New works by eight graduating student artists celebrated at opening of “Under Scores: 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition”

May 6, 2026

On view through May 31, the annual exhibition is in two venues, the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Gordon Gallery.

Two campus galleries were filled with people during the opening of Under Scores: 2026 Weitzman MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring new work created by eight graduating students, the culmination of two years of study for a Master of Fine Arts degree.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Department of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the Arthur Ross Gallery to present the work of artists Ana González, Cacie Rosario Jackson, Sol Kim, Dylan Li, Jingyi Ling, Noa Mori Machover, Shay Myerson, and Ambika Trasi.

For the first time the annual exhibition, on view through May 31, is in two campus venues: the Arthur Ross Gallery at the Fisher Fine Arts Library building and the Gordon Gallery at Weitzman Hall, a hub for interdisciplinary research and teaching completed last fall.

“There are all of these connections that you’ve built with each other that move through your work, and now you offer us the possibility of seeing those,” said Sharon Hayes, Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts, addressing the students during the April 30 opening celebration, attended by more than 300 people.

“There is something really challenging, extraordinary, and let’s also say urgent, about making work at this particular moment in time, the work that you’ve given yourselves, and the work that you’ve given us,” Hayes continued during her remarks.

“Take time over this month to learn from it, and to learn from what you’re proposing to each other, and what these proposals can mean. An exhibition happening in this moment is also an exhibition with this moment. And that is something we all need. You need each other, we need you, and we’re all going to learn from what you’ve made.”

Emily Zimmerman, Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at the Arthur Ross Gallery, is the curator of the exhibition and served as the 2025-2026 Weitzman Fine Arts Guest Curator and Visiting Critic. Zimmerman conducted several studio visits with each artist throughour the past year and regularly participated in final critiques over the past two years, developing a curatorial framework that emerged out of those extended conversations.

“This year’s exhibition is joined together under the title Under Scores. That title emerges out of the work that the students are doing that’s looking at systems that underlie much of our daily life, but that evade our attention,” Zimmerman said during her remarks at the opening.

“In the Arthur Ross Gallery this includes works that trace the many meanings of power: energy, transformation, circuitry, histories of dominion, authority and control,” Zimmerman continued. “In the Gordon Gallery these scores shift towards systems that extend, limit, mediate, and complicate the human body.”

Thematically, the artworks “really cohere in a way that is evident once you’re in this space,” said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Inaugural Faculty Director of the Arthur Ross Gallery, in an interview. “Pieces are really talking to each other, and you get the sense of a graduating class who has wrestled with some of the same ideas together and come out with different answers.”

Shaw, the James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art, said she was “thrilled” with the opening. “It’s so exciting to be in two locations for this exhibition,” she said, “and the Philadelphia arts community has really come out to celebrate these young artists doing such wonderful work.”

The artworks are in a wide range of media, including printmaking, video, sculpture, sound, photography, collage, and large-scale installation.

• Ana González casts concrete forms inspired by the built geometries of radiation containment, creating sculptures that give form to the spatial logic of entropy and the invisible action of radiation on matter. Two paintings made from egg yolk applied directly to the wall invoke the tradition of fresco painting, while introducing a material rooted in generation and transformation.
• Cacie Rosario Jackson translates circuit boards, schematic diagrams, and graphic music scores into artworks, using a soldering iron to draw into wooden taskboard. Based on her research into the Chitlin Circuit, a network of Black music venues in the U.S., her interpretations connect Black culture, memory, music, and community with their built environments. The installation also includes audio drawn from Black radio stations.
• Sol Kim engages video, performance, and installation to understand systems that organize perception. In Kim’s work on view, the artist records herself in unusual poses, uploading each to an AI that rates her degree of “humanness.” In a series of lawn signs, she intervenes playfully into advertising language to reveal how meaning slips and transforms within technological frameworks, like AI.
• Dylan Li works across performance, video, and installation to explore how images translate and fragment the body over time. His video installation implicates both artist and viewer in questions of bodily presence through the history of image-making, as the body shifts between figure, surface, and site.
• Jingyi Ling builds site-specific installations that engage the physics of light and the viewer’s kinesthetic experience, using subtle performative interventions to shift how space is perceived and navigated.
• Noa Mori Machover follows platinum-group metals as they pass between formal and informal economies, tracing how law, logistics, and exchange shape and destabilize ownership and legitimacy.
• Shay Myerson constructs encompassing sculptural environments that reflect on American mythology, drawing from hunting culture, pastoralism, and politics, where objects and materials stand in for belief, fear, and ecological myth, while blurring the boundaries between human and natural worlds.
• Ambika Trasi brings together a pipe organ, Victorian furniture, glass lantern slides, and other archival materials in a critique of museological practices that present the violent spoils of colonial extraction as educational props, examining how histories of colonialism and power are embedded in objects and reshaped through their circulation.

The Fine Arts program “values rigorous conceptual, material, and formal experimentation,” and the thesis exhibition is “a moment of deep import and impact,” because public display of the work “gathers meaning and develops relationships beyond the artist’s own control and understanding,” Hayes said in an interview. “This inspired transformation from studio to public is deeply moving and a pleasure to witness.” 

This is the second year of the collaboration between the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Weitzman School of Design. Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth: 2025 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition took place in the Arthur Ross Gallery and marked the annual exhibition’s return to campus after being held offsite for several years. 

Related article: Profile of artist Cacie Rosario Jackson

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Under Scores:2026 Weitzman Fine Art MFA Thesis Exhibition
On view through May 31. Admission is free and open to the public.

Arthur Ross Gallery
Fisher Fine Arts Library building
220 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA

Gordon Gallery
Weitzman Hall
205 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA

HOURS
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday: noon – 5pm