Interdisciplinary MFA Program 2013 thesis exhibition
Berlin
May 25–June 8, 2013
Forum Factory, Besselstraße 13-14, Berlin
Los Angeles
June 8–22, 2013
945 and 953 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA
The Penn MFA program presents the 2013 thesis exhibition in Berlin and Los Angeles. The exhibition is the culmination of a six-month exchange between the graduate students and curators Alex Klein and Christian Siekmeier. During the twelve-day installation in each city the students will visit artists studios, install the selected works and complete their engagement in this highly experimental exhibition project.
The thesis exhibition project acknowledges that emerging artists work from a globalized state of culture and respond to a new perception of site specificity. The exhibition presents work impacted by a collective discussion on the premise that travel, cultural exchange and the examination of cultural relativism are all markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world.
Berlin, May 25–June 8 (opening May 25)
Forum Factory, Besselstraße 13-14, Berlin
Artists: Caroline Claflin, Orlando de la Garza, Mark Dilks, Tara Fadenrecht, Laine Godsey, Christina Kerns, Alex Nguyen, Scout Segotta, Cristina Tufino, Tara White
Los Angeles, June 8–June 22
945 and 953 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, California
Artists: Stephanie Cheng, Elisa Gabor, Zenas Hutcheson, Daniel Oliva, Jacob Rivkin, Future Sentimentality, Minmin Shi, Ceaphas Stubbs, Sarah Tortora, Toisha Tucker
Berlin and LA exhibition curators
Alex Klein is an artist, writer, and curator working between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where she is the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE ’60) Program Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-founder of the editorial project and publishing imprint Oslo Editions, which organized and published the lecture series CONTRA MUNDUM I-VII (2010) and is the editor of the critical volume on photography Words Without Pictures (LACMA/Aperture, 2010). She has previously held positions in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Christian Siekmeier is the founder and director of Exile Gallery in Berlin. Since its inauguration in 2008, Exile has hosted numerous solo and group exhibitions by young contemporary as well as older-generation artists. Among them the first retrospective of the work on American photographer and mastermind Bob Mizer (1922–1992) and post-minimalist artist Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942). He has further curated many group exhibitions, such as Document Performance (Exile, 2011) and My safe reduction to form (Exile, 2012). Art fair contributions include LISTE Basel, Artissima Turin and Art Brussels amongst others. Siekmeier received an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York and has participated in select gallery and museum exhibitions with his own works in the US, Europe and Mexico.
Penn MFA Program
The Master of Fine Arts program at Penn is focused on the professional development of visual artists. Through workshops, seminar courses, international residency opportunities and interactions with curators, writers and artists, the program provides an open intellectual framework to foster independent methods of artistic research. In addition to seminars within the Fine Arts department, graduate students are encouraged to pursue topics of science and the humanities through an impressive selection of courses offered across the university.
Visit the Penn Thesis Exhibition website.
Download the PennMFA Program Catalog.
For program inquires, contact [email protected] or 215 898 8374
