2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition University of South Florida Contemporary Museum of Art April 4–May 10, 2025
By Tony Wong Palm
Current world population is 8.2 billion; and an intrepid percentage of these humans have chosen the artist’s path.
Six of these in particular have an exhibition at USF CAM (University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida).
The exhibition’s self declared title, “Thank You in Advance, 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition” tells of these artists at a threshold propelling them beyond their academic studios.
The six artists are: Jocelyn Chase, Olin Fritz, Adrian Gomez, Michael Lonchar, Emily Martinez, and Tom Rosenow.
A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an in-depth profile on each artist by the international and independent art critique, journalist, and lecturer, Laurie Rojas.
Olin Fritz
Visitors are met with bizarre assemblages upon entering the museum. Maybe even alien, they’re headdresses, perhaps for ceremonial rituals of people anthropologists have yet to discover; or costumes for a fringe festival performance; or even for a contemporary interpretation of the 1967 broadway musical “Hair” – from a generation way before the artist was even born.
Olin Fritz
There are seashells and other ocean flotsam, feathers, fabric, eyeballs, taxidermy parts, teeth, hair, latex gloves, foam…to name a few items in the menagerie list of miscellaneous matter, with mysterious gobs and strands that are precariously built, stuck together, and mounted gravity defying on spindly stands.
Jocelyn Chase
Another strangeness waits on the other side of the museum. A corridor space, painted dark and tunnel like is where Jocelyn Chase’s dramatically lit formations and monoliths rise up from the floor and jutting out from the wall.
Reminded me of going caving in West Virginia hills where only light is from our head lamps. Navigating Chase’s installation like traversing those damp underground caverns filled with other worldly shapes and forms, each colored and textured from eons of mineral buildup; except in Chase’s formations are of industrial stuff – fiberglass, styrofoam, and layered with resins, enamel and automotive paint, shredded tires, felting, marble dusts…all filtered through generations of human existence.
An experience far from childhood stuffed animals, yet intriguing, sitting in the dark contemplating these aggressive structures from the Anthropocene Age.
Intersecting these two spaces are CAM’s East and West Galleries. Looking from an architectural plan view, one could draw out lines crossing these four spaces creating a compass, appropriately representing points in these artists’s journeys ahead, with all the symbolic and mythic meaning the cardinal directions imply.
In this compass configuration, Fritz’s entry space would point North and Chase’s cave space, South. In the East Gallery (now named Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery) are artists Michael Lonchar and Tom Rosenow; and the West Gallery are artists Adrian Gomez and Emily Martinez.
The Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery featuring the work of Michael Lonchar and Tom Rosenow, with additional work by Jocelyn Chase along the back wall.Michael Lonchar, Gone Fishing, Out for a Swim.
Looking east, suspended in the middle of the gallery is Michael Lonchar’s singular “Gone Fishing, Out for a Swim”. Hung at an incline, chains and giant cartoonish hooks grapple a structure in what might be in the framing phase of construction.
There’re twelve identical 2×4 pine frames connected like pages of a pop-up book opening, stretching out. A coffin shape, a memento mori void extending through the center of each page, with what resembles the hull of a boat suspended within.
Michael Lonchar, Gone Fishing, Out for a Swim.
This whole rectangle structure could be an apparatus for philosophical inquiry. It is a telescope looking up from one end to a boundless vastness; viewing down from the other direction becomes a microscope searching the quantum foundations of this existence; and from the sides are segmented views of the boat hull floating somewhere between these extremes of scale, between beginnings and endings, between birth and death.
Tom Rosenow
Tom Rosenow’s printmaking prowess surrounds Lonchar’s two-by-four geometry. Massive cyanotypes dominating one side of the gallery, and another anchoring the opposite side, his thirteen prints, a mixture of traditional and modern print making techniques, draw a linear landscape around the gallery walls.
Tom Rosenow
Rosenow’s works, collapse and condenses images sourced from the digital world of social media that inundates many of our lives. He captures the relentless barrage of images and video stills and curates into compositions for possible longer internal reflections.
Tom Rosenow
The internet with its speed and reach may be unique to this current time, but the gathering and spreading of thoughts, ideas, discoveries, inventions – culture in general, have always migrated with humans around this planet. Setting precedence was Japanese ukiyo-e block prints in the 17th century with their popularity that even influence a distant artists like van Gogh is one example.
Rosenow merging technologies from different eras into one collage moment to tell age old stories of human elegance and foibles is another example.
Only three works in the seemingly sparse West Gallery, but their monumentality and dense complexity confidently fills the space, one anchoring the floor and the other holding up the walls. A note on continuity: Prior to this exhibition, in early 2025, CAM hosted X Factor: Latinx Artists and the Reconquest of the Everyday. What is now in this gallery could be a progression of that.
West Gallery featuring the work of Emily Martinez (left) and Adrian Gomez (right).
Parked on the floor is Adrian Gomez’s giant mobile street vendor cart, “Bisagras” as it says on the exhibition signage, though the exhibition catalogue titled it “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”. One translates as “hinge”, and the other “not from here, not from there”. This duality might express Gomez’s pivotal identity and intensions of his art.
With LED’s running and side awnings open, the cart is loaded with “merchandise” ready for market. Religious statuettes lined up in rows, indigenous pots, Mexican style mortars filled with various ingredients. Interestingly, a number of articles have been written on museums being the contemporary sacred space, inheriting roles churches used to provide as a place for quiet contemplation, reverence for the objects within, and potential transcendence experiences. Gomez’s cart of religious statutes and secular objects playing a double role?
Adrian Gomez, Bisagras.
There’s also a film projecting on the back awning following a drive around dusty dirt roads through ranch or farm country; and the sets of towing ball hitches on every side, presenting a conundrum on how this cart can be pulled, and more importantly, which direction.
Emily Martinez’s the soft edge of a sword (left) and Pietra (right).
Emily Martinez’s two massive works, “Pieta”, a charcoal drawing on paper; and “the soft edge of a sword”, an acrylic on canvas painting; references old masters use of imageries, symbolisms, figures, and hierarchical compositions speaking to this contemporary world.
“Pieta” recreates a religious theme that a number of artists have depicted with Michelangelo’s version being the most famous. There’re seven figures in Martinez’s interpretation, with herself playing each role, and the Virgin Mary here wears a cowboy hat. Her own Cowboy Carter.
The “the soft edge of a sword” is commanding, a clash of circus characters in costumes charging each on unique breeds of horses while an array of bodies, characters and creatures in both foreground and distant fantastical landscape, Hieronymous Bosch-esque, playing out allegorical scenes of love, struggles, cautionary tales…
No doubt many challenges building up to this exhibition, and the brilliant job of installation, which unfortunately has such a short schedule. But it is a grand send-off, and will be interesting to follow each artist’s progress – their hero’s journey.
As part of their exhibition program, CAM creates a self guided virtual tour of every exhibition, in part as a documentation record, and in part for outreach. It’s nice to be able to view the exhibitions from other parts of the world, or even after their closing. Here’s the link to the on-line virtual tour for this exhibition: https://cam.usf.edu/CAM/exhibitions/2025_04_MFA2025/MFA2025.html A digital version of the Thank You in Advance 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition catalogue is also available for downloading at the same link.
jenal, 2019. Acrylic, oil, coffee grounds, enamel, on board, foamular frame, 50 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jenal Dolson is a nervous flyer even under normal circumstances. Add scrambling to get out of the country during a global pandemic before international borders close and anyone’s stress levels will ascend to new heights. It is Tuesday, March 31st, and she is leaving the United States and returning home to Canada to shelter with her family as the severity of COVID-19 slowly dawns on U.S. citizens. She sits alone in Tampa International Airport, waiting to board a flight that she never expected to be on and saying goodbye to a place she is not ready to leave behind.
To call the last few weeks of Dolson’s time in Tampa a whirlwind would be an understatement. At this point in March, she is a MFA candidate at the University of South Florida, in the thick of her final semester when the coronavirus hits America. Between transitioning her in-person classes to an online platform (no easy feat for studio art courses), finishing her thesis work, writing about said work, preparing for install, and making travel arrangements, change is the constant. Her graduating class’s MFA exhibition Battin’ A Hundred is canceled, their reception is canceled, their panel discussion moderated by artist Kalup Linzy is canceled. It feels like everything is canceled. However, the artists are undeterred, and they still exhibit their work in the USF Contemporary Art Museum. There is almost a defiant pride in displaying their art knowing that it will not be seen in person.
Dolson spends her precious final hours in Tampa packing for her flight and installing her work in the CAM, with the invaluable assistance of museum staff Vincent Kral, Eric Jonas, and Tony Wong Palms. She recalls visiting the museum for the first time on a 2014 trip to Tampa and sensing then that she would one day show work in this space, a premonition fulfilled these six years later.
Bump Dream, 2020. Acrylic, latex, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.Soother, 2020. Acrylic, oil, fabric, foamular, on MDF, 50 x 50 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez. Whale, 2020. Acrylic, oil, foamular, on panel, 50 x 50 inches. From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.
Her arrival in Toronto is not met with a warm embrace from Dolson’s parents, who are relieved to see their daughter home safe but still respecting the social distancing rules that now measure our lives. Everyone dons their face masks and Dolson sits in her parents’ backseat on the car ride from the Toronto airport to their family home outside of Cambridge, Ontario, taking these moments to let a wave of quiet calm wash over her and finally exhale. She is deeply grateful to her parents for hosting her, knowing that in doing so they have committed to the country’s mandatory 14 day returning traveler quarantine alongside her.
Dolson uses the next few days to reacclimate to these surroundings, the familiarity of place comforting her during an unfamiliar time. She self-isolates in a section of her family’s basement, with her beloved chihuahua Bam Bam to keep her company and a mini-fridge stocked with snacks to keep her fed, courtesy of mom. That Friday she joins a Zoom reception hosted by CAM for the MFA exhibition, which has a great turnout as many people are eager to see the artists’ work and congratulate them. Dolson later passes the two-week quarantine mark on the same day that she passes her thesis defense, and her reward for this tremendous accomplishment is finally being able to hug her parents.
Into the Belly, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 8.75 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
A welcome focus for Dolson’s energy comes in the form of creating a solo exhibition entitled Into the Belly for Tempus Projects, highlighted on the non-profit gallery’s Instagram account. The show, which ran from May 30th-June 12th, neatly aligns with the Tampa-based gallery’s approach to the pandemic’s unique challenges. Tempus is utilizing social media to showcase a series of mini-virtual exhibits that feature works on a small, intimate scale. As Tempus Founder and Programming Director Tracy Midulla explains, “We have taken the approach of offering small, short virtual exhibitions. This allows us to keep the quality of the work featured at a high standard, but the format and delivery of the works to a manageable level for everyone as we are distanced from one another.”
Installation view of Into the Belly in a section of Dolson’s converted basement space. Image courtesy of the artist.
Into the Belly consists of eight coloured pencil drawings on gessoed board, with each work’s dimensions around 5×6 or 7×8 inches. Dolson’s process is reliant on found materials, so she seamlessly adapts to her new circumstances by repurposing leftovers in her old studio in her parents’ house. Her use of coloured pencils on board allows for textures to come out of the surface itself, some areas pulling through the grain of the wood or underlaying brushwork; paired with a uniform attention to colour blocking and gradient fades. These underlaying patterns resemble countless tiny fissures, which further emphasize the material’s surface while adding layers of complexity to already rich compositions.
The Days Eye (Edelweiss), 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
The small scale of each work is in keeping with the gallery’s current theme of miniature exhibitions. Dolson also expresses her interest in scaling down the works to a size that is accessible, where they can be held in your hand and you can take them with you very easily. Although these new images are much smaller than her thesis paintings, she draws several parallels between the two bodies of work. Dolson clarifies that the viewer is still looking at a series of shapes, forms, lines, directions, and pathways, which you can follow around the work finding little areas where something new can be seen.
Bathhouse, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
There is plenty to see in Dolson’s drawings, so much that you might get lost in looking. The artist presents the viewer with a plethora of shapes and motifs to latch onto and alluring pathways through each labyrinth. One might glance at a piece like Bathhouse and seize upon the chain in the lower right of the composition as a good entry point. If you follow this chain directly upwards, it becomes veiled by a light blue rectangular shape that hints of cloth or drapery. If you choose a different approach and start from top to bottom, does the chain then become unveiled? Other areas may suggest something recognizable while leaving you grasping to articulate this familiarity.
Into the Belly is an apt title, as Dolson equates our current COVID-19 reality with entering the belly of the whale or belly of the beast. As levels of infection fluctuate worldwide and we find ourselves months into isolation with no clear end in sight, she muses “it is hard to say if we are on the other side yet, are we still inside of it completely, or can we see the light? There is a lot of emotion in this time that is kind of unpredictable and everyone’s pace of life has changed dramatically. It is not only a metaphor, but it is allegorical of how everyone has been forced into this journey.”
The title also attaches us to the body, to be within a living thing, which she connects to the physical referents that a lot of the shapes and forms take on in her work. The tempest of emotions and anxieties we feel manifest physically in our bodies, and the pandemic makes us hypersensitive to these sensations. We continually self-monitor for the first signs of fever, the slightest cough, and to make sure we have not lost our sense of smell or taste. As Dolson succinctly puts it, “our emotions in our bodies are really in our guts.”
Insulation (viewfinder), 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Dolson is appreciative of Tempus for giving her a platform to explore new ideas post thesis, amidst the pandemic. She explains that the timing was especially beneficial, as it “really gave me a lot of purpose during the first month and a half that I was back. I was able to come home and put in work drawing 8-10 hours a day and that was absolutely amazing. I think Tempus has a strong sense of what it means to be an art space in that they truly value their artists and look to foster a sense of creativity and programming that makes sense for who they are affiliated with.”
Proceeds from Dolson’s show will go towards helping Tempus fundraise for a paid full-time director position for the gallery. Dolson is also donating a portion of the proceeds from future sales to Black Lives Matter Tampa.
What is next for Jenal Dolson? “Making more work” is her immediate, unflinching answer. Dolson is making a new series of paintings on canvas and she looks forward to waking up each morning and having her studio time. She relishes the daily grind of making work, embodying that true artist-as-hustler mentality, where the balancing act of juggling multiple jobs and projects only energizes her to seek more.
In terms of future exhibitions, Dolson is thrilled to have a solo show this fall at an artist-run space in Benson, Nebraska called The Pet Shop, and she beams when discussing the opportunity. Her close friend Kim Darling, currently a MFA candidate at USF, ran a space at the gallery and helped Dolson make connections in Benson. Dolson also remains in good virtual company through regular studio visits with friends and a gallery in Chicago with which she is enamored. Finally, it has been only days since Dolson moved into an apartment in the port city of Hamilton, Ontario. The industrious city’s “steel town” identity matches her own tenacious work ethic. She is drawn to the city’s strong local arts scene, where she can make her marks on the community. There is also a lovely blend of nature and rich architectural history that she is wasting no time in exploring. Dolson is eager to create her place in this new environment, and everywhere she looks she absorbs new lines, new shapes, new textures, new patterns, and new objects, searching for another source of inspiration around every corner.
Dolson in her Tampa studio with Bam Bam. Image taken by Kim Darling.
James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to corrupt the impressionable youth of America.
“My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery, a continuous exploration of how it is put together.” Christian Viveros-Fauné
Christian Viveros-Fauné is an internationally respected independent art critic and curator. His appointment as Curator-at-Large to the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) in August of 2018 launched a series of politically and socially engaged exhibitions that have further linked Tampa Bay to current trends in the global art world.
Interview conducted and transcribed by Amanda Poss in May of 2019.
Amanda Poss: I was reading your new book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, and in the introduction you cite a trip to the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. when you were twelve where you saw four Rothko paintings. You said this experience was something that “energized” you, and that the paintings “lodged themselves deep into [your] memory.” With this as your catalyst into art appreciation as a child, would you also describe your initial steps into the art world as a professional?
Christian Viveros-Fauné: Those were my initial steps as recounted in the introduction, which reads in part as a portrait of the critic as a young man. At some point I figured out that there was this thing that was mysterious to me–and that actually remains mysterious to me, simply because I can’t make [art], I can’t do it. You know there are people who can’t dance and you say “they have two left feet,” well, I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do either because I have two left hands so to speak, so I write. My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery; it’s a continuous exploration of how art is materially put together, how pigment is pushed around cloth, for instance, to make a picture. That has always seemed to be, to me, kind of miraculous.
I had another experience in my early twenties, when I went to live in Europe. I was always a writer, or a writer wannabe…(laughs)…this was definitely during the writer wannabe period… and I figured out that hanging out with artists was a lot more interesting than hanging out with writers. Writers tend to be shut-ins, they spend a lot of time alone. Being a professional writer is a lonely experience, whereas artists have to get out into the world and show their work at least once or twice a year, so art making has always been far more public. Writers, on the other hand, could spend two years, five years, ten years, basically working on the same project…. So, like I said, I found that artists were a lot more interesting to hang out with. Eventually I entered an artist studio, an actual professional artist, someone who got paid for making paintings and exhibiting them, and I remember being floored by the idea that people could push pigment around to make meaning in ways parallel to how I wanted to make meaning with words. That was a real revelation, it has stayed with me, and is a gift that keeps on giving. I find myself continually inspired, surprised, and amazed by individuals who have made a life from making this kind of meaning consistently.
Bosco Sodi, Muro, 2017-2019. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: That brings me nicely to my next point: you have a tremendous CV, with a wide array of experiences and accolades. As someone who has done quite a lot of independent writing and curating, what sort of opportunities/possibilities excite you most about working within USFCAM, which is an institutional but also academic setting?
CVF: That’s a really good question. I’ve long had a career as a writer who moonlights as a curator… meaning, I arrive at an institution and put together a show, but I rarely get to do a second exhibition at the same institution. And that independence comes with significant freedoms, but it also has some drawbacks, right? Not only is working independently unsteady work, but being at an institution longer than single exhibition can mean that you make a bigger impact than just one good show…
AP: One moment, as opposed to a successive series of them.
CVF: Exactly! And that’s really the sort of thing that attracted me to the idea of working at USFCAM. Margaret Miller is largely at fault-slash-deserves the credit for bringing me here. The way she proposed the position was very liberating. For me, ultimately, it was largely about being able to do something at an institution that offered significant freedoms conceptually and curatorially, but that also allows for the opportunity to be able to do a series of exhibitions, with the added bonus that the university is the enveloping organization That is, USFCAM operates in an environment geared towards education, rather than making museum trustees happy.
AP: Which is really different.
CVF: Yes, very different! So, yeah, I think it’s turned out to be a really good fit. There’s also the value of doing things on this campus and in Tampa as opposed to in New York. New York is arguably the center of the art world, it has long been the center of money in the art world. A lot of important art is seen in cities like London and New York, and that is obviously significant on its face… [but] there a lot of cultural phenomena that fail to register in New York because there’s not enough money attached to them, and that’s very unfortunate. Ideas that run contrary to the art market tend to do better elsewhere, they tend to take root in places other than New York. In my book I talk about groundbreaking artists like Rick Lowe. He has given plenty of talks in New York but he has never had a show there, he has never participated in the Whitney Biennial, which is insane, seeing as he’s one of the most influential artists living today. Same thing with Theaster Gates. Social practice in general, which is more than a decade old, has gotten very little play in New York and I think that tells you a lot.
Jorge Tacla, Señal de abandono 34 (Homs), 2018. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: That brings me to my next point. In an interview you did back in 2016 with Brett Wallace for Conversation Project NYC, you were asked: “What should a great show seek to accomplish?” In your response, you mentioned that art should “illustrate [critically] where art/culture is today,” and that you see this happening more in secondary and tertiary cities around the world, as opposed to New York. Do you still feel that way (it sounds like you do), and do you feel that Tampa could be one of these cities?
CVF: I hope so! Let me answer the second part of your question first: I sincerely hope so, and I know my colleagues at USFCAM hope so. We have made inroads and will continue to make inroads in that direction. I’m not sure Tampa has become a secondary or tertiary cultural hub yet, but I do see green shoots suggesting, given a number of crucial synergies, that such a thing could happen. What I like about Tampa currently is that it presents an environment in which ideas can be profiled anew and redefined, which I personally find to be very appealing.
Miki Kratsman, Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016). USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo by Will Lytch.
AP: Now let’s talk about something a bit broader. What does it mean to you to be a curator?
CVF: I don’t really subscribe to the idea of a curator as an author. That is, I don’t like the situation where the curator supplants the artist as an author. I like to think of the role of the curator as a chief collaborator, someone who helps articulate, who helps put discrete works together, like in a group exhibition. Or, if we’re talking about mounting a solo exhibition, [the curator] helps create the context for the work. Curatorial work is, in part, a function of getting art out of the studio. Many artists work long hours with the doors closed to the outside world. Then the work comes out for exhibitions. In a gallery situation, the dealer, the gallerist, hopefully helps the artist articulate his or her vision. In a museum, it’s the curator who helps in making the symbolic meaning circulate. In those circumstances, the curator functions like an an interlocutor–a chief believer in the work–whom the artist can also talk to and figure out the best cultural angle in which to position his or her art.
(Laughs) That was kind of a wordy and non-specific definition….
AP: That’s perfectly fine! I was curious what it meant to you (specifically), because anyone could cite sort of a textbook definition or current theories but everyone has their own approach.
CVF: Possibly because I am very much a generalist as a writer and curator, I really do think there’s an important aspect of editing and interpreting in curating. At their best, curators act like editors for artists. That’s not to say that the curator is necessarily cutting anything from an artist’s production, but, to continue with the editing metaphor, if you’re putting together a collection of ‘essays’–that is, a collection of artworks–then it’s on the editor/curator to make sure that those artworks play as well together as they possibly can. Whether the ‘editor’ is working with a single artist or a group of artists, it’s his or her obligation to establish a relationship of trust and collaboration wherein the best work comes forward and is represented in the best light possible.
Miki Kratsman, People I Met, 2010–2018 (installation view). USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
CVF: Let’s see. Both of those exhibitions you just mentioned can be described, in broad strokes, as highly political, to nod definitively towards issues of social engagement. But what we have on tap for the future, well, some exhibitions are more political than others. Work with a social or political bent has always been my interest, but I don’t want to present those kind of shows exclusively. I think that would make for far too uniform an exhibition program, both for the museum and myself as a curator, so there are other things on tap, [which] I’d rather not discuss right this minute… (Laughs)
AP: No hints? (Laughs)
CVF: I don’t necessarily want to give away the the shows that are coming in 2020 or 2021, but what I can tell you is that it will involve an eclectic group of exhibitions. There are going to be several that are a lot more about eye candy [as opposed to] the two shows I’ve done to-date, and even the exhibitions that are heavy on the eye candy will have a significant social component to them. I can say [something] about the next exhibition, which is called The Return of the Real. It’s a two-person show that riffs, or cheekily appropriates, the title from Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real. We’re definitely not using the title in a way that he’d like. (Laughs)
[The exhibition includes] the work of Robert Lazzarini, he makes amazing sculptures that are distorted anamorphically, and another artist who is a generation younger, Rodrigo Valenzuela. Rodrigo is a faculty member at UCLA, [and] a photographer… he’s had about five shows in West Coast museums in the last three years, so he’s well-known out there but not so much on the East Coast. We’re interested in bringing in him [to Tampa] and in being the first institution on the East Coast to showcase his work. Both of these artists are differently committed to amazing acts of re-representation. In both cases, their artworks involve visually stunning, conceptually complex work.
Tavares Strachan, 130,000 Years, 2018. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: Let’s talk more about your book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art. What were you looking for when selecting 50 exemplar works of political art from last 200 years?
CVF: To be honest with you, and I say this every time I present the book, the selection is pseudo-authoritative and very subjective. I write in the introduction to the book that the volume contains 50 essays on what I consider to be the 50 greatest works of political art. Those 50 artworks will invariably be different from another critic’s 50 great works. We might overlap on 10 or 20 artworks, or at least I would hope so.
What these artworks have in common is that they’re all important in the sense that they have all transformed the notion of what people think about when they think about political art. They’ve all put down a marker, they’ve all expanded the definition of both art and politics. Some of these artworks have done so closer to their date of creation, others have not. I start with [Francisco] Goya’s Disasters of War, which was published posthumously, 35 years after his death. He was way too smart to publish those prints in his lifetime because he would have been nailed to the wall by the Spanish monarchy, and if not by the monarchy, then by the Inquisition. But he still made them… and it took more than a decade to put the plates together. So, you have to ask yourself: why would an artist of his stature, late in life, labor so long to put together those 82 plates? [Goya] is basically taking it all in, he’s considering the war, the state of things, the application of reason to human events, weighing how humans respond to social and economic pressure, and ultimately, what happens to society when things fall apart. And what he witnessed is in those prints. I mean, he wasn’t sitting there taking photographs of the war… but somehow or other, through his own observations and other people’s accounts, Goya arrived at the first modern visual record of war and its human cost: what the poet Robert Burns referred to as ”man’s inhumanity to man.”
AP: Some would say even that all art is political, and you address that question in your introduction, but of course you also had to narrow it down to 50 artworks for the book. What do you wish you could have added in?
CVF: I wish I could have added in another fifty artworks. The initial idea was that the book would include a hundred works of political art. I was told by my publisher that they loved the idea of the book, but that we had to slim it down because reproduction rights are just too expensive… (Laughs) Even the reproduction rights on this little book are crazy, so a hundred wasn’t happening, but, yeah, I wish there were specific works that I could have gotten in there, some of them by contemporary artists whom I admire very much…
David Zwirner Books, Published in 2018
For example, I wanted to include a major work by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. The group ran a free University, BHQFU, for a whole decade. The collective hasn’t disappeared but it has sort of gone underground. That university was very important. It’s only been a year since it was closed, but it was amazing as a social experiment. The Bruces helped shape an entire generation of artists in what is otherwise a very jaded city. There are many others artworks–contemporary, modern, precursors to the modern–that I would have loved to include and simply could not. Richard Mosse, for example: I would have loved to have included images from his Heat Maps series, which are recent photographs that document the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East using a military-grade infrared camera that is so sophisticated, it is actually considered a weapon of war.
AP: So what excites or intrigues you most about art right now?
CVF: Its possibilities. The fact that [art], today and in every age, actually gets to reimagine what’s possible. I think that’s really what always amazes me [most] about art. It’s got nothing to do with the actual politics of it, whether I might agree with them or not. It has everything to do with the power of the artist to make something amazing from somebody else’s idea of garbage, to turn the seemingly useless into something that has a renewed purpose…. I mean, that basic gesture is just revolutionary, it’s super radical. I find that kind of surprise, that kind of retooling, to be something that only art can do. There’s something special about art’s lack of use value, its seeming uselessness. At its best and most ambitious that uselessness harbors the potential to create laboratory-like insight… the fact that artists can reimagine worlds is immensely powerful.
Karolina Sobecka, A memory, an ideal, a proposition, 2017. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.
AP: One last question. Can art change the world?
CVF: I think that it can, in small and big ways… it’s not [literally] liberty leading the people, and likely never will be, but art does provide, like [the painting] Liberty Leading the People[by Eugène Delacroix], a rallying point for ideas, and we are a very image driven species. Art can change the world, it has done so in the past–I can count at least 50 instances in which it has–and will continue to do so in the future.
The Return of the Real: Robert Lazzarini and Rodrigo Valenzuela opens at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa on August 26th and runs through December 7, 2019. The exhibition is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, and organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum.
Artist’s Conversation and Exhibition Reception Friday, September 6, 6-9 pm Conversation in the galleries with artists Robert Lazzarini and Robert Valenzuela, and USFCAM Curator-at-lare Christian Viveros-Fauné. The exhibit reception follows from 7-9pm. Free and open to the public.
For additional information about a symposium, curator’s talk, spoken word and open mic events, and concerts in the gallery throughout the run of the exhibit, visit the USF Contemporary Art Museum’s website.
Amanda Poss received her MA in Art History from the University of South Florida in 2015 specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art, and a BA from the University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2011. Poss currently holds the position of Gallery Director at Gallery221@Hillsborough Community College, Dale Mabry campus, where she also oversees a growing permanent art collection. She is the former Gallery Director at Blake High School, where she organized and curated exhibits from 2015–2017. Poss also has also held positions at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa as a Gallery Assistant, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampa, and Adjunct Professor at Hillsborough Community College.
