The MassArt graduate alumni in Little Splinters use a wide range of formal strategies to ask key questions: Where are you from? What do you see? How do you live in your body? How do you map your place in the world?

The work in the gallery’s second annual juried alumni exhibition is grounded in perspectives including the Queer body, the maternal witness, visually ambiguous racial identity, Middle Eastern heritage, the responsibilities of citizenship, the limits and fragility of democracy, and economic struggle, among others. The work is inherently political, in that much of it springs from an inquiry into identity as a means to claiming a voice and self, as well as a potential for othering and oppression.

The show itself is more an opening than a declaration. It’s as if these artists, using humor, beauty, and stark inquiry, make the membrane between what is internal and external permeable for the viewer. We are invited to peer in and to listen with care.

Little Splinters: 2022 Graduate Alumni Exhibition features recent work from twenty-nine graduate alumni, representing seven MassArt graduate programs, including MFA and Post-Bac programs in Fine Arts (2D and 3D Fine Arts, Photography, Film/Video, and Fine Arts: Low Residency), as well as three graduate programs in Art Education, with graduation dates between 2008 and 2022.

This exhibition was collaboratively curated and designed by Lucinda Bliss, Felicia Scott Flint, Jen Mawson, Rebecca Morrison, and Zhidong Zhang.