Hunter College MFA degree show (part two)

I neglected to point out yesterday that the works seen in the students’ studios may or may not have been completed at the time they were seen this past weekend. My images may therefore be, in at least some cases, of works in progress. They might also be only studies, not intended to be shown out of their context. While these people are artists, at the moment they are also working as students, in rooms normally not visible to the rest of us.


Alicia Gibson (detail of painting)

Gibson is actually part of Hunter’s BFA degree program, not the MFA; she wasn’t in her darkened studio when we passed through it, so this image of one of the paintings is compromised by my camera’s flash; what I saw there was extraordinary, mature work which will not stay in the dark for long; she will be part of the college’s “Degree Show” opening this May


Chris Coronel

Coronel showed somewhat ghostly small paintings of midwestern grain elevators, beautifully executed; my favorite by far was the one shown above, but because the image is fuzzy I felt I had to make an exception to the format I’ve used otherwise in these two posts and show a second work below


Chris Coronel


Stephen Canino

incredibly dramatic use of color and form for pictorial narrative


Jennifer MacDonald

luscious small drawings and two wonderfully-bizarre short videos

I’ve run out of camera images, but I can still see in my head the good work, among that of so many others, of Becket Bowes, who seems to be at home in almost every media; the drawings and haunting desert photographs of Christina Dixcy; the humanist photo portraits, far beyond documentary, of Roberto Carlo Soto; the smart/silly sculpture and video of Scott Penkava; and the sweet/sorrow playground landscapes and jungle gym “portraits” of Lauren Orchowski. After this too-short list, testimony to a ridiculously inadequate memory, I begin to lose track altogether.