LOS ANGELES — When I was in graduate school for an MFA in writing, a professor told me something harrowing. “Most people here aren’t artists,” she said. “They’re students.” The judgment was implicit: Students go to school, and artists make art. At the time, I deeply wanted to be an artist, and not a student — but after viewing graduate art exhibitions across Los Angeles, I believe the latter to be the superior category. Yes, there is a range of professionalism in the work on view — students often struggle to distinguish baby from bathwater, and simply put the whole tub on display instead — but the University of California Los Angeles’s MFA exhibition proves how valuable it is to be a student. Far from perfect, their work illustrates the kind of mess, ambition, and attention that many “artists” would be lucky to have.
Installations on view turn galleries into would-be campsites, erecting makeshift structures across their barren white boxes. Ayla Gizlice’s “Rumble, Rumble, Rumble” (all works 2025) cordons off one gallery with strings stretched from floor to ceiling, wrapped around a wrought iron bar. Beyond it lies what looks like a tea kettle and floor cushions, waiting for guests who haven’t yet arrived. Harrison Kinnane Smith’s exhibition uses scaffolding wrapped with orange plastic fencing to frame its contents, stacking wooden boards along one wall to evoke a half-finished construction project (“Story Poles (Proposal for New Wight Gallery)”). Each installation is in conversation with other artwork on view: Smith’s photography investigates LA housing developments, and Gizlice’s exhibition includes an original fairytale — the kind one might tell around a campfire (“The Woman with Three Husbands”).
Student sculpture, photography, and video interrogate art world conventions, poking fun at the ways artwork — and life — are traditionally experienced. Maren Karlson’s grayscale paintings and collages lie on the floor under a glass pane. Their display mimics how one might study her subject matter, which ranges from machines to X-rays of her own organs. In Zenobia’s “ ‘Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects (abject) – for Harriet Jacobs,’” an enlarged steel needle appears to pierce directly through a gallery wall, ominously positioned at head-height. D.A. Gonzales exploits barriers in “CBP-FO-2024-133704,” a series of 21 reflective graphite prints that reveal FBI denials of requests for video footage from surveillance cameras at the United States-Mexico border. And Misty EunJoo Choi demonstrates how domestic life interpolates art, often to surreal results: One video and accompanying installation features a small kitchen vestibule tipped on its side, the footage capturing warped daily rituals: Toast flies “up” to a plate, and a figure crouches from the “ceiling” (“The Disoriented Room”).
Here’s the thing. If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that students are the real artists. At least, they’re what artists should be: unafraid, playful, and principled, especially in the face of ever-increasing government threats. At UCLA, these students — all of whom are, shocker, artists too — make space for new ways of making, looking, and being. Just how it should be.
University of California Los Angeles 2025 MFA Exhibition #4: Misty EunJoo Choi & Ayla Gizlice continues at New Wight Gallery (Broad Art Center, Suite 1100, Los Angeles) through May 9. 2025 MFA Exhibition #3: D.A. Gonzales, Maren Karlson, Zenobia, & Harrison Kinnane Smith was on view in the same gallery from April 17–25.
Read our review of Parts I and II here.