LOS ANGELES — The mood was energetic early Saturday afternoon, May 13, at Otis College, though the day isn’t quite in full swing yet given the previous night’s activities. On Friday night, Otis hosted his Industry Night, an event that focuses on connecting art and design students with employers and includes a fashion show, as well as a preview of Otis’ annual BFA and MFA shows and the first part of the two-day MFA Open Studios.
Needless to say, there was plenty to see between all the events, and I found myself particularly impressed by BFA’s annual exhibition, playfully titled THE Bucket. Covering multiple rooms and a multitude of perspectives and artistic outcomes, much of the work has been developed distinctly for the undergraduate level. Among the most notable is the painting “I Wear the Same Thing Every Day” (2023) by an artist named Carmen, made up of woven strips of fabric that together depict colorful abstract shapes and optically alluring lines . Lia Walker’s Wabi Sabi-influenced ceramic vases and sculptures, such as “Méimei” and “100 Teacups at Play” (2023), also caught my eye with their simple lines and emphasis on the imperfect.
Graduate students followed with ChatMFA: CONSCIOUS MANEUVERS, an ode to the deeply interdisciplinary nature of their program and a nod to the controversial ChatGPT chatbox that arguably threatens to take over large swaths of the creative industry with its AI-generated content. Hayley Quentin’s subtle and exquisitely rendered paintings had the witty undertones of the works of other Angeleno painters such as Theodora Allen and Claire Colette, whose practices allude to the mid-20th century transcendental painting group that is the subject of A current show at LACMA. Joseph Sherman’s collection of portraits of Michael Jackson, titled “Arbitrary Amount” (2023), shows how the legendary artist’s image can still, surprisingly, remain visually relevant in our collective pop culture iconography, and Kai Chan’s ground sculptures “Rug: Don’t Step on Me” and “Rug: Sleep With Me” (2023) add texture and humor to the exhibition.
The MFA Open Studios event also took place, with many graduate students praising the program and how it had benefited their practices. “I felt a lot of freedom to create and experiment,” said multimedia artist Suwichada Busamrong-Press, whose turmeric-yellow-soaked installation spanned both her own studio and a nearby project room. . His sentiments have been echoed by fellow artists Patsy Pitts, whose beautifully crafted large ceramics focus on black identity, and Henry Krusoe, whose multimedia practice explores ideas around abjection – including a sculpture that features a flaccid phallus with joking text “Forgive me for my terrible penis.
The day began with excitement as I left campus, walking through a seemingly endless series of events, including a sale of ceramics and a group of BFA students getting ready for karaoke. Students buzzed around socializing, discussing each other’s artwork and drinking iced matcha drinks as parents browsed the sale and gushed about their children’s accomplishments in what was a refreshingly sweet event, as far as relates to art school. Krusoe seemed to capture the mood of the graduating class with his sense that he was both “excited for what lies beyond the curriculum and sad to be leaving.”
