Artists from all over Southern California will come together at Cal State Long Beach in one of the biggest visual art installations on campus. Greater Los Angeles MFA will return this January for its 13th annual exhibit, featuring 23 artists from various colleges in the LA area.
The exhibition was created in 2005 by Long Beach students, and is organized by the Fine Arts Roundtable, an artist collective made up of students in the Masters of Arts programs. The show invites aspiring artists from Southern California graduate programs to showcase their photography, sculpture, painting, installation or videos.
The exhibition acts as a way to introduce students to fellow artists outside of Long Beach. Beginning in spring, the art is curated by MFA students who survey studios to pick pieces they feel work best for their upcoming galleries, as well as gather entries from students.
Each year, the works are curated then thematically written about in a concise curatorial text. This year’s was “Liminal Subjects, Queer Objects: Questioning as a Statement” by alumna Rhiannon Aarons, which encouraged students to consider various perspectives on similar issues.
Cintia Segovia, a third year fine arts student and co-president of the show, said the art is picked through careful scouting as well as from submissions. The final pieces were selected over the summer.
“[The curators] picked the works that were the strongest conceptually and cohesively tied into what we already selected, while keeping in mind the space available,” Segovia said.
GLAMFA’s last show presented artists such as Emily Blythe Jones, who is a studio arts major at Cal State Northridge. Her sculpture “Party Cups Used to be Yellow” featured a ceramic cake surrounded by yellow party cups to draw a comparison to the red Solo Cups usually filled with alcohol. Her sculpture was curated by Segovia and Shannon Leith, who led last year’s exhibit.
“I was thrilled and so grateful to be included in a really incredible batch of work,” Jones said.
She expressed her gratitude for the show, both over being chosen to participate and the opportunities it has opened to her since then.
“I am now an active member of the artist-run gallery collective Monte Vista Projects in downtown LA,” Jones said. “I have the opportunity to pay forward the generosity that I feel was given to me in the curation of my work into GLAMFA.”
One of the many artists who will be featured this year is Ryan Brewer, a student at the Art Center College of Design, whose sculpture “Fountain” will be displayed. The sculpture acts as a second installment to his project “The Tower” and surrounds the existing piece with 12 separate fountains filling the area with chemicals that over time, create a crystalline solution, then evaporate.
It is a constantly changing fluid structure, since the crystal forms can be dissolved and reformed. After reading the curatorial text provided by organizers, Brewer said he is looking forward to applying his reading when viewing other student’s art.
“I cannot wait to meet all of the other artists and see how they are thinking about and addressing similar concerns from varying perspectives,” Brewer said.
The show also offers the opportunity to meet other artists from participating schools.
“My biggest hope for my participation in GLAMFA is to meet other members of the arts community of the greater Los Angeles area, and to make connections that would most likely not occur otherwise,” Brewer said.
To view the art that will be displayed at this year’s show you can visit Greaterlamfa.com.
The 13th annual exhibition will be available for viewing from Jan. 22 to 31 with an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m., including open studios and announcement for best of show at 7 p.m. on Jan. 28 in the School of Art galleries. Admission is free as well as parking in lot seven and docent tours will be available.