In 1949, a young man from an immigrant Rusyn family in Pittsburgh graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology—now Carnegie Mellon University—with a degree in pictorial design. That graduate was Andrew Warhola, who would later re-fashion himself as Andy Warhol. 76 years later, graduates of Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Fine Arts program have their work displayed in the Andy Warhol Museum, a convergence that Warhol himself probably could never have imagined after leaving his hometown and college years far in the rearview mirror. But while Carnegie Mellon remodels its fine arts building, the thesis work needed a place to go. Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, Izsys Archer, Max Tristan Watkins, Frankmarlin, and Tingting Cheng are all third-year MFA students whose work makes up Holding Still, Holding On, a group exhibition on The Warhol’s second floor.
Andy Warhol Museum Displays Carnegie Mellon MFA Students’ Work in Holding Still, Holding On
Student-centered exhibitions like Holding Still, Holding On are always interesting windows into what conversations might be happening in contemporary art. If MFA programs are the top echelon, the work that comes out of them can be an indication of what the art world will come to value. Graduate-level artwork also often shows how imaginative artists can be in managing their resources. Notably, Carnegie Mellon made their MFA program tuition-free, making it more accessible and ushering in generations of new talent to Pittsburgh.
Max Tristan Watkins’ Medieval Erotics
Max Tristan Watkins’ work was the most esoteric in concept, but also the most grounded in a physical medium. Watkins created a series of works using goatskin vellum, the paper that Medieval bookmakers used. He created small artist books, palimpsestic two-dimensional work drawing upon source material found in Medieval manuscripts.
“For me where books and bodies collide with each other is what I’m most interested in,” he said. “There’s an erotics to using vellum. You have to shave it and go with the hair when you paint. You have to breathe on the skin to warm it up and use your the oil from your own skin if you want to make gold.” He also added “I have an obsession with obsession and with research as a performance or a character. These books make a portrait of me as a person obsessed with books.”
Watkins’s work had a strong, coherent concept and showed a clear interest in materials and in learning, and while at Carnegie Mellon, he took a weeklong intensive course in medieval manuscript illumination.
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza Interrogates Local History
Filmmaker Chantal Feitosa-Desouza’s documentary work is at home in The Warhol, given that it centers on Schenley High School, which Warhol himself attended. Schenley closed in 2008 and became a luxury apartment complex. For her film, Feitosa-Desouza interviewed graduates of the school, which was one of Pittsburgh’s first public high schools. “I wanted to tell a story about the school closure from the perspective of the people that had to experience it,” she explained.
The ten-minute film, Lightning in a bottle, shows how an asbestos problem and the lack of funding to abate it led eventually to the school shuttering. The film itself has a sort of educational kitsch to it. “I was thinking of the Socratic seminar, like high school English class,” she said. It’s also expertly edited, with composition notebooks, Pinyon Script font, and chalkboard-scratch like sounds. At one point, a carousel of luxury apartment units in Schenley High School plays while their standard answering system “hold music” plays as the audio. Something that was once a site of access is reduced to a sound bite, a robot chirping Thank you for calling Schenley Lofts. It’s powerful work.
Tingting Cheng Sees Herself as a “Digital Hunter Gatherer’
Typically, museums do not allow visitors to touch their work. Tingting Cheng’s installation, however, is open for anyone to touch, and she encourages it. “I want to welcome people, especially children, to touch it and play with it,” she said. However, the work itself isn’t exactly toy-like, given that on the wall are reproductions of missiles. Hanging from there are large vinyl cards, meant to look like the playing cards Cheng saw in her childhood in China. Visitors can flip through them and touch at their leisure.
Part of Cheng’s interest in these objects is that she wants to observe how base human desires to collect and gather interact with new technology. She called contemporary people “digital hunter-gatherers” and pointed to the fact that in China, ancient traditions like animistic beliefs seep into modern life in insidious ways. She also saw connections between the post-industrial city she grew up in and Pittsburgh, allowing her to explore her own path along with the concepts in her artwork.
Frankmarlin Delves into Grief and Joy
Frankmarlin introduced his work as dealing with “universal emotions” that “we all collectively experience.” One of the interesting tensions in his sculpture and installation was between the universal and the specific—death is universal, but people in different social positions view an image of, say, a casket differently. Frankmarlin got flowers from funeral homes to use as part of his sculptures, and described that process as emotional. “The first time I carried the flowers home I sobbed in my car,” he said. How much was contained in each of those offerings was overwhelming.
Though it focuses on death, there is joy and catharsis in Frankmarlin’s work, as well as a bit of the absurd. One wall label boasts the material list of “a jar with the artist’s fermented urine, large blunts soaked in camphor water, filled with sulfur from a paper-burning ceremony where everyone wrote letters to sadness, sealed with betadine solution.” (It bears reading all the wall descriptions). The concept is deeply felt, and the work was often communal. Frankmarlin re-staged family photographs with friends, allowing friendships to deepen into found family.
Izsys Archer Celebrates “Foremothers”
Frankmarlin shares part of their space with Izsys Archer, who describes herself as a “space taker-upper.” Archer has made a mixed-media installation, blending sculpture, digital prints, and found objects. “This process of install was very intuitive and improvisational,” she said. “I sat with the work and journaled about it while it was in my studio.” The work itself is a paper-covered set of three walls with a sculpture at its center above a makeshift altar. Archer dedicated it to her mother and to the experience of being a plus-sized Black woman. This piece was her first venture into sculpture, and she approached it with curiosity.
There’s a clear through-line of care as a way of being, treating objects from her family history with care, and the care between mother, daughter, and as Archer puts it “foremothers.” All of the students’ work had an element of kitsch to it and a fascination with objects and their meaning. It all spoke to a desire to feel more deeply and to find meaning in ordinary, small things, like trading cards, family photos, or treasured books.
Story by Emma Riva
Photo courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum, a collaborative photo that the Carnegie Mellon MFA students worked on together
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