Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA class of 2025 thesis exhibition
March 14–April 21, 2025
For the first time, the Carnegie Mellon School of Art MFA Program co-presents a joint exhibition with The Andy Warhol Museum—one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the largest and most comprehensive single-artist museum in North America. On view March 14 through April 21, 2025, the exhibition Holding Still, Holding On launched an exciting new series of thesis exhibitions spotlighting the MFA program from the school where Warhol earned his degree in Pictorial Design in 1949 (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University).
Holding Still, Holding On features new works by the CMU School of Art MFA class of 2025—Frankmarlin, Izsys Archer, Tingting Cheng, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza and Max Tristan Watkins. The exhibition spans wide-ranging media and highlights the distinct perspectives of these five artists as they complete their final year of study. Presented in The Warhol’s rotating exhibition gallery, the exhibition offers a dynamic exploration of contemporary artmaking.
The featured artists in Holding Still, Holding On each employ diverse approaches to storytelling, through mediums including photography, painting, archival assemblage, sculptural installations, text, sound, and film. Their works collectively explore the intersections of memory, place, and belonging, together revealing art’s unique capacity to hold and transform complex personal and collective histories.
Frankmarlin
Izsys Archer
Tingting Cheng
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza
Max Tristan Watkins
Frankmarlin takes a look into the invisible, sees beyond what is presented and asks questions he doesn’t know the answers to. With a sense of urgency, his works explore themes of erasure, lineage, surveillance, healing, and the beauty of mundane Black experiences.
Izsys Archer is a self-proclaimed Space Taker-Upper originally from Lafayette, Indiana. She graduated with a BFA in photography from the Kansas City Art Institute. Within her practice, she explores her intrinsic need to create through physical, digital, and ritualistic spaces of the Archive. Perpetual self-portraiture becomes a performance of identity as she interrogates notions of domesticity, memory, and Black iconography to wander on a journey of self-actualization and representation.
Tingting Cheng is a cross-media artist whose oeuvre is deeply informed by the ritualistic traditions of the Chu state and the cultural hybridity shaped by globalization. Working across diverse media, she mobilizes cultural archives as forms of “contemporary witchcraft,” integrating natural, synthetic, and vernacular materials to cultivate ritualistic engagement with audiences while subverting commodification.
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza is a Brazilian United Statesian from Queens, New York. She is a filmmaker, a learner, and a facilitator of workshops and public events beyond the traditional classroom setting. Her practice is guided by the visual process of collage and its potential to create new histories from found fragments. Her work is always proposing slower methods of thinking, remembering, and storytelling for an audience.
Max Tristan Watkins is an artist and writer born in Canterbury in the UK. His practice draws from various historical tools of control and their absurdities. Currently, he is interested in the European early-modern book as an information technology. With a literary sensibility that favors quotation, citation, trope, and idiom, he takes pleasure in following rabbit holes and constructing webs of footnotes. At the center of his work is the precise absence of something unarticulated, gestured towards and acted out in miniature, euphemism, or parable. His prints, paintings, and books often toy with ideas of the body double, the facsimile, or the absent original. A subject he returns to often is the disjointed, open(ed) or chimeric body—and its misrepresentations in taxonomies, anatomies, and histories.
The Carnegie Mellon School of Art MFA Program is an interdisciplinary, experimental, research-based program that provides students with a challenging and supportive context to expand and develop their work and thinking as artists. As one of the top-ranked graduate programs in the country, the School views art-making as a vital social, critical, and intellectual pursuit. Graduate students are encouraged to employ a comparative and intersectional approach to critical and cultural theories, and to allow this inquiry to inform and expand what it means to be an artist and to make art within the contemporary condition.
