Boston Globe feature: 6 art-school stars to watch
Sammy Polinsky (top left), Megan Arné (top center), Azin Majooni (top right), Tristan Lajarrige (bottom left), Steve Aldeus (bottom center), and Yukai Chen (bottom right).
Boston Globe feature: 6 art-school stars to watch
From painting to photography to performance, these MFA students are all standouts
This article was first published in The Boston Globe on May 3, 2023. By Cate McQuaid.
Excerpt
The artists in our annual spotlight of talented MFA candidates scrutinize technology, motherhood, the natural world, and the communities that formed them. They’re studying at Boston University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Lesley University College of Art & Design. We met and chatted in galleries and their studios.
Megan Arné (CFA’23)
A mind map on Arné’s studio wall has “WORRY” at the center. The painter and her husband have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old; her work expresses the nitty gritty of motherhood.
When she first arrived at BU, pregnant with her second child, she said, “It was really hard to juggle home life and the studio.”
A series of small prints symbolizing her toddler’s foods proved a watershed.
“It’s progressed from compositions with these shapes into having them become other symbols — for the female body, for childbirth, for breast-feeding — and using them to make patterns,” she said.
In one series, Arné charts the sleep of family members. In the “Two Births in Orange” series, she layers food symbols to evoke “the birth canal, the shapes of the breast and the vulva, and cells dividing,” she said.
Paintings integrating her studio and home life are a mixed blessing.
“I’m working constantly. When I’m at home with my kids I’m tracking their sleep, what they’re eating. I’m tracking my guilty thoughts, my emotions, making little charts,” she said. “Then when I come to the studio, I’m still in the same mode.”
Her art reflects the invisible labor of mothers and caregivers.
During our studio visit, she wore coveralls. Emblazoned on the back: “Milking It.”
Studio-driven mixed with critical dialogue
The Master of Fine Arts program in Painting at Boston University School of Visual Arts promotes the discipline in its varied manifestations as a fundamental form of artistic expression. At its core, the program is studio-driven. As an art form, it is a long-term critical engagement with ideas, feelings, and sensibilities. The program, ranked the #6 best graduate painting program in the nation (U.S. News and World Report), supplements this emphasis on the studio with critical dialogue in the form of studio visits, critiques, weekly seminars, lectures, workshops, and more.