MFA in Print Media

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/10177/40702

Browse By

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Ebony Frison 2025
(2025-05-09) Frison, Ebony
Echoes of American Apartheid is a multidisciplinary thesis that weaves personal memory with historical archive to examine the enduring impact of racial segregation and systemic violence in the United States. Central to this project are my own lived experiences—as a Black woman, veteran, and artist—and the Forgotten Frontlines archive, a collection of over 1,000 rarely seen photographs taken by Newton Carroll, an African American army photographer during World War II. Through photogravure, painting, and prose, this work bears witness to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual residue of American apartheid. By confronting the visual and emotional dissonance of Black life—between visibility and erasure, service and betrayal, memory and myth—the project offers both a reckoning and a reverence. It creates space for ancestral presence, collective grieving, and reimagined belonging. Influenced by thinkers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, Echoes of American Apartheid is at once altar and archive, resistance and remembrance—a gesture toward healing through radical seeing.
Ray Zill 2025
(2025-05-16) Zill, Ray
Splendid Irony reflects on my relationship to text as a print-disabled artist and librarian. I exist in a liminal space between print and electronic text, always longing for the tangible. My work draws on the tension between tactile and visual modes of perception and the human touch we often lose by reading digitally. Through print, and physical media in general, I regain an intimacy lost in our digital age, one that can be found on the press or by directly animating on film. I experiment with light, magnification, and sound to challenge traditional methods of reading and the didactic meaning we place on text. My research focuses on personal narratives from blind and visually impaired artists and writers reflecting on their experience with sight loss and reading. I then broaden my scope to include origins of ocularcentrism, the importance of touch, and technostalgia. My hope is to present both an intimate glimpse of my lived experience as well as a universal longing towards print, reading, and physical media. This paper asks: Why are we still craving physical media in a digital age that boasts convenience, accessibility, and connection? And how do we maintain touch on screen?
Sarah Huttner 2025
(2025) Huttner, Sarah
Rooted in Wonder: Awe in Nature’s Connections is an artistic exploration of the vast interconnectedness of trees in the natural world. It is a body of work that reflects my own wonderment of the complexities that lie beneath our feet and above our heads. It is also an act of gratitude (appreciation) towards the trees themselves to better understand and help preserve their environment so that all will prosper. Without bringing the actual forest into the city, or into a gallery, I engage the viewers’ senses and evoke a memory or feeling, perhaps an instance of wonderment. I encourage the viewer to move past their initial feelings and into action. Whether simply hiking though a green space, or taking on the daunting threat of deforestation, I encourage viewers to change their focus toward the natural. Through this body of work, I bring myself and others closer to nature in an effort to instill the need for conservation and better land management so that future generations can share in this experience.
Jess O'Farrell 2025
(2025-05-18) O'Farrell, Jess
“The Sacred and the Profane: An Altar to Queerness”-honors the divine and holy within the marginalized identities of queerness. I have created a sacred sanctum where intaglio works become sculptural and merge with an immersive space to create an altar to queer devotion and defiance. The United States’ government and, its laws, and regulations are thoroughly influenced by Judeo-Christian culture, which holds a primarily moral opposition to the LGBTQIA+ community. This leads people to believe that queer people are profane or lesser: or, at worst, evil. In this body of work, I reinstate the value of queerness, elevating it to holiness. The altar becomes a transformative space where the sacred meets the subversive. It appropriates, references, and reimagines the iconography of the Catholic Church to assert queerness as divine and unapologetic. As a queer person I see the tender devotion that members of this community have for each other, and the subsequent need to deconstruct the binary matrix of the heteronormative world. By appropriating the imagery and aesthetics of the Catholic Church I seek to imbue these works with the aura and culturally accepted authority of religious art and sacred spaces. Not only is the imagery an act of devotion, but the making of these objects is as well. Intaglio, and more specifically mezzotints, are laborious etching processes that require an almost religious devotion to the medium. Through the countless hours of preparing plates and burnishing and scraping, the intimacy extends beyond the images themselves into their creation. This Altar stands as a devotion to something beyond the oppressive doctrines of the past- a celebration rather than a condemnation of identity, self expression, and empowerment. I invite the viewer to confront the intersection of religion, power and identity. I urge them to reconsider the sacred not as a space of exclusion, but as a site of inclusive reverence.

Browse By

Recent Submissions