A NEW STATE OF MATTER

Daniel Dobrow, bree gant, Breanna Robinson, Renee Royale, José Taymani—2025 Master of Fine Arts degree candidates—present their thesis projects and conclude their residencies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University.

This exhibition and the associated events are co-organized by the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Support provided by the Norton S. Walbridge Fund; the Myers Foundations; the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts; and the Alsdorf Gallery Endowment.

Daniel Dobrow is an artist based in Chicago, Ilinois.

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. They work across disciplines, rooted in ritual and intimacy and Black Queer Feminism. bree studied film at Howard University, and spends a significant amount of time binging science fiction and waiting for the bus.

Breanna Nannette Robinson is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Her work explores the role of memory-making and narrative within discourses of identity, experience, and culture. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate in Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She has recently exhibited work at venues such as the Arts Club of Chicago and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, participated in artists residencies at Lillstreet Art Center and the Chicago Artists Coalition, and was awarded the 2024 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship.

Renee Royale (b. 1990, Brooklyn, New York) is a research-based and process-oriented visual artist whose practice operates at the intersections of media, philosophy, and ecology. Her work witnesses how film-based artworks and artifacts contribute to and are permanently altered by engagement with ecological degradation and colonial histories. By foregrounding media materiality and its entanglement with ecological systems, she addresses broader questions about temporality, belonging, and the legacies of Black ecologies. Her art has been featured in publications including liquid blackness, SEEING BLACK: Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond, A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art, and an artist’s book, Landscapes of Matter. She has exhibited work at various institutions including the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona, Minnesota; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota; Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, Georgia; Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; and ICOSA Gallery, Austin, Texas.

José Taymani, b. Querétaro, México.