Poetry, and a Rabkin Prize in Art Criticism. The author of more than 20 books of poetry, his most recent book is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024 (2025).
Exhibition Organizer Meredith Malone, Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg Curator, Kemper Art Museum
Printer Advertiser’s Printing
Publisher Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts © 2026 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher.
Foreword
Group shows are often organized around the theme. The theme could be loose, such as “summer” and all the artists must contribute a work that is “summery” in some way or another. An MFA thesis exhibition is altogether a different animal. There are 13 artists in the Washington University in St. Louis MFA thesis exhibition. None of the work I saw resembled anyone else’s work, which was wonderful to see. The show was titled Apparition, which became increasingly fitting as I looked at each of the works. If the artists shared anything, it was that each of them was haunted, but in different and particular ways. In some cases, such as Levi Anthony Walker’s monumental plaster column, Roadwork (2026), it was evident that being a registered member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina played a large role in his understanding of history and cultural exchange. This was also true of Brittni Mosby’s incorporation of family photos into her paintings. As a young Black woman dealing with family photographs, Mosby’s subject was unique to her upbringing and understanding of being American. This was not a one-size-fits-all exhibition. Everyone found a different way to the subject they were dealing with. The artists worked in different media, used a wide array of materials, brought things in from the world, tapped into memories, things seen and heard, as well as relied on their imagination in both what they made and how they made it. Having spent time with each of the students, and having seen their work at various stages, this part of the exhibition was most impressive to me. In many cases, the student would tell me what they had in mind, which was not necessarily evident in what I saw. Whatever they were going to do to get from the work in progress to completion was not obvious; it was as if they had incorporated obstacles into their process. By overcoming them, they would be able to finish what they had set out to do. This is the opposite of capitalism, which is predicated on efficiency and speed, and marshaling enough resources to do the same thing repeatedly. Their approach was hands-on. Thinking and doing were inseparable.
That was the surprise of the exhibition. The artists transformed the inert materials they had into what can only be called art. Their transformations surprised and intrigued me. The space between what I imagined I would see and what I saw was always unexpected, making me look repeatedly. Looking again means rethinking, as well as questioning one’s first impressions. Such looking leads to self-reflection and looking inward. This is where art works its real magic. Take your time. Look slowly. There are many worlds in these works.
John Yau Poet, critic, and curator
Installation view, Apparition: 2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Photo: Carol Green.
Emily Eid 6 Zain Almutawa 10 Levi Anthony Walker 14 Violet L. White 18 Dallas Spears 22 Yitian Chen 26 Zach T. Johnson 30 Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇 34 Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu) 38 Tianqing Xu 42 Shiyao Fu 46 Emilia-Qian Shen 50 Brittni Mosby 54
Emily Eid I did not meet or talk with Emily Eid before seeing her work, Reconciliation (2026), a wheelchair encircled by a semi-transparent black curtain from which strips of green plastic hung down, like streamers. In her abstract, Eid characterized her work as a “semi-private ‘confessional booth’.” The viewer was to sit in the chair and listen to Eid “challenging the misconceptions surrounding chronic pain and disability.” According to Eid, “by placing the viewer in a site of shared vulnerability, the work transcends the spectacle of pain to offer a pathway to everlasting hope.” Eid’s Reconciliation (2026) and her performance, which I saw on the opening night of Apparition, recalled an article, “Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Arts Now” (Art in America, 2022) by the chief editor, Emily Watlington, which opened with: Art has played an integral—maybe even primary—role in the burgeoning movement for disability justice throughout the United States in the last decade. In memoirs, paintings and drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, and live performances, and in venues ranging from small galleries to movie theaters to professional sports arenas, disabled artists have shared their myriad perspectives on life, again and again. With persistence, these works have begun to chip away at the ableist beliefs that structure disability oppression, and we are beginning to see hints of the effects as the cultural tides turn. In her sculptural sound piece and performance, Eid chooses to narrate her firstperson experience. The work is both in-your-face and vulnerable, riddled with pain, faith, and hope. My experience of Eid’s work reminded me of how much the art world had changed since I first began reviewing exhibitions for Art in America in 1977. This change was recalled in Watlington’s important essay: Disability-related concerns have long been written off as too niche, as affecting too few people, to deserve the limelight. But through crossdisability solidarity, artists and activists have formed myriad coalitions, following trails blazed by crip elders too numerous to name. With art as a primary weapon, they have demanded that their stories and perspectives infiltrate and change a culture riddled with ableist norms. By challenging us to hear and empathize with her story, to recognize what we and the artist share, Eid becomes part of a significant cultural shift effecting both society and the art world.
Emily Eid, Reconciliation, 2026. Ribbon, chiffon, and artist’s wheelchair with audio, 5:07 min.; 84 x 60 x 36 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Emily Eid
↑ Emily Eid, Reconciliation, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green. → Emily Eid, Reconciliation, 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
Zain Almutawa, Master the World by Mastering the Performance of the Self, 2025. Mixed media on wood, 11 ½ x 15 x 2 in. Photo: Carol Green. Zain Almutawa, Handmade Sketchbook, 2025-26. Mixed-media sketchbook in wooden box, 12 ¼ x 9 ½ x 2 in. (closed). Photo: Carol Green.
Zain Almutawa In his epic free-verse poem, “Song of Myself” (1855), Walt Whitman famously wrote: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.) What does it mean to live in a world that suppresses these contradictions in favor of individuals who present a single, dependable public identity? All societies do this to some degree. Zain Almutawa is from Bahrain and grew up in a traditional Muslim family, which, for women, centers on the principle of modesty (haya). This means that you are required to conceal your body’s shape and hair from unrelated men. Almutawa’s work addresses the layered complexities of navigating these cultural restraints while defining a place for herself to feel free. In her artist’s statement, she writes The sketchbook project materializes this alternative space in which I am free to exist on my own terms. This freedom is found when it is kept private—away from the eyes of surveillance. Within this constructed sacred space, I reclaim the unpolished parts of my identity: the dark, the angry, the sarcastic, and the chaotic. It is a space to be raw, outrageous, and an ecologist of desires without the threat of being outed or disowned. Within this alternative space where visibility is controlled, I thrive in the glitch I create that disrupts the feeling of entrapment by the gaze. Re-casting patterns in a personal, diarist image transforms the power held by the gaze into a power cast back on the world—it reclaims one’s own narrative back to the self. This act of reclaiming the narrative and resisting self-erasure mirrors my stance against macro patterns that go beyond the domestic sphere. I link this to the gaze of political oppressors who attempt to exploit, colonize, entrap, or threaten Arab identity and lands. Almutawa’s sketchbook project subverts one of the basic premises of Western art, which is visibility—the viewer is to see everything. The sketchbook is closed and locked and/or kept in a vitrine. By underscoring that the alternative space is closed to us, we learn something about both the world the artist inhabits daily, as well as our presumption about what art must deliver to us. If we expect visibility, then we must reconsider what this and the term invisibility mean, and, more importantly, how we use them. Almutawa pulls us into a state that parallels her daily life, one where visibility and invisibility, what is open and what is hidden, are non-negotiable. We are only permitted to see what she decides to reveal. I find that powerful and resonant, necessary and urgent.
Zain Almutawa
Zain Almutawa, Master the World by Mastering the Performance of the Self, 2025 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Zain Almutawa, Handmade Sketchbook, 2025-26 (details). Photo: Carol Green.
Levi Anthony Walker
Levi Anthony Walker is a registered member of the Lumbee Tribe, which was recently the 575th tribe to be recognized by the United States government. This recognition came more than a century after they were recognized by the state of North Carolina in 1885, and after they were acknowledged as a tribe in 1956 by the federal government but were denied crucial government benefits and access to the Indian Health Service. Consisting of 60,000 enrolled members and inspired by the change in the tribe’s status and the frequent visits he made to his North Carolina family, Walker made a column, Roadwork (2026). This monumental sculpture melded together two antagonistic worlds to investigate “how colonial structures can be retooled to support and promote Indigenous communities without erasing or replacing identities and beliefs.” Walker used the brown tannic water from the Lumbee River to build his plaster column, which he topped with a capital adorned by elements meaningful to his tribe, known as the “people of the dark water.” The size of the column compels us to imagine what kind of building it would support as well as who and what would be welcome. Using an architectural form that signifies power and triumph, Walker’s union simultaneously acknowledges colonialism and subverts it. More than being an essential ingredient in the use of plaster, the water of the Lumbee River roots Roadwork (2026) in a history that the federal government has never fully accepted. Walker’s work embraces that history, recognizes difference, and proposes that the way forward is through mutual recognition and acceptance of difference. At the same time, Walker’s column rejects the idea of the universal in favor of the local, specifically the history of the ongoing relationship between the heirs of the original white settlers and the Lumbee Tribe, which he does not spell out. He has made a work to be both seen and uncovered, looked at and reflected upon. There is nothing didactic about it, which opens a common space for viewers to imagine a future where reconciliation becomes possible. This reading underscores Walker’s work as a radical, hopeful response to our current situation, its divisions and growing intolerance.
Levi Anthony Walker, Pipelines, 2026 (detail). Plaster, 188 x 48 x 48 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Levi Anthony Walker
← Levi Anthony Walker, Pipelines, 2026. Photo: Carol Green. ↓ Levi Anthony Walker, Pipelines, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Violet L. White, When You Don’t Forget You Miss Me, 2026.
Violet L. White
Pay phone, integrated circuits, interactive voice response (IVR) system, business cards, the participants, the birds, and galvanized grate, 90 x 54 x 36 in. Photo: Carol Green.
There are moments in art when everything fits together in ways that remain surprising. In the middle of Apparition stood a public phone booth set on a street grating. I had to look twice to make sure there was no cavern below me. Once, there were 8,000 public phone booths in Manhattan. Now there are four. The cell phone, which has become ubiquitous in our daily lives, has made them obsolete, a relic of another era. Another feature of urban living is pigeons. They seem to be everywhere. Despite having once been used to communicate, most recently during World War I, they are widely regarded as city dwellers bordering on being a nuisance. By making pigeons the focus of her work, Violet L. White united two obsolete entities that used to deliver messages: telephone booths and pigeons. Together, they raise myriad questions. What happens to discarded objects when there are thousands or more? Can animals which society deems non-productive, show us something about our interaction with the environment? How many species have been extirpated or driven elsewhere since the founding of St. Louis on February 14, 1764, by the French fur traders Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, Pierre Laclède, and Auguste Chouteau? How many of these animals are no longer found in the state of Missouri because they were driven to extinction by human greed and carelessness? As White points out in her thesis statement, written in preparation for Apparition: The pigeon serves as the primary collaborator and conceptual anchor of the work, both because of its years-long history of partnership with human civilization and because of its status as a discarded and overlooked species in the urban environment. Standing in her phone booth, dialing one of the numbers we are instructed to call, we feel the absurdity of this gesture (who calls pigeons from a phone booth and what would we say to them or could learn from them?) as well as become a little more aware of the world we have made. In this world, we feel isolated from others. “Care,” White tells us, is “an actual way of making rather than a thematic position.” This challenge to the old, but persistent hierarchies of art making, understanding the world, belief in social strata, and the difference between the deserving and undeserving elevates White’s work into another realm. What at first seems whimsical is hardly that at all.
↑ Tahia Farhin Haque, installation of Present:0, 2025. Installation with chalk on chalkboard paint, 144 x 197 in. Photo: Caitlin Custer.
Violet L. White Violet L. White, When You Don’t Forget You Miss Me, 2026 (detail). Photo: Tiffany Calvert.
Violet L. White, When You Don’t Forget You Miss Me, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Dallas Spears I first saw Dallas Spears’s thesis project, Body Of (2026), before it was finished, but didn’t realize until she told me she had more to do that the arrangement I saw was subject to change. It was clear to me from this exchange that Spears was a maximalist who, I soon learned, used only discarded materials she found in the studio building where she worked. Her primary material was discarded copy paper, that cheap disposable type fed into printers and Xerox machines before being tossed into the trash can. I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye both what a gold mine this must be for Spears and how much paper and similar refuse we throw away every day—cartons, paper cups, plastic bags, straws, and newsprint of different kinds. When I asked Spears what kind of facilities WashU gave her, I learned there were no machines for making paper pulp and that she had figured out everything on her own. This DIY attitude—which was shared by many of her classmates—enlivens the school’s atmosphere. In Spears’s case, her commitment to using only found materials from a limited environment conveys her desire to be ethical, resourceful, and artistic. She would not let her circumstances become an obstacle. Body Of (2026) is a large door made of black metal tubing. Spears uses both the back and front, attaching different colored sheets of handmade paper pulp and other rescued materials on both sides, layering the door. It was as if the door was meant to hold letters which were either never sent or never arrived. Rolls of colored paper stuck out at different angles. Perhaps, they are waiting to be turned into paper pulp. Nothing seemed final, which was in keeping with Spears’s aesthetic of infusing discarded materials with a new life and identity. There was something chaotic and ordered about the arrangement, a feeling that everything was improvised and necessary. By mounting the paper pulp pieces on a door, Spears makes us aware of passage, of walking by and not seeing what’s around us, as if one’s destination is more important than the journey. The fact that everything we see in her work is something that has been retrieved and transformed conveys both joy and singlemindedness. Looking at the individual sheets—their color and fragility—this viewer marveled at the changes that Spears made happen. Her ingenuity, resourcefulness, and focus augur a bright future.
Dallas Spears, Body Of, 2026. Mixed media, 120 x 60 x 12 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Dallas Spears
← Dallas Spears, Body Of, 2026. Photo: Carol Green. ↑ Dallas Spears, Body Of, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green. → Dallas Spears, Body Of, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Yitian Chen When I taught in the art department at Rutgers University, both undergraduate and MFA students, I always hoped that the grad students would undergo some kind of unpredictable transformation and would make a new unexpected body of work during the two years they were there. Yitian Chen achieved exactly what I had in mind: she reinvented herself. Born in Shanghai, Chen’s early photographs were as she states in her thesis statement: I was drawn to travel, especially to places known for their spectacular natural scenery, such as Qinghai, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Iceland, Zermatt, and the African savanna. However, as I looked back at these images, I began to realize that beyond presenting the grandeur of nature, they offered me only little to engage with. As beautiful as her large-scale photographs of these places were, Chen was not wrong in her analysis. The pictures were full of grandeur, the kind one finds in glossy calendars, but other than that, there was little that held the viewer’s attention. This realization caused Chen to unpack everything she knew, rethink her approach to the subject matter, and begin fresh. In her words: When I began this project in St. Louis, I initially returned to natural environments. Although the landscapes here lack the dramatic scale of the places I had previously visited, they offer different kinds of trails. Walking through these trails, without towering mountains or vast lakes, I began to slow down. In this quieter environment, I started to notice details I had previously overlooked—particularly the lines of trees. These forms gradually guided me back into the urban environment, which I had once found uninteresting. I began to notice similar shapes appearing across both natural and urban spaces. This visual connection between two seemingly opposite environments led me to further explore what happens at their points of intersection. As a result, my work gradually shifted toward sites where traces of human activity and natural processes coexist. I am struck by Chen’s awareness of the changes in her perception that are taking place as she walks around a landscape that lacks overt drama. She is literally learning to see a world she has never paid much attention to, the intersection of human activity and nature. In response, her photographs became smaller and pulled this viewer in. Typically, she juxtaposes two photographs, both challenging us to make a choice as well as compelling us to see connections, differences, and the changing mental space between them, because they never cohere. A cement block lying in a field of snow, melted footprints. Why was it put there? A power line growing above trees. Who and what does it connect? A feeling of solitude runs through Chen’s photographs. They mirror her isolation and ours.
Yitian Chen, within stillness, 2026. Four pigment prints on paper, 20 x 24 in. each (framed). Photo: Carol Green.
Yitian Chen Yitian Chen, within stillness, 2026 (detail).
Yitian Chen, within stillness, 2026 (detail).
Yitian Chen, within stillness, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Zach T. Johnson, Here, a while, 2026. Dyed fabric, ink, and silver leaf on 3 bent plywood panels, 73 x 21 x 22 in., 61 x 20 x 30 in., and 78 x 21 x 36 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Zach T. Johnson
In his groundbreaking essay “Specific Objects” (1964), Donald Judd argued that painting had become limited because it was a flat rectangular surface, and that its shape determined how its interior elements were arranged. More than half a century later, Zach T. Johnson turns Judd’s influential argument on its head as well as injects it with a healthy dose of humor. Working on plywood, which he curves and covers with hand-dyed muslin, Johnson makes what Judd calls “specific objects.” They are neither sculptures nor paintings, but, at the same time, combine aspects of each. Like many of the artists in Apparition, he rejects fabrication in favor of the handmade, preferring what can come of out of a direct engagement with materials. In his artist statement, Johnson writes: Tie-dye carries associations of children’s crafts and leisure, while silver leaf introduces precision, tradition, and material worth. Their coexistence destabilizes distinctions between refinement and casualness, labor and play. The works hold these oppositions in suspension rather than resolving them. The result is a work that is funny and forlorn. It is as if the painting/object got tired of standing erect against the wall, like a guard, and slumped down to the floor. This is work in a posture of rest; it is relaxing, taking a break from having to uphold the legacy of the avant-garde. Johnson’s use of tie-dying calls to mind the hippies’ preference for batik, while his application of silver leaf evokes their reliance on craftsmanship, such as the design and creating of jewelry, as an alternative way of making a living. Seen in this way, Johnson’s art becomes an alternative to the legacy of minimalism and its selfseriousness. It subverts Judd’s dicta. Eschewing the goal of a pure art, Johnson brings leisure and humor into his unclassifiable work. At its core, Johnson’s humor is both provocative and critical.
Zach T. Johnson
Zach T. Johnson, Here, a while, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green. Zach T. Johnson, Here, a while, 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇
Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇 studied sculpture at the highly respected Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing before he was accepted into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. In his artist statement, he states that while he is: …an artist primarily engaged in portrait painting, my focus lies not in the mere representation of physical likeness and appearance, but in how images carry memory and lived experience. I regard portraiture as an unstable form of existence, where the figure is perpetually shaped by time, context, and the way of viewing. This view of portraiture is different than Western painting which is focused on capturing the subject’s likeness. Zhang’s painting for the thesis exhibition consisted of three large canvases joined together to form a triptych that was panoramic in its sweeping viewpoint. In the middle panel, Zhang has depicted a naked preadolescent boy holding a dead white bird in his hands and standing in a dark green field that rises behind him to form a horizon line just below the painting’s top edge. The field in the left panel is dark brown while the one on the right is steely gray blue. All share the same horizon line. In the left panel, a dark blue horse stands in the middle of the parched brown field while two massive square columns are the background of the right panel, their tops cropped by the painting’s top edge. A flock of gray sheep has gathered on the horizon. The sky is yellow, and we see a yellow sun occupy a different position in each of the panels. Aside from the columns, which is a sign of industrialization, we see a modern windmill in the left panel and discarded building stones in the foreground of the right panel. Nature and industrial society are intertwined. As the sun’s position tells us, time is passing, and the world is constantly changing. But does knowing this make this visually compelling painting yield up its meaning? Or does it resist any reductive reading? There are themes that come forth; the juxtaposition of the windmill and sheep suggests the need for humans to harness nature’s forces rather than only extract from it. The painting’s resistance to a single allegorical reading is its strength. There is no single, satisfactory reading, which subverts decades of social realist teaching in China. The opaqueness we encounter in this painting is important to recognize, as well as signals a welcome shift that has been taking place in contemporary Chinese art.
Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇, If Life Were Only as Our First
Encounter, 2026 (detail). Oil on canvas, 96 x 180 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Yixia Zhang 张祎潇
Yixiao Zhang 张祎潇, If Life Were Only as Our First Encounter, 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu) The earliest known writing system in China is the Oracle Bone Script (c. 13th century BCE). Highly detailed pictographs were carved into turtle shells and ox bone for use in divination rituals. I was reminded of the origins of Chinese writing when I looked at Virginia (Jingyi) Lui’s largely blue painting in which a form could be discerned. In her artist statement, Liu states she is obsessed with: …the concept of ‘cultural identity in between,’ characterized by having no single origin, no hierarchical structure, or a central point. Identity is about being fluid and changing, not a settled label. Any point can connect with other points, which creates new and exciting forms. One of these forms is the Texas longhorn: As metaphors for fluidity of identities, longhorns are my muse. They are a Texas icon, but they are not originally from Texas. They came from North Africa, moved to Spain, and eventually arrived in Texas through historical migration. The Longhorn embodies a dual condition: an outsider and a participant. This deeply resonates with me as someone from China living in Texas. Looking at Liu’s painting, I made a connection between the image I saw and Chinese pictographic script. I doubt I would be alone in this. Liu’s use of materials such as acrylic, dye, and ink to get a deep blue stirs up associations with traditional Chinese porcelain and painting. Blue represents both sky and flowing water, healing and change. Living in the diaspora, and realizing that she can neither go home, which by now is different and unfamiliar, nor feel at home in Texas, she lives in a state of perpetual inbetweenness, where the ground she walks upon never feels stable. Working in blues that bleed into the canvas, she makes the border between the figure (abstract horns) and ground porous. Out of her complex feelings of displacement, Liu has begun to make the signs of a language that is both her own and ours. This is how one learns to see and speak for themselves.
Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu), Longhorn (Seal Script), 2026 (detail). Acrylic, ink, and blue dyes on canvas, 78 ¾ x 66 15/16 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu)
← Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu), Longhorn (Seal Script), 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
↑ Virginia Liu (Jingyi Liu), Longhorn (Seal Script), 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
Tianqing Xu
When I was in Tianqing Xu’s studio, I learned that in addition to being a sculptor, she was also a jeweler. This combination brought to mind some of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century: Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Alberto Giacometti. Being a jeweler means you have learned to pay attention to the smallest details, and are capable of intense, narrow concentration. Talking with Xu about her thesis project, Incubator (2026), I learned it was made of multiple parts—some which she made and others she found. Using a wire chicken coop as a setting, she planned on creating a classroom, complete with rows of students seated at their desks, facing a blackboard on which the day’s lesson was written. Made of milky white wax, the students are cast from molds created by Xu. Before installing them in the classroom, she places each one under a heat lamp, partially melting their heads. While viewers are likely to see her thesis project, Incubator (2026), as a comment on the rigidities that are crucial to an educational system that emphasizes rote learning and memorization, and even connect it to the artist’s life in China, I think this reading ignores her mastery of different crafts. The longer I looked at Incubator (2026), the more I thought it was also about the artist. What might it mean for someone to partly melt down the perfect forms she creates? Can something new arise from this destructive act? Might the artist not want to break all the conventions of jewelry making and casting that she has learned and clearly mastered? By giving up what she has mastered, she is pushing herself into new territory, which is synonymous with leaving school. Seen within this context, Incubator (2026) becomes an eloquent testimony to Xu’s desire to break free and move into a new territory.
Tianqing Xu, Incubator, 2026. Wax, metal, wood, 3D-printed polylactic acid (PLA), found objects, and 12 photographs, 7 ¼ x 5 ¼ in. each (framed); 54 ½ x 55 x 33 ½ in. (structure). Photo: Carol Green.
Tianqing Xu, Incubator, 2026 (detail). Photo: Carol Green.
Tianqing Xu
Tianqing Xu, Incubator, 2026 (details). Photo: Carol Green.
Shiyao Fu, We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue, 2026 (detail). Wood and metal, 30 x 86 x 46 in. Photo: Carol Green.
Shiyao Fu
Shiyao Fu’s sculpture, We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue (2026), lies on the floor. It consists of short sections of wood that have been cut into non-identifiable organic shapes. Without using nails, Fu fits the shapes end to end to form an undulating loop that branches out, as well as winds around itself. Placed in the middle of the piece is a winding line made of a metal strip that wraps around itself, forming a tight braid, as well as passes through the looping wooden form. In her artist’s statement, Fu describes her sculpture as follows: We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue is a back-and-forth exchange with my materials. The sculpture takes shape through this exchange, documenting how both the materials and I respond to one another. I intentionally limit my control over the form, allowing wood and metal to assert their own agency, which is embodied in the ways the structure twists and curves. As a result, the sculpture appears to have grown into its form organically, rather than being fully predetermined. In responding to the materials’ agency, my interventions are shown in their interactions and at points where the internal logic of the structure shifts. In this work, wood and metal speak a shared visual language through their undulating forms, while still maintaining their distinct identities, forming a complex coexistence system. While Fu describes the process, the meaning of the piece is open to interpretation, which is underscored by the title. Some viewers might wish to see the work in purely formal terms and begin scrutinizing how it was built. But this limited view doesn’t seem enough; it couldn’t be a purely formal work. Yes, the dialogue between the elements is formal. Fu had transformed the wood into something that rose and fell as it wound around the floor, while the twisted metal held a different, more flexible shape. The uneven surface of both elements invited human touch. For this viewer, these associations and its quiet, enigmatic presence stirred up a wide range of possible meanings. The one that persisted was centered around the dialogue between the wood and wire, starting with their difference in color, texture, susceptibility to being shaped, flexibility and inflexibility, the way they interacted and yet maintained their identity. That dialogue—and the terms used to describe it—pushed past the formal into a realm decidedly more human. We don’t just see We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue, we turn inward as we look at it, and see the ways it mirrors the ideal interaction of humans. The wood and wire coexist without one dominating the other. They establish their separate identities, even as they contribute to the whole. Can we recognize each other’s differences without trying to suppress them? These questions are the ones that stay in the mind after looking at We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue.
Shiyao Fu
Shiyao Fu, We twist, extend, and accrete in our prolonged dialogue, 2026. Photo: Carol Green.
Emilia-Qian Shen
Even though none of the sculptures were complete when I first went to Emilia-Qian Shen’s studio, I was immediately curious about what she was up to. As I soon learned from talking with her, she was informed and inspired by the sculptures of Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse, and by the writings of Lucy Lippard. These inspirations helped shape Shen’s interest in the body’s multiple contradictions about identity and beauty. Even in their nascent state, I could see traces of humor, the grotesque, vulnerability, and awkwardness emerging. It was as if Shen was creating an alternative group of creatures to the plushy ones found in every toy store, calling our love for Hello Kitty and KAWS’s Companion into question. Shen distinguishes her work from her historical predecessors by subjecting divergent materials to different processes, each of which she has taught herself. Her processes include “cutting, gluing, carving, pouring, layering, waiting, supporting, and adjusting.” Her intense hands-on engagement with resistant and unlikely non-art materials means that the process and object become unified, and that something unplanned will emerge at the end. For Shen, making art is about discovering what can be done. For all their humor and awkwardness, Shen’s creatures speak eloquently to a generation that feels both supported and threatened by artificial intelligence, body alterations that range from cosmetic to gender affirming, and the instability of living in an accelerated age where change is both unpredictable and unavoidable. To address this constantly calamitous situation, Shen uses humor mixed with abjection to convey the depth of anxiety her generation feels, the lack of security that is a deeply embedded part of their everyday life. In this way, the process becomes even more crucial to her work, which doesn’t look polished and manufactured. By rejecting fabrication, and how it separates entrepreneurship from craft, and hired labor from the handmade, Shen dismisses the false division between shiny, impeccable objects that are expensive to make and homely things that can be made from forlorn material. Can we love that which is degraded? Can we embrace our imperfections, or must we subject every view we have ourselves to a set of impossible standards foisted on us by those who believe profit is everything?
Emilia-Qian Shen, Felix, 2026. Wood, foam, latex, silicone, and metal. Photo: Carol Green
Emilia-Qian Shen, Min-ho (민호), 2026. Wool, foam, air-dry clay, and metal Photo: Carol Green.
Emilia-Qian Shen
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Emilia-Qian Shen, Baiding (白丁), Min-ho (민호), Mila, Omar, Farrah, Yuki (ゆき), Iris, Alma, 2026. Wood, wool, hair, foam, hemp, latex, leather, sand, silicone, and metal. Photo: Carol Green.
Brittni Mosby
Named after Marcel Proust, a Proustian memory is an involuntary memory triggered by a sensory cue, most often a specific scent or taste. What about a photograph, which stays the same, even as we and the subject change? What memories are triggered by a family album or shoebox full of photographs? Do our memories of them change? These are some of the questions that Brittni Mosby, a Black woman, asks as she incorporates family photographs into her layered, monochromatic paintings. Through her use of color and other techniques, the faces become blurred, distant, difficult to make out. Their resistance to immediate comprehension and to being named simultaneously raises and addresses a range of questions. In 2019, Tamara Lanier sued Harvard University over its possession of images of Renty Taylor and his daughter, Delia Taylor—two of the enslaved people featured in a group of daguerreotypes taken in 1850. They were part of a collection commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who used them to promote a pseudoscientific, white supremacist theory that falsely asserted that white people are genetically superior to other races—a justification for slavery. They were housed in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. As part of the settlement, Harvard transferred the photographs to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, where Renty and Delia lived as enslaved people. Mosby’s works go to the heart of the question: What is a Black archive, and where does it belong? How do you preserve its integrity while turning it into art? How do you push back against the viewer’s desire and even expectation of transparency, the feeling that they have the right to know who they are looking at? How do you resist the possessive gaze, while also recognizing your own changing memories and need to honor your family and ancestry, their survival? In her abstract for Apparition, Mosby writes: I reimagine the archive as a living system that enables me to layer histories and embodied memories that emerge beyond fixed or singular narratives. Just as moving the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia from a museum of archaeology and ethnology to an international history museum establishes a new context for them, Mosby’s reimagining of the archive is crucial. We must learn to see others in a new way.
Brittni Mosby, interstitial truths, 2026 (detail). Pigment, archival prints, shea butter, and gel medium on 2 panels, 48 x 48 in. each. Photo: Carol Green.
Brittni Mosby
↑ Brittni Mosby, interstitial truths, 2026. Photo: Carol Green. → Brittni Mosby, interstitial truths, 2026 (details). Photo: Carol Green.
Installation view, Apparition: 2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Photo: Carol Green.