What the UCLA MFA Show Reveals About the Importance of Learning from Art Students
Inside the 2025 UCLA MFA Exhibitions: When Students Become the Real Artists
By Hyperallergic Editors
Each spring, MFA exhibitions at art schools across the country offer a window into the future of the contemporary art world — often complete with experimentation, disruption, and daring conceptual design. But in Los Angeles this year, the University of California, Los Angeles’s 2025 MFA exhibitions didn’t just show promise — they posed a powerful argument: the student is the artist.
UCLA’s rigorous art program, known for its emphasis on interdisciplinary practices and critical engagement, showcased a dizzying breadth of creativity, from deeply political installations to surreal explorations of daily life. These emerging artists, rather than aiming for refined perfection, instead embraced exploration, vulnerability, and the power of unfinished ideas — traits that established art institutions sometimes forget in pursuit of marketability.
A Field of Campsites and Story Poles
In these latest exhibitions at UCLA’s Broad Art Center’s New Wight Gallery, structure and space were reimagined. Ayla Gizlice’s installation “Rumble, Rumble, Rumble” evokes a scene of quiet anticipation. Strings stretch from wall to wall, enclosing domestic elements like a kettle and cushions in a quiet sanctuary. Nested within this installation is an original fairytale, “The Woman with Three Husbands,” told in hushed whispers around what feels like a ceremonial campfire — a poetic retreat from institutional critique.
Meanwhile, Harrison Kinnane Smith reconfigures the gallery into a speculative construction zone with “Story Poles (Proposal for New Wight Gallery).” His work, made of scaffolding draped with fluorescent orange fencing, is a commentary on Los Angeles’s shifting infrastructure and tells a layered story about housing, development, and displacement through architectural remnants.
Emotionally and Spatially Subversive Installations
Student work this year challenged both form and audience positioning. Misty EunJoo Choi inverted our understanding of domestic physics in “The Disoriented Room,” creating a sideways kitchen environment where appliances operate against gravity and toast inexplicably flies “up” to a waiting plate. This surreal anti-logic exposes how routine and stability can be strange under scrutiny.
D.A. Gonzales used bureaucratic resistance as creative fodder, presenting 21 graphite prints from denied FBI Freedom of Information Act requests related to the US-Mexico border. In the piece “CBP-FO-2024-133704,” their minimalist documents become haunting markers of state opacity. Gonzales’s accompanying self-portrait “CBP-FO-2025-071750” includes gelatin silver prints intertwined with ongoing FOIA correspondence, making the process of legal inquiry part of the work itself.
Excavating the Personal Through Material
Artists like Maren Karlson brought intimacy into the exhibition by literally laying their work on the floor beneath panes of glass. Her medical imagery — X-rays, machine parts, graphite-drawn mechanizations — lays bare a fragile body under inspection. Her floor-bound compositions force viewers to crouch down, joining her physical and symbolic submission.
Zenobia’s work took up questions of visibility and power from another angle. Her dramatic sculpture “‘Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects (abject) – for Harriet Jacobs’” pierces the gallery wall with a steel needle, evoking trauma, resilience, and resistance. Her smaller pieces, like “Mimesis (saccharine),” evoke historical scars through carved ebony wood and stoneware, balancing craft and conceptual narrative.
Nothing Here Is Safe — and That’s the Point
Rather than resolving their ideas into polished objects for sale, these student-artists have chosen complexity over clean execution. Their installations are layered with political critique, personal reflection, and spatial disruption, and they highlight the vitality of academic spaces as zones where real experimentation can still happen.
They also reject the idea that artistry is somehow separate from scholarship. The UCLA MFA exhibitions prove that today’s students — navigating rising tuition, cracking architectural spaces open, confronting institutional histories — are already reshaping the art world with creativity and commitment that reaches beyond the gallery walls.
Conclusion: Art as Living Practice
To dismiss students as “mere” students is to miss what artistic practice looks like at its most potent. The mess, the failure, the brilliance, and ambition — these qualities aren’t just learning stages. At UCLA in 2025, they are the art.
The 2025 UCLA MFA Exhibition #4 — featuring Misty EunJoo Choi and Ayla Gizlice — continues at the New Wight Gallery through May 9. The prior cohort’s exhibition, which included D.A. Gonzales, Maren Karlson, Zenobia, and Harrison Kinnane Smith, ran from April 17 to 25.
For reviews of earlier MFA exhibitions, visit Hyperallergic’s full coverage: https://hyperallergic.com/1002489/the-dizzying-range-of-ucla-mfa