ALUMNI

Jes Fan

Fan’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter, as well as the invisible substances that shape how we experience the world, like melanin and hormones, into their sculptures. Through this process, Fan looks at how these highly politicized materials form our understanding of the social constructs of race and gender, and the absurd pursuit to locate these in quantifiable amounts of material. Originally trained in glassmaking, Fan combines hand-blown cellular glass forms with casts made from sections of human bodies, cast in aqua resin and bearing uncanny flesh-like tones. Removed from the context of the figure, these forms take on abstract qualities, repeated and distorted across architectural armatures, suggesting an experience of the body that is increasingly intertwined with and mediated by technology.

BFA 2014

King Cobra

KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner) was born in 1986 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in glass in 2014, COBRA has created corporeal sculptures that utilize glass alongside silicone, beads, crystals, rubber, synthetic hair, petroleum jelly, and other materials to explore the frequently suppressed and traumatic medical histories of the Black body.

MFA 2014

Tavares Strachan

Themes of visibility and invisibility run through Strachan’s practice, as manifested in his endeavor to lift up the contributions of marginalized figures in history who have been left out of official records. Strachan uses the Encyclopedia as a point of departure for pieces in other media. Through a rare combination of historical and scientific inquiry made visible through an artistic practice that reaches across media, Strachan is creating work that inspires curiosity and pushes the limits of what is possible in art. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at various national and international venues, including the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Baltimore Museum of Art; Prospect.3, New Orleans; the Venice Biennale; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

BFA 2003