Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts is pleased to announce that several of its alumni were selected to be part of the Queens International 2016, opening Sunday, April 10 at the Queens Museum. Five of the 34 artists included in the exhibition earned graduate degrees from VCUarts.
In the recent U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate arts and design schools, VCUarts was ranked second, right behind Yale University. And the VCUarts Sculpture department once again ranked number one. For more than a decade, VCUarts has been the highest ranked public university arts and design school on the list.
“It is no surprise that VCU Sculpture alumni are making such a strong showing at the Queens International,” says Department of Sculpture + Extended Media Chairman Matt King. “VCU Sculpture has a thriving community of alumni living and working in New York. The artists chosen for this exhibition each demonstrate why we are the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media. Their interdisciplinary practices are pushing the boundaries between object-making, performance, and video with works that are complex, ambitious, and uniquely thrilling.”
The VCUarts alumni included in the 2016 Queens International are:
Alina Tenser, VCU M.F.A. ’12, Sculpture + Extended Media
Melanie McLain, VCU M.F.A. ’12, Sculpture + Extended Media
Carl Marin, VCU M.F.A. ’13, Sculpture + Extended Media
Brian Caverly, VCU M.F.A. ’04, Sculpture + Extended Media
Janks Archives (Ben Kingsley and Jessica Langley VCU M.F.A. ’08, Painting and Printmaking)
The Queens International biennial exhibition aims to highlight the vibrancy of work made by artists living or working in the borough. This year, the exhibition focused on work reflecting the idea of thresholds, contact and exchange as ways our contemporary life is shaped. The VCUarts alumni projects in the show include experimental, performance-based and global collaborations. For example, Jessica Langley and her partner Ben Kingsley’s project Janks Archive is an investigation of insult humor sourced from around the world, collected in video and archived online, it’s not only humorous but also revealing of cultural norms in different societies. Sculpture alumna Melanie McLain’s “Prepersonal” incorporates video and sculpture into a piece that draws from institutional architecture to put the viewer in an uncomfortable position with which to watch the video, creating a dialogue between object, environment, body and self. McLain is planning several performances to activate the piece throughout the exhibition.
The Queens International 2016 opens Sunday, April 10 and runs through July 31.
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