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In the middle of August 2023, when the administration of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth blindsided art students, faculty and staff with the sudden closure of the Star Store, it led to a time of tumultuousness, discord and disillusionment.
The historically significant grand old building, a once beloved local version of Macy’s with its restaurant, bakery, beauty salon and the only escalators in the city, was a landmark and an emotional touchstone for many in the community. In its 20-year history as UMD’s New Bedford campus, it was a center of culture and creativity alongside The Zeiterion and the New Bedford Art Museum, nestled amidst the downtown galleries, restaurants, taverns and merchants.
And much to the chagrin of many (myself included), it was soon announced that the displaced art students would eventually be resituated in a former Bed Bath & Beyond store in a Dartmouth strip mall. Much of that shopping center still remains unoccupied as Circuit City, JoAnn Fabrics, Office Max and other retailers ghosted long ago.
But after spending a little time at the old BB&B (now officially referred to as the UMD Art and Design Studios) with graduate students who will soon be receiving their MFAs, my stance has softened a bit. They have individual studios, exhibition space, and a common area where they eat lunch together almost every day. Undergraduate students gather there to take classes in ceramics, fiber arts, screenprinting, metalsmithing, papermaking and more.
It lacks the old school elegance of the Star Store but nonetheless it works as it exudes a kind of feisty charm and determination, primarily due to the current crop of nine graduate students who mesh together wonderfully.
There is a palpable sense of genuine camaraderie and mutual respect among them despite their diverse ages, backgrounds, and philosophies. Three are from Iran, one is from Turkey, and another is from India via Oman and Dubai. There are four Americans: a Southwesterner now living in Massachusetts, a former Californian currently residing in Newport, a former modern dancer and landscaper from Easthampton, and a Vermonter from the Northeast Kingdom, who commutes home on the weekends.
I spoke to all the artists one-on-one, seven in person at their studios and two on the phone. I was taken by their enthusiasm, wit and commitment to their respective areas of specialization.
Alison Bergman’s official concentration is in ceramics but that is far too narrow a term to describe her whimsical work. She is a multidisciplinary artist that has a keen eye and a tactile sensibility with regard to clay but she does not adhere to a strict fidelity with regard to any given medium or material. She delves into fiber arts, painting, printmaking and site-specific installation art.
With bold colors, particularly red, blue and yellow, she references Mondrian while creating immersive spaces that are simultaneously gleeful and mildly disorienting. She notes that her work “seeks to transform moments of imperfection into opportunities for renewal, creating environments where repair and readjustment become generative and where the possibility for joy remains.” It’s not eye candy. It’s an entire eye candy store.
Immer Cook is a ceramicist distinctly untethered to the the vessel, forgoing the vase, the cup, the teapot and the urn in favor of unusual juxtapositions between traditional elements birthed of the kiln and unexpected materials: plywood, refractory brick, granite, concrete, shaped segments of wood, and myriad of found materials and repurposed objects. With his sculptured assemblages — intermingling hand-built ceramics with, well, almost anything — he explores, in his words, “a spectrum of permanence, stability, gesture and craft.”
Born in India, MITRAAVRS (pronounced “mitra-verse”) is the self-proclaimed “artist name” of an illustration major utilizing digital design, animation, hypertext, and experimental web-based media to create non-linear narratives. They approach identity as something fluid and “continually assembled and reassembled across different contexts.”
Influenced by “the fragmented aesthetics of the early web,” Marvel’s “Spider-Verse” and other pop culture phenomena, MITRAAVRS is the least traditional artist among their grad school peers. In conversation, they are outspoken, serious and well-versed in the technology they use. But some of the digital prints — with text such as “Am I So Forgettable?” — reveal a certain diffidence. Or perhaps, it is a purposely faux diffidence.
Yaren Yildiz is a multidisciplinary artist who received her BFA from Bilkent University in Turkey. She went on to do highly detailed anatomical illustrations. She now refers to herself as a “former realist” and she has successfully reinvented herself as a non-figurative ceramic sculptor, noting that one needs to know the rules before you can break them.
Her glazed porcelain artworks appear as something akin to intestines (pretty pinks, lavender, pastel yellow and baby blue but intestinal in appearance nonetheless) as she seeks to elicit a gut reaction and is readily procuring that response. Despite or perhaps because of the body horror influences of filmmaker David Cronenberg and the painter Francis Bacon, Yildiz is creating lovely and disorienting art exploring the inner body as visceral, tactile and in a state of flux.
Allison Morones, majoring in fiber arts, received her BFA in costume design and technology from the University of Arizona and went on to become the resident costume designer at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, where she was involved with dance, opera and theater productions. Her graduate work culminated with “Wild Cactus,” a somewhat autobiographical puppet show, in which she reimagines herself as an anthropomorphic cactus, interacting with a menagerie of creatures, including a snake and a vulture.
She acknowledges that the conceptual sources of the production are rooted in the emotional scars of childhood, “cloaked in fantasy and rose-colored glasses.” She is a masterful artisan, creating backdrops that appear so lush with color and texture that they could easily be mistaken for large-scale abstracted landscape paintings. The marionettes are charming and Morones is a skilled puppeteer. As a storyteller, crafter and performer, she’s the real deal.
Maya August Palmer received a BA in biology from Hofstra University and worked in neuroscience for a number of years before they decided to pursue an MFA in painting. Informed by science and a realist’s sensibility, they love the “scatter of matter, the trash of everyone.” Palmer paints tiny environmental snapshots on both sides of Dura-Lar plastic, a translucent product similar to Mylar but with a mildly textured surface, which aids in the adhesion of paint.
Painting discarded objects — a plastic fork, a pink straw, a mangled water bottle, or a crushed bright red beer cup — and situating them alongside fallen leaves, tiny green plants, even a salamander, they make no distinction between the individual components and they are not on a sociopolitical soapbox. Palmer is drawn to display the work in corners of the gallery or the floor or in other awkward spots, hoping “to trace new ecologies — intimate, tangled and quietly defiant — where decay becomes memory and the mundane holds transcendence.”
Arghavan Booyeh, Ali Masoumzadeh and Sarah Valinezhad are all from Iran and all three agonize over the horrors being perpetuated by the despotic leaders of their homeland. And there is the war being waged against Iran by the United States and Israel. There is little comfort and many difficult moments worrying about family and friends.
And yet they persevere, at least in part by making art. It is art that needs to be made, even if naysayers think it is futile.
Booyeh is a fiber artist grounded by a background in law and her work addresses women’s rights and the desire for equality. Utilizing metaphors that are significant in Persian culture, the Cypress (Sarv) and paisley (Botteh), she honors the heroic women who continue to fight for freedom in Iran. The Sarv-e Abarkuh is one of the most ancient living trees in the world (4,000-5,000 years old) and it symbolizes longevity, resilience and spirituality.
She creates emotionally loaded large-scale fabric works, often on which the paisley shape is manifested, existing somewhere between womb and body bag. Her engaging work seeks to address that women must be all things at once: wife, mother, teacher, artist, activist and more. And she does it with exquisite and heartfelt grace.
Masoumzadeh is painter and bookmaker who creates three-dimensional canvases, merging sculptural elements with black-and-white painted surfaces that explore themes of war, loss, mythology, cultural identity, memory and the reinvention of self. The canvases are painted on both sides and revolve as part of a room-size mechanism with which viewers physically interact. Sources as varied as Goya, Picasso, David Hockney, animal illustrations, mythology and pop culture feed his artistic output. His work is an energetic frenzy that remains anchored to his home and past.
Domestic space is the dominant component in Valinezhad’s paintings, which she describes as being deeply informed by Iranian women’s lived experience and the ongoing fight for freedom in Iran. Pink is a predominant mainstay in her paintings but it’s not a sweet pale little girl’s pink. It’s all grown-up, loud, demanding of attention and refusing to be silent. That pink says, “OK, you want me to be this? Alright. But I’m not going to be quiet, I’m not going to fade into the background and I’m going to do it on my own terms.”
Valinezhad’s paintings are devoid of male figures as if she is quietly claiming the domestic realm itself as sacred territory. She notes that she aims to honor vulnerability alongside defiance, and to mark the continuous fight for freedom as something lived quietly, persistently and intimately.
The three Iranian-born grad students do not bear the burden of their deep sadness by themselves. They are buoyed by their colleagues, by their community and by their collective college family.
United, the nine are fine.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org.
I would love to see this work in person. Is this an open exhibition?
Segments of he MFA thesis show is/was exhibited in three locations, including at the UMassD Art and Designs Studios at Dartmouth Towne Center near Barnes and Noble which closes today at 6:00 (May 7th). Another segment is on display at the Hatch Street Studios, 88 Hatch Street, Studio 215, New Bedford and it can be seen during the Hatch Street Open Studios on Saturday, May 9th from 10:00 to 6:00. And the third segment is on display at the New Bedford Art Museum, 608 Pleasant Street through May 14th.
Wonderful article. Don, I remember that the Arlans Department Store on Brook Street in New Bedford had an escalator as well. The store operated from 1945 to the 1960s.