The Penn MFA program will present the 2016 thesis exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition is the culmination of a five-month exchange between the graduate students and curator Hamza Walker. During their residency in Los Angeles, the students have installed works created for the exhibition, visited artists’ studios and have been immersed in this highly experimental exhibition project.
In recent years the Penn MFA program has organized exhibitions in Los Angeles and Berlin (2013), in Vienna (2014), and in Brussels (2015). 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.
Exhibition Curator
Exhibition Curator Hamza Walker is Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society, the non-collecting museum of contemporary art at The University of Chicago. His 2008 curated exhibition, Black Is, Black Ain’t, explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a moment where racial identity was being simultaneously rejected and retained. The exhibition was the subject of a 2013 symposium. Walker has written articles and reviews for publications such as Trans, New Art Examiner, and Artforum. He is currently on the boards of Noon, an annual publication of short fiction, and Lampo, a non-profit presenter of new and experimental music. This year he is co-curator the Made in L.A. 2016 with Aram Moshayedi at the Hammer Museum.
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