6 New Yale MFA Grads Share Their Visions of a Changing World
Installation view of “a signal urgent but breaking” at Perrotin, 2023. Photo by Guillaume Ziccareli. Courtesy of the artists and Perrotin.
The past few years have been marked by global upheaval, be it the pandemic, increasing awareness of systemic injustices, climate change, or evolving conversations about identity and equality. These conversations are particularly relevant to art students, who find themselves graduating into a changed world.
In a new show at Perrotin, the Yale MFA printmaking and painting class of 2023 show the results of these seismic changes in their work. Titled “a signal urgent but breaking,” on view through July 28th, the exhibition reflects the class’s engagement with the emergent issues of our time.
Kristen Hileman, co-teacher of the cohort’s thesis seminar, noted that these 22 artists remind us “of the profound lessons learned since 2020: to dig deep roots and hold as precious our immediate worlds; to value the exploration and expression of self, extracted from conventional routines and institutional systems; and to recognize the vital need to care intensely about those who navigate these precarious times with us.”
The graduating artists represent a wide range of approaches to artmaking, both conceptually and materially—from Christopher Paul Jordan’s acrylic on window screen, resembling a crumbling seascape; to Estelle Maisonett’s mixed-media installation evoking a scene through a window surrounded by a brick facade.
Here, several of the artists from this Yale MFA 2023 cohort share their work and the inspiration behind it.
Rina Lam Goldfield
B. 1987, Northampton, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
Portrait of Rina Lam Goldfield. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“Most recently, I have taken up the framework of the book as a site of thinking, investigation, and encounter,” said Goldfield. “I spent many hours at the Beinecke Library exploring Latin books I could not ‘read’ in any traditional sense. Instead, I ‘read’ [them] through smell, touch, imagery, meditation, and interactions with (actual) bookworm holes.
“In the show, I’ve included my zine What the Bookworm Reads, which gathers the words eaten by (again, actual) bookworms as found poetry. I also have three paintings of books, which consider the open page as a spatialization of thought.”
Tura Oliveira
B. 1990, Fall River, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New York.
Portrait of Tura Oliveira. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“I’m interested in the overlap between marginalized materials, narratives, and aesthetics (craft, quilting, fan fiction, science fiction) and marginalized social position,” said Oliveira. “Arpilleras, narrative quilts created by working class women in Chile to protest Pinochet’s violent dictatorship, are a huge influence on my work, as are the textiles of [Chilean composer and musician] Violeta Parra, Madalena Dos Santos Reinbold, Bispo do Rosario, and Feliciano Centurión.
“My quilt Stranded on this Planet like a Bitter Almond or an Olive Pit, She Finds Herself Miraculously Changed (2023) is influenced as much by ex-votos and David Cronenberg, as it is by Titian and Poussin. The central image is of a nude, ochre-skinned alien at dusk in an earth-like landscape, holding a sentient, tentacled growth away from her body.” The artist cites the inspiration for this work as “my love for petroglyphs [rock carvings] and classical relief sculpture, and to my varied work history: repairing Muppets in Hoboken and working in the downtown studio of an idiosyncratic fashion designer.
“The steel floral form in my sculpture Once, In a Dream, We Each Became Semi-Liquid and Flowed Together (2022) was created through a mix of cold- and torch-forging and is based on the Amazonian plants,” they said. “The hand-dyed silk organza forms that seem to drip and flow from the pistils are tentacles, termite tunnels, and distorted manioc roots.”
Nina Hartmann
B. 1990, Miami. Lives and works in New York.
Portrait of Nina Hartmann. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“These works came to fruition through an ongoing research practice cataloging images from both online and institutional archives,” said Hartmann. “My practice functions as an ongoing inquiry attempting to understand systems of belief, an attempt to illuminate the invisible systems that surround us through mapping and drawing connections.
“The vinyl piece [Studies in Camouflage, 2023] is a mapping of collected research about modes of camouflage, both literal and figurative. I’m interested in exploring the layers of perception that affect us in a phenomenological fashion. The tinted vinyl serves as a reminder that our personal reality affects how we perceive everything.”
Erick Alejandro Hernández
B. 1994, Matanzas, Cuba. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
Portrait of Erick Alejandro Hernández. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“Purple Room (2023) was guided by thoughts around family, intersubjective spaces, and modes of representation,” said Hernández. “I was interested in the silent charge of a shared space that is heavy with memory. It is also an exploration of purples, violets, and lilacs.”
Fiza Khatri
B. 1992, Karachi, Pakistan. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
Portrait of Fiza Khatri. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“Both of my works envision fictional gatherings of people and animals I have known at various times and contexts, informed by my experiences in feminist space-making efforts in Karachi,” said Khatri. “The painting is an homage to a woman (the archetypal ‘Cat Lady’) who cared for a cat colony in the neighborhood of an older Karachi studio. It features all the cats I have known, though they never shared space in real life. The drawing features a broader collective of human and nonhuman companions also in a fictional moment of being together.”
Soren Hope
B. 1993, Long Island, New York. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
Portrait of Soren Hope. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“My practice is informed by the capacities and limits of both paint and the body to expose, conceal, imitate,” said Hope. “I am intrigued by the fallibility of embodiment, slips of the tongue, and ambivalence toward the calcification of recognition.”
