“All that is solid melts into air.” Never have these words of Marx and Engels resonated more profoundly. The MFA class of 2020 is emerging into a world that has profoundly changed. ln the course of a few months, all the conventions of daily life have been upended. In art, as in life, long held expectations and assumptions no longer seem to apply. What kind of art will be meaningful in a post-Covid world? What kind of art life will be possible?
This year’s graduating class faces extraordinary challenges, but also opportunities. After two years of dedicated work (three years in the case of the three Chubb Postgraduate Fellows) they are leaving school with skills, personal visions and bodies of work that will launch them into this new reality. This is in keeping with the ruling principle of the New York Academy of Art. The Academy is based on a paradox. It is predicated on the idea that an education steeped in tradition will equip students with the tools to decipher and express contemporary reality.
The results are evident in the work of these 45 grads and three Chubb Fellows. Their works are wildly diverse in style, media and theme. They have internalized their knowledge of traditional genres, techniques and motifs and transformed them into highly personal expressions that illuminate both the world outside and the worlds within. In their hands, realism, representation and figurative art do not simply generate an objective view of the world.
Rather, they can be wielded to forge a personal language that reflects the complex nature of contemporary life.
-Eleanor Heartney
New York Academy of Art
2020 Thesis Exhibition Catalogue
MFA CLASS OF 2020
| Lydia Baker | Young Lim Lee
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Johanna Ryan |
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