Yin Peet (MFA ’91), artist and executive director of the YV Museum in Acton, Mass., talks about the vision and history of the museum with Harvard Press.
“Peet came to the United States from Taiwan in 1982 with a passion to pursue art and having “dreamed the American Dream.” She studied art of the Western world in New York and spent from 1984 to ’88 in Nepal learning about South Asian art. Many of her works represent a blending of Eastern and Western religions and philosophies. ”
Read more in The Harvard Press.
MassArt instructor and director of ‘The Lab,’ Clint Baclawski is an accomplished artist who has won numerous awards, exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and attended residencies in Venice, Italy, and Wassaic, NY.
Clint Baclawski, '08 MFA. Photo: Tony Luong.
MassArt instructor and Associate Director of 'The Lab,' Clint Baclawski is an accomplished artist who has won numerous awards, exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and attended residencies in Venice, Italy, and Wassaic, NY.
You can find his large-scale works hanging in buildings across Boston—including on the MassArt campus. Clint has been a MassArt employee since receiving his MFA at the College in photography in 2008 and has been teaching here since 2017.
What drew you to the MFA photography program at MassArt?
What I loved most about the MassArt MFA was that the current students were involved in the interview process; first-year grad students would sit in on the interviews because they would end up being in your cohort—they were the second-year photo master’s students when I came in as a first year. It was a great vibe; you could just tell everyone wanted to be here.
What is ‘The Lab’ at MassArt all about?
I think of The Lab (which is what we call the computer print lab here) as the hub of the campus: it’s where everybody goes to print their documents, but it’s also a place where artists can work and connect. We have all sorts of specialty printers in The Lab—wide format, archival, inkjet, a latex printer, a RISO. All that equipment allows students to think beyond the parameters of a normal-sized artwork. Right now, I have a student who’s making a 1,000-foot print: 36 inches tall by 1,000 feet long. They ordered 19 rolls of vellum! I was like, “Yeah, let’s make this happen!”
If a student comes in with a cool idea like that, and I know it’s feasible, my response is, “Of course, let’s do it.” It’s a teaching opportunity where the student figures out how to accomplish their vision. Will the driver of the printer that you’re trying to print on be able to handle a 1,000-foot job? No. So how many slices do you need? I put that on the student to figure out, and I work on it with them.
The Lab is a creative space for community members to explore innovative practices and projects across various media. Photo by Tony Luong
MassArt’s Riso printer offers students an opportunity to experiment with creating everything from limited-edition art prints to zines and posters.
How would you describe the learning environment and the community at MassArt?
There’s a great communal energy here that I experience every day. I think of the students as my contemporaries. I don’t preach from this position that I know best or I know more than anyone—you never know what somebody is coming into the program with.
What’s really cool about being a practicing artist and full-time staff is that the students can see what I’m working on. At 4:00, I’ll put on a different hat and go up in the spray booth to spray hinges for a project, or I’ll go down to the wood shop to sand a piece that I’m going to use for my next work. The students see that, or they’ll see me working in The Lab, and there’s this understanding that we’re all here for the same reasons: to educate ourselves and to become better artists.
How does a MassArt education prepare someone for succeeding in life, even outside of their chosen area of study?
Someone with a degree in art is trained to offer totally new perspectives on situations where others might not necessarily have that same viewpoint. In my first critique, I was making these large-scale lightboxes to be viewed on either side and my professor—with my permission—just hoisted the whole thing down on the floor. We all sat around looking at it from a new perspective and it was a transformative moment—so to me, the MassArt MFA program is really about looking at the world differently.
Bound-ary, Clint Baclawski. Artwork courtesy of the artist. Photo by Dan Watkins
What advice would you give to someone who’s considering pursuing a BFA or an MFA at MassArt?
MassArt is an incredibly encouraging place for any artist. No matter what department you visit, no matter which studio manager you meet: here, people will help you achieve whatever you want to accomplish.
Visit the campus, take the tour, see the resources with your own eyes—in every single discipline, it’s state of the art. Ultimately, it’s a place where you can play and try new things. If you don’t like something happening in your work, throw the lightbox on the floor. Hang the painting upside down. Just try something different. MassArt is a place where you can experiment with anything and see what sticks.
MassArt alum Nancy Callan returns with Blown Away judge Katherine Gray, showcasing collaborative glassblowing and inspiring students through hands-on demonstration and mentorship.
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Architect Michael Plofker reflects on historic preservation in New York City, Plaza Hotel restoration, and Lincoln Center/66th Street subway station underground gallery.
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The Provincetown Independent featured alum Larry Collins, whose work is on view at the Alden Gallery in Provincetown.
MassArt alum Sara Campbell is the founder and designer behind the nationally recognized women’s fashion brand Sara Campbell Ltd., known for its timeless style, quality craftsmanship, and made-in-the-USA production. After earning her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Sara built a career rooted in artistry and entrepreneurship—transforming her love of fine fabrics and design into a thriving retail business with 20 boutiques across the East Coast and Midwest. Her creative journey, from sewing dresses as a child to leading a beloved fashion label, reflects the dedication and design sensibility fostered through her MassArt education.
Alum Steve Locke’s solo show at Mass MoCA reviewed by Murray Whyte for the Boston Globe
At MassArt, MFA students and alumni uncover their unique curatorial styles through hands-on experiences and courses like Curatorial Practice. Catherine LeComte Lecce’s exhibition, Matrescence, explored the profound and often overlooked transformations of motherhood.
Catherine LeComte Lecce, '23 MFA Photography. Image courtesy of the artist.
Opportunities for MFA students and alums to learn the ins and outs of curation
Lisa Tung, who curates the exhibitions for MassArt’s on-campus museum MAAM, has been quoted as saying that “Every curator’s process is a little different.” How each curator chooses the works to be included in an exhibition is their “secret sauce,” she says.
But how does one learn what their secret sauce is? How do they develop it? At MassArt there are a couple of different ways.
One is by taking a graduate programs elective called Curatorial Practice (which fills up fast). There, students are introduced to the idea that curators don’t simply choose art. In making their decisions, they are in effect arranging open conversations that are social, cultural, and even political in nature.
The students are exposed to different ways of thinking about the curation process – guest speakers from a variety of arts institutions speak to the class about everything that goes into contemporary exhibition making. The students also gain hands-on experience in all aspects of the art presentation process, collectively planning and executing an exhibition at MassArt x SoWa, MassArt’s off-campus public gallery space in Boston’s art and design district. They learn everything from the initial conceptual framework to the installation and promotion/marketing.
As graduate alumni, they can apply to curate a show of their own at MassArt x SoWa. MassArt sends out an alumni curatorial call twice a year. Catherine LeComte Lecce was one of those alums whose application for curation was accepted. Her show, Matrescence, ran this spring and summer, and we had an opportunity to talk with her about her curatorial process, her own secret sauce.
What is Matrescence, exactly?
Catherine LeComte Lecce: It’s a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s to focus on the subject of ‘mother-becoming.’ It’s meant to refer to the profound change in identity that occurs when someone becomes a mother.
Why that subject?
LeComte Lecce: I had my son in August of 2023. When I was pregnant I didn’t expect to make art about motherhood. But the shift to motherhood is so intense and unexplainable, and I wanted to explore that shift through art making.
How did your exhibition examine the shift to motherhood in a way that was different from others?
LeComte Lecce: There actually haven’t been many exhibitions on this topic. Historically, when there have been, art on the theme of motherhood hasn’t tended to be taken seriously. It was sort of seen as a hobby, or ‘That’s cute. You make things about children – how nice.’ I’m hoping that by having curated this exhibition motherhood will be taken as a serious topic that should be shown more.
How did you decide what to include?
LeComte Lecce: I wanted to take viewers on a journey of contemplative moments but also playful moments and very serious, terrifying ones that need to be discussed – especially postpartum themes.
Can you give some examples of the kinds of works you chose?
LeComte Lecce: The works examined such topics as raising children against the backdrop of one’s own mother’s suicide; a new mother who developed preeclampsia a week after giving birth and who could have died had a friend not told her to seek medical care; and the careless remarks of people to a mother who lost her child through miscarriage.
Those certainly are serious issues. How were they articulated artistically?
LeComte Lecce: Well, for instance, a wood-carved sculpture by Alison Croney Moses depicted the tensile stress of an artery looking as though it’s about to burst with the dangerously high blood pressure that characterizes preeclampsia, blood squeezing through the vessel’s walls. The pleasure of motherhood was included, as well. Kara Patrowicz turned wool sourced from local farms into exuberant expressions of childhood happiness and calm. I also curated works examining motherhood through the lens of race and colonialism. And I included a work of my own, a vignette of throw pillows embroidered with remarks commonly made to women grieving in miscarriage – ‘It wasn’t your fault; ‘At least you weren’t further along.’ I found that at least in the type of American culture that I had experienced, people didn’t really know how to talk about death and loss around miscarriage. So there are many different kinds of mother-becoming. My main goal in all of this was to raise more awareness of us artist mothers out there and our multifaceted experiences.
What would you say was the most meaningful aspect of how your MassArt experience prepared you to develop your skills as a curator?
LeComte Lecce: Before I ever submitted an application to curate a show, I worked as a graduate assistant at MassArt x SoWA while I was a student in the MFA program. I learned how to work with other artists, how to communicate, how to reach out. And the gallerists were incredibly supportive. They let the graduate assistants be very hands-on. They let us install, give feedback on exhibitions, meet the artists. So when it came time to apply to be a curator as an alum, I was able to rely on the network I had amassed through my MassArt affiliation and also on the skills I had acquired – it was a bridge to a world of exploring curation I might not otherwise have had access to as a first-time curator. It was an incredible opportunity.
The MassArt x SoWa satellite gallery allows graduate students to display their work publicly while honing their curatorial skills.
Learn MoreMassArt alum Nancy Callan returns with Blown Away judge Katherine Gray, showcasing collaborative glassblowing and inspiring students through hands-on demonstration and mentorship.
View story Architect Michael Plofker reflects on historic preservation in New York City, Plaza Hotel restoration, and Lincoln Center/66th Street subway station underground gallery.
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“What if we joined our sorrows…what if that is joy?”
It’s a question posed by the poet Ross Gay, and it particularly resonates for multidisciplinary artist Hannah Brancato, closing keynote speaker for the MassArt Graduate Programs Summer Lecture Series on Thursday, July 25. “That quote is important to me,” she says, “because of the idea that sorrow and joy exist together; the idea that with intense grief and trauma that comes from sexual violence and any other kind of violence, it’s only possible to access healing through connecting to other people. There’s only so far we can go on our own.”
“That’s what I’m going to be talking about when I speak at MassArt,” she says – “the complexity of organizing with survivors around our trauma and all the work that is coming out of that.”
The “work” Brancato is referring to is the art of what she calls collective storytelling, One of her projects is The Monument Quilt, a crowd-sourced project of 3,000 individual stories from the U.S., Mexico, and beyond that are sewn into large quilt blocks. It’s an initiative of FORCE, an art and activist collective she co-founded that is dedicated to ending sexual violence and creating public art to disrupt rape culture.
There’s also Move Slowly, an interview series and visual art project featuring both conversations between creative activists working to end sexual violence and portraits of the interviewees, based on their words and cyanotype prints of their hair.
A theme that informs Brancato’s art projects is how people’s trauma is responded to. People who are white or have more money or privilege may be reacted to differently by the police, for instance, and “how our trauma is responded to in the aftermath really impacts how we deal with it in the long term,” she says.
Her work entitled The Inheritance of White Silence speaks directly to this issue. “It’s a project where I began to work with a set of white linen napkins that I inherited from my grandmother,” she says. “I was thinking about white supremacy culture and the way I was racialized – or more accurately, not racialized – as a white person in the United States. How had I taken on the culture without being conscious of it?
“I started to use white embroidery on the white linen to express ways in which I had noticed I had taken on characteristics of that culture – ‘Grandad’s Bootstrap Story,’ ‘Fear of what I don’t know,’ ‘The desire to be perfect.’ I then took a set second of napkins and put the ways I want to pass down legacy – what I want to do differently as I look into the future: ‘Release of control,’ ‘An understanding of interdependence,’ ‘Curiosity to always learn more.’
“I am constantly negotiating the complex relationship between my whiteness, class, and ability privileges, as they are interconnected with my experiences as a woman and as a survivor of trauma,” she explains on her website.
Brancato and her work have received widespread media coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other publications and on broadcast channels that include MSNBC, CNN, and NPR’s All Things Considered. A gifted, provocative speaker, she is not to be missed.
Hannah Brancato’s keynote will be held at MassArt’s Design and Media Center Lecture Hall on Thursday, July 25, 4:30 pm. All MFA lectures are free and open to the broader MassArt community and the public. For more information about the MFA summer lecture series, visit the MassArt Events Calendar.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design MFA Photography students Natalie Brescia, Jacob Church, and Andrew Zou are featured in 25 students to watch by Lenscratch.
