Yet Traces Linger

Zhenyu Zhang, Yining Zhang, Ryan Van Der Hout, Sabrina Thompson, Beki Song, Rose Silberman-Gorn, Sej Sanghvi, Anna Samara, Maria Clara (Mari) Rios Cacua, Lilly Reyes, Valeria Or, Victoria Norton, Parisa Mah, Shiqi Luo, Ziqi Li, Odella Li, Arden Kraatz, Meiqi Kong, Jordan Homstad, Lola Carlander, Anahita Bagheri, Maryam Alameri

Parsons Fine Arts is pleased to present its 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition, Yet Traces Linger. A cumulation of the two-year program, the show features a diverse group of 22 talented up-and-coming New York based artists. Encompassing both the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery and the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery, the exhibition is open to the public and on view in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center’s ground floor.

Curatorial Statement:

Yet Traces Linger ruminates on the myriad ways in which the graduating artists of this year’s Fine Arts MFA program have explored embodied memory. Through multimedia installations, hand-built ceramics, large and small-scale paintings, delicate drawings, and distorted metal, these artists consider the various ways memory manifests in, beyond, or even in spite of materiality. Twenty-two artists with disparate practices are connected through their cohort’s interrogation of the intangibly visceral.

Delving into trauma, loneliness, and the bodily, the MFA Fine Arts cohort considers what lurks and lingers in the shadows of recollection. In processing the palimpsest of grief and time, these artists propose new rituals, alternative realities, and novel mythologies.

—Sarah Cho

Sarah Cho is an Assistant Curator at the Queens Museum. Previously, she was in the curatorial department at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Cho also has experience at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, and New York Artists Equity Association.

Parsons MFA Fine Arts is a two-year, cross-disciplinary program led by an internationally accomplished faculty committed to expanding the formal, intellectual and conceptual dimensions of emerging artists’ work. Embracing interdisciplinary approaches to making and thinking about visual culture, the program promotes global understanding of the arts through one-on-one studio visits, group critiques, critical theory seminars, studio electives, writing/research, professional training seminars, and interactions with an array of visiting artists and curators. This year visitors included Farah Al Qasimi, Tara Asgar, Jeanette Bisschops, Daniel Bozhkov, Beatriz Cortez, Abigail DeVille, Sarah Faux, Min Sun Jeon, Corrie Jackson, Ebony L. Haynes, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, David Lisbon, Jumana Manna, Troy Michie, New Red Order (NRO), Tammy Nguyen, Cassie Packard, Mika Rottenberg, Angelique Rosales Salgado, Azza El Siddique, Rose B. Simpson, Tsherin Sherpa, Ian Wallace, Madeline Weisburg, Joe Whittle, among many others. In 2022, QS World University Rankings, a London-based higher education organization, named Parsons as the number one college for art and design in the US and number three worldwide for the fifth year in a row.