“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.”

Imagine growing up moving between China and America and living in many different kinds of neighborhoods but with none of them overlapping. That was Jasmine Chen’s experience, and she uses her art to reflect the struggle of trying to make sense of place and identity across time and time zones, cultures, and of course actual physical places and spaces.

Jasmine will be discussing that struggle subsumed into her beautifully evocative paintings this Friday, July 19, 6:30pm, when she presents as the third of four speakers in this Year’s MFA Summer Lecture Series. Her talk will take place in the Lecture Hall of the Design and Media Center, and she will show some of her works, which are in the permanent collection of the Danforth Art Museum and have also been exhibited in galleries throughout New England and beyond.

Being a diasporist artist has changed some, Jasmine points out. With the internet, the ocean no longer establishes a definitive barrier because “it enables a constant partial exposure to people and places from the past.” There’s an upside to that, of course, but at the same time, she says, “accounting for one’s origins and place can be more problematic than ever. My works respond to this condition.”

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.

Initially, art was a medium through which Falaks Vasa (they/she) was building awareness of her various identities and working to consciously to disrupt and resist the othering, the marginalization, of people like herself. “But now,” she says, “that’s taking much more of a back seat as my art has evolved. It’s the ways that I move through the world that feel like activism, resistance. I am a trans femme person, I am brown, I’m from Kolkata so I am an immigrant,” she says. “Just living my life is a way of upsetting the spaces I move through.”

How has their creative process changed? These days, says the multidisciplinary artist, who has exhibited everywhere from Italy to Ireland, India, Canada, and the Netherlands, “when I’m making creative work it feels extremely easy and fun. When it feels like I’m trying to do something or make something happen, it no longer quite works for me. In the past couple of years I have really steered into humor and into this way of being where I don’t take my art too seriously and just allow it to happen. It’s still informed by all those ideas, but now they’re more natural as opposed to maybe a little bit forced.”

That artistic evolution is part of what Falaks will be touching on during her talk as part of this summer’s MFA Lectures Series on Thursday, July 18, 4:30 PM, at MassArt’s Design and Media Center (DMC) Lecture Hall. She will also be reading from her first novel, Shor, which translates to “noise” in Hindi, as well as showing pieces from different stages of her artistic development. 

One of them, Double-Diamond Decolonizer, was completed “at a time that I was thinking a lot about the relationships between cartography and colonialism,” they say. Colonizers divide the world into grids and places they can point to and name and say they have control over. By contrast, the double diamond, based on the Jain world view of Falaks’ upbringing, has no specific grids to show what can be conquered. “That project,” they say, “ended up becoming a lot about refusal and thinking about how to make things illegible, opaque, to my audience, which at that time was a western one.”

Falaks will discuss, too, her approach to teaching. “My pedagogy is very interdisciplinary,,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m performing. Sometimes I feel like I’m curating. But the classes I teach are part of my creative practice.”

All MFA lectures are free, open to the broader MassArt community and the public. For more information about the MFA summer lecture series, visit the MassArt Events Calendar.

“I’m an out-by-myself-in-the-middle-of-nowhere person,” says Kelly Knight (MFA ‘18), who returned to MassArt as the director of the low-residency MFA program in January 2024. 

How does she reconcile that with the fact that she lives smack in the middle of a city? That’s part of what she’s going to talk about when she kicks off this year’s MFA Summer Lecture Series on Thurs., July 11, at MassArt’s Design and Media Center (DMC) Lecture Hall. 

Knight, a multimedia artist who has exhibited at venues such as the Farm Projects Gallery in Wellfleet, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, and the Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville, is currently working on a new set of figures she says are “in female form, but not people, really. I think they’re ancestors or guides or other entities. We have a vacant lot next to our house that we’re trying to turn into a habitat for wildlife, and these characters [in mixed media that include catalog pages, cardboard packaging, and other repurposed materials] come out after I’ve been doing a lot of physical work in that space. I think they’re messengers, or maybe guardians.”  

The kickoff lecture series serves as Knight’s reintroduction  to the MassArt community. The series includes artists working in  a mix of themes and media, which Knight “ balanced with racial and gender diversity “so that it’s inclusive and reflective of our student body,” she says.  Additional lecture series speakers include: Falaks Vasa (July 18 at 4:30 p.m.), Jasmine Chen (July 19 at 6:30 p.m.), and Hannah Brancato (July 25 at 4:30 p.m.).

All lectures are free, open to the broader MassArt community and the public, and presented in-person. For more information about the MFA summer lecture series, visit the MassArt Events Calendar.