A Comprehensive Overview of the Diverse Works Featured in UCLA’s MFA Show
Exploring UCLA’s 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibitions: A Cross-Section of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
Los Angeles has long been a vibrant epicenter of artistic innovation. While artists like Ed Ruscha and David Hockney have defined earlier frames of L.A.’s cultural output with sun-washed imagery and a midcentury modern sensibility, today’s generation of artists reflects a city—and a world—radically more fragmented, diverse, and visually complex. A compelling testament to this shift is the 2025 MFA thesis exhibitions at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where graduate students express a sweeping range of ideas through compelling, boundary-pushing works.
Spanning from introspective explorations of materiality to powerful meditations on trauma and transformation, the exhibitions affirm UCLA’s Studio Art program as one of the top incubators of emergent talent in contemporary art.
Exhibition #1: Innovation Through Material and Form
The first of the exhibitions, which concluded in mid-March, featured the work of Sheng Lor, Yezi Lou, and M. O’D-L. Anchored in a dialogue between commercial production and fine art, each artist manipulated materials to unsettling and evocative effect.
Yezi Lou’s paintings are deceptively whimsical at first glance. In “Yachts” (2025), for instance, the cheerful consumer toy—a wide-eyed rubber duck over a paddleboat—is rendered in unsettling scale and composition, suggesting themes of isolation or artificial cheer. Her canvases use the visual vocabulary of consumer kitsch to challenge the viewer’s trust in sentimentality and familiarity.
Sheng Lor’s textile-based sculptures push the loom beyond its traditional connotations. Her works like “Loom 3” are engulfed in layers of yarn that render the tool almost unrecognizable, transforming it into a monolithic presence. The tactile density of the pieces speaks to questions of labor, femininity, and the erasure of functional identity through excess.
M. O’D-L explores material reuse as aesthetic strategy. His massive wall hangings made from industrial refuse, tape, paper, and paint—such as “Untitled (Pinstripes 1)”—mirror the painterly chaos of Anselm Kiefer while introducing a vocabulary rooted in modern urban waste. In doing so, O’D-L aligns abstraction with decay, memory, and the tactile remnants of everyday life.
Exhibition #2: The Body, Violence, and the Specter of Mortality
The second MFA exhibition, currently on view at UCLA’s New Wight Gallery through April 11, brings a darker, more visceral tone. Featuring works by Alma Alvarado, ricardo nagaoka, Adam Thompson, and Jory Drew, this showcase enters the space of fragility—of both body and environment.
Alma Alvarado’s video installations are perhaps the most graphic in their exploration, directly confronting the viewer with scenes of animal butchery and preservation. Her piece “salt is the main ingredient in conservation” projects on translucent mulberry paper, visually linking the imagery of exposed muscle and bone with the materiality of processed flesh. Alvarado’s work is a meditation on decomposition, survival, and sacrificial acts—at once poetic and repulsive.
Ricardo Nagaoka furthers the dialogue on corporeality with “Shroud,” a chilling installation that features a steel coffin rigged to a slow, rhythmic ventilator. The accompanying video, “Shave,” captures a man applying shaving cream intercut with glimpses of a blade, forming a quiet yet commanding tension between personal care and latent violence.
Adam Thompson brings the uncanny into pastoral territory. His “Waxen Collage (Unabomber Cabin)” reconstructs the notorious shack in textured wax hues that confound expectation, transforming a structure of destruction into a ghostly memory. His other works, such as “Three Birds,” animate found organic material with electronics, evoking liminal spaces between life and death.
Jory Drew’s “Miracle Baby” arranges domestic symbols—childlike ceramic figurines, police miniatures, and household fabrics—into an immersive environment filled with cultural allusions and spiritual aftershocks. With narration recounting trauma, including references to fire and birth, the installation balances symbolic architecture with very real psychological weight.
Looking Ahead: Future MFA Exhibitions
UCLA’s MFA exhibitions reflect a depth and breadth of talent within its graduate program, spotlighting studio practices that are conceptual, political, and materially innovative. The upcoming exhibitions promise even more discovery:
– Exhibition #3: D.A. Gonzales, Maren Karlson, Zenobia, and Harrison Kinnane Smith (April 17–25)
– Exhibition #4: Samar Al Summary, Misty EunJoo Choi, and Ayla Gizlice (May 1–9)
Collectively, these shows demonstrate why UCLA’s Studio Art program holds a firm place at the leading edge of art education