Past Exhibitions 2022
Alumni Invitational 5
Alumni Invitational 5 continues a series of exhibitions featuring new art by alumni artists. To mark our fifth invitational, this iteration includes five artists—Zaria Forman, Fitzhugh Karol, Zehra Khan, Susan Meyer, and Eliza Naranjo Morse—who work in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and performance. Together, their work offers a visual conversation around nature and our human relationship with the environment.
Zaria Forman ’05 makes large-scale pastel drawings on paper and videos that immerse viewers in the ethereal blue light of the earth’s disappearing glaciers. Intensely naturalistic yet otherworldly, her work is intended to connect us with the reality of climate change’s adverse effects while depicting the unique beauty of some of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world.
Fitzhugh Karol ’04 makes abstract sculptures of wood and metal which evoke hills, valleys, steps, and portals—elements of real, imagined, and remembered landscapes. Whether monumental or intimate, each sculpture combines a playful vocabulary of geometric forms to draw and strengthen connections between people and the landscape.
Zehra Khan ’04 is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes drawing, sculpture, performance, and painting—the latter often on her fellow humans. Always playful, often absurdist and provocative, Khan uses unconventional and found materials and methods to explore relationships—those between individuals as well as those between humans and the flora and fauna of the world around us.
Susan Meyer ’86 is inspired by defunct utopian communities, scholar’s rocks, and other potent elements of popular culture. From these sources, she makes sculpture, installations, and two-dimensional work that evoke a host of tenuous relationships—between the natural world and the built environment, between growth and decay, between aspiration and failure.
Eliza Naranjo Morse ’03 (Santa Clara Pueblo) explores the existential questions which arise from current events, personal experiences, and spiritual seeking. Her art, in materials as varied as wood, clay, fiber, graphite, and paint, is guided by the needs of each project and blends references and techniques from her academic art education with her Pueblo heritage and ancestral knowledge to reflect on cultural history, spirituality, and contemporary existence.
