Opening Reception: Time in Dreams is Frozen

The University of Pennsylvania’s 2017 graduating class of Master of Fine Arts students will present their thesis exhibition in the Icebox Project Space of the Crane Arts Building in Philadelphia. The exhibition represents the culmination of two years’ study at Penn and will be curated by Creative Time artistic director Nato Thompson. During their time at Penn, students have developed a diverse body of work that speaks of their subject positions as young artists living in a world of flux. In various sub-groupings, they also partook in trips abroad including Havana, Dubai, Paris, Lugo (Italy), Rome, and Skowhegan that challenged their self-understanding in and of the world.

PennMFA Thesis exhibition artists
Joshua Beaver, Lindsay Buchman, Laura Carlson, Danielle Cartier, Gwendolyn Comings, Sharla Dyess, Casey Egner, Aimee Gilmore, Yaochi Jin, Jeremy Jirsa, Christopher Richards, Asha Sheshadri, Alexandra Snowden, Rebecca Tennenbaum and Ji Won Woo

Exhibition curator Nato Thompson is the Artistic Director for Creative Time. Since 2007, Thompson has organized such major Creative Time projects as The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, BookForum, Frieze, Artforum, Third Text, and Huffington Post among them. In 2005, he received the Art Journal Award for distinguished writing. For Independent Curators International, Thompson curated the exhibition Experimental Geography with a book available from Melville House Publishing. His has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life to be published in January 2017.