Featured Artists: Emil Bakalli, Angela Basile, Michael Caines, Wai-Yum Cheng, Rebecca Curry, Matthew De Leon, Ben Finer, Jana Flynn, James Harley, Kyoung Eun Kang, Antoine Lefebvre, Caitlin Martin-Rueter, Seyhan Musaoglu, Mary Nangah, Jess Ramsay, Gabe Shuldiner, Suzanne Stroebe, Lars Van Dooren, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Genvieve White, Stephen Wilson

Parsons The New School for Design will present its MFA Fine Art Thesis Exhibition May 7 through 16 at The Kitchen in Chelsea. The show brings together drawing, painting, sculptures video, installation and performance from 21 graduating students. An opening reception will take place on May 7 from 6-8 pm.

“The exhibition’s multi-disciplinary character is a reflection of the diversity of Parsons Fine Art Program’s student body and their engagement with a wide range of current trends in global art practices,” notes Fine Arts Chair Coco Fusco. ”Students in the program hail from Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Russia, France, Canada, Colombia, Bulgaria, Ghana and Japan as well as from throughout the U.S. They are encouraged throughout their course of study to explore connections between artistic methods, genres and cultures.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue designed by the students featuring an essay by the exhibition curator, Anthony Allen, who is an independent curator, scholar and translator who is the Associate Director of the Paula Cooper Gallery. The catalogue is available on the Parsons Fine Arts website.

In his text for the exhibition catalogue, Allen writes: “Many works on view put forth an understanding of identity as a performative and mobile concept. It is a question of forging alternate identities from disparate elements: male and female archetypes, totemic animals, historical figures, pop culture and cartoon figures, social selves caught in familial, religious and ethnic networks, mythological heroes and fairytales characters – all these structures are variously unmade and re-imagined, subverted, encrypted, hybridized, queered, re-located or cyborged. These constantly shifting self-fashionings are negotiated anew in each work – each work here is a provisional statement.”