“This Isn’t LinkedIn” — In Practice: The Official University of Chicago Arts Blog

DoVA MFA Graduates Mount Independent Group Show Post-Graduation

by Clare Austen-Smith

Graduating during the pandemic was rough. Graduating an MFA program that is supposed to culminate in a shared celebration and gallery show during a pandemic is tougher.

The Department of Visual Art’s (DoVA) MFA Class of 2021 opened their thesis exhibition, The Long Day, in May 2021 at the Logan Center for the Arts. At that time, the restrictive COVID world required museums and galleries to institute timed entry and ticketed reservations, somewhat dampening what is a pivotal experience for DoVA’s graduates.

This Fall, with COVID restrictions easing throughout the city, the 2021 cohort sought to cultivate a different experience with an entirely new exhibition. Working with Belong Gallery, an independent gallery located in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park, the graduating class presented their group show, a forest of signs, goth collage, and aphorisms.

We chatted with Sara Grose, MFA’21, and Anton Auth, MFA’21, about the experience.

Clare Austen-Smith: So tell me a little bit about the show. How did it come together, and what was your inspiration for wanting to do a second group show after graduation?

Anton Auth: Well, we talked—me and you, Sarah—we talked about not having a university show because it was just so much easier to bring people in[to the Belong Gallery], and it was just a different community. It’s a different audience, it’s a different neighborhood, which is really cool. The gallery brings in their group of people. It was cool to be able to bring in some of the faculty to the space, as well. Pope.L and Catherine Sullivan showed up.

Sara Grose: I think it was also good for us to have a way to keep up some momentum after graduation, to have something to work towards. I’m just like, “Well what's next [after the MFA show]?” But it was nice after to be like, okay, we kind of know what's next for now, you know?

AA: Yeah. And fun to work with the group too. We made a website for our MFA show that was in the Logan Center, and we paid for that domain. So we own longday.live, and we figured let’s just continue that momentum, let’s find other things to do. We just realized we could keep this up. This group of eight, our cohort, we all really like each other. We all like working together.

CAS: And then how did you get connected with Belong Gallery?

SG: We cold-called a bunch of galleries when we decided we wanted to do this, and Belong was one that we really liked the look of. And then once we started talking to Joey [Berrios], who runs the space, we were really happy to see that he was as excited to work with us as we were to work with him. That was pretty important for us. But it was mostly just looking up spaces in Chicago and emailing people and seeing how people responded.

AA: It was a huge networking exercise, I would say. And it was a nice exercise to do outside of school.

CAS: Do you feel like your experience putting together the show and working as a group helped make this process smoother?

AA: Yeah. We knew the workflow, we knew what needed to happen.

SG: I think ‘smoother’ actually is the right word. I felt like this past install went way smoother than our thesis one! We figured out how we work together as a group, in a space, through doing the MFA install. We sort of just found our rhythm—of how we curate stuff together, and how it actually goes when we’re in the space working together. I noticed during this Belong install, that we would kind of naturally spill into small groups, and people would talk and then eventually we would all come together and be like, okay, what do you guys think about the way it looks now? We all have been thinking together for the past two years, and it really helps for us to be able to work together in this way well.

CAS: Were you all curating it together, or did you work with a curator from Belong Gallery?

AA: We didn’t have a curator, which was a funny thing. During our MFA show, half the people we talked to would say, “Oh, you don't have a curator?” And then the other half were like, “You don't need a curator.” It was really nice to build the exhibition through self-curation, because then you notice things about each other’s work. Like my work and Mercedes’s [Cardenas]—one of the painters in our group—we both deal with a lot of symbols and cultural symbols. I'm a sculptor, and she's a painter, and we are talking about different things but also talking about similar things, and naturally those elements end up having a relationship, so spatially it’s cool to see how things play out in addition.

CAS: In the exhibition description, you write that each artist is presenting work which acknowledges their relationship to this phrase, “shit happens.” Was there anything specific that this line was in response to, or are the ideas manifested in the show in response to the phrase itself, either individually or as a group? I would, of course, have to include the pandemic in that question as well.

SG: I think it’s hard to avoid having an undercurrent of what we've all experienced together over the past couple of years. That’s not to say that the work is about the pandemic, but I think we're all sort of responding to our own “shit happens,” whatever that might be. But it seems there is a sense of just dealing with things. Making work that deals with things that are maybe out of our control, or like we’re all responding to our different interests within that. But yeah, I mean, we did all have the common shit that happened.

AA: Yeah. And we were also kind of inspired by a piece of writing that a Master’s student produced for our thesis show. That’s where the title of the show came from. We could share that with you. It was really cool because it was academic writing that was poetry at the same time.

SG: We all made lists of our favorite aphorisms and “shit happens” was in that list.

CAS: Since your MFA show opened during heightened COVID-19 restrictions, with things like timed reservations and atypical formal processes to attend a gallery opening, how did it feel to be able to have a reception where that wasn’t the case?

AA: It was great. There was a point when we were—I think me and you were talking, Sara—we were just like, “I can’t hear you inside.” There were so many people there that we couldn’t hear each other, and that’s a good thing! Everyone’s safe, we all had on masks. It was just nice. It was nice to be around people. And it was nice to have a show spill out into the alleyway after COVID, you know?

“It was nice to be around people. And it was nice to have a show spill out into the alleyway after COVID.”

—Anton Auth, MFA ‘21

SG: It was a bummer not to have an opening for our thesis show. A few of us grabbed some beers and sat on the stoop of the Logan Center, having our own little opening reception, which was really fun and kind of special, when you think back and you're like, we had this unusual experience. But to actually have the opening reception—and a lot of people from DoVA came out to it, which was really nice—felt, for me, like the closure that I would have expected from a thesis opening.

CAS: Well, I’m really glad that you all got to have that! My last question: what would you recommend doing if BA or MFA students wanted to follow in your footsteps, in terms of having an off-campus gallery show?

AA: I think cold-calling was really productive for that. Just learning how to do—I hate the word—soliciting. But what else is it, it is kind of like soliciting. You have to do that if you’re trying to make art.

“To actually have the opening reception felt, for me, like the closure that I would have expected from a thesis opening.”

—Sara Grose

SG: It’s kind of nice to cold-call a bunch of people and see who’s responsive to that kind of thing, you know? And then, for future shows, we can be like, oh, they responded and we didn’t end up working with them, but we'd like to start to build this connection through that. And I think, just as I said earlier, having worked with a gallery that is excited to work with you, I think it was just pretty important.

AA: Yeah, the tertiary relationships: you talk to someone, someone else talks to someone about you, and then that person ends up giving you a phone call. That’s kind of how networking happens in the art world. And it was just nice to—with the people that didn't respond—it’s cool to be in dialogue with them, even though we didn’t end up having a show. So, I guess I would say to MFA students, if you want to do that kind of stuff, just be friends with people. You’re just trying to make friends, and things will happen. And do it for fun, enjoy it. You know, don’t go into it as “trying to get deals.” You just got to go into it and make friends. This isn't LinkedIn.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Visit a forest of signs, goth collage, and aphorisms at Belong Gallery through October 23, from noon-4pm. Closing Reception and Costume Party on Sat, Oct 30, 7-10pm. FREE.