Good Mother Gallery presents the third annual edition of The MFAs of LA, a group exhibition showcasing the work of graduate students from eight Los Angeles art programs. Curated by Leslie Fram, this year’s show, Prompt and Circumstance, runs from Sunday, Oct. 5, through Sunday, Oct. 12, in the gallery’s Annex space in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Among the 20 emerging artists featured are three CalArts School of Art students: Nathan Cheung (MFA 26), Sua Kim (MFA 27), and Schuyler Hazard (MFA 26).
The show takes place in the Good Mother Annex, a cavernous warehouse that challenges the conventions of a white-cube gallery. Artists were invited to respond directly to the space, using its irregular architecture as a prompt to create site-specific installations of two to four works. The title Prompt & Circumstance reflects this generative process while playing on the phrase “pomp and circumstance,” long associated with graduation ceremonies. It serves as a fitting nod to MFA students approaching a milestone in their creative journeys.
Born in Hong Kong and based in Los Angeles, Cheung works across photography, installation, and social practice to explore queer futurism, world-making, and liberation. Their practice foregrounds queer joy and the radical act of building “home” and “family,” while drawing deeply from their lived experiences as an undocumented immigrant and political organizer. For Prompt & Circumstance, Cheung presents the second iteration of HAUS OF FREEDOM, an installation that reclaims space, resists erasure, and imagines liberation in the present moment.
South Korea-born artist Kim is a painter whose artistic practice explores how abstraction, color, and materiality can convey complex psychological states and the ephemeral nature of memory. For Prompt & Circumstance, Kim presents 14 Hours, a series of plexiglass paintings over screen-printed images she took in South Korea and Los Angeles. The overlapping images express both the challenges of displacement as well as the sense of connection she has found in Los Angeles.
Hazard’s practice explores the polysemic nature of time through sculpture, performance, and material experimentation. In her site-specific installation Studio Time: Annex 9, she poured 60 gallons of PVA glue onto her studio floor, lifting the hardened surface, which weighed more than 200 pounds, to reveal layers of debris left by previous artists. In Running Makes Me Feel, Hazard retraced her late mother’s footsteps in the New York City Marathon decades later, documenting the seven-hour run with disposable cameras. The performance also served as a fundraiser, generating $7,770 for cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
An opening reception for Prompt and Circumstance will be held Sunday, Oct. 5, from 2 to 6 p.m.
