Press Releases
2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition, Under Scores, Examines Invisible Systems that Shape Daily Life
March 31, 2026
New works by eight artists opens May 1 at the Arthur Ross Gallery and Gordon Gallery
Under Scores 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition
Arthur Ross Gallery and Gordon Gallery, University of Pennsylvania
May 1 – 31, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 30, 5 pm – 8 pm
PHILADELPHIA, March 31, 2026 — The Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the Arthur Ross Gallery present Under Scores, the 2026 Thesis Exhibition featuring new work by eight second-year candidates for the Master of Fine Arts degree. The exhibiting artists are Ana González, Cacie Rosario Jackson, Sol Kim, Dylan Li, Jingyi Ling, Noa Mori Machover, Shay Myerson, and Ambika Trasi.
The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday, April 30, from 5 pm to 8 pm, and will be on view through May 31. The artworks will be presented across 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.
“For a program like ours that values rigorous conceptual, material, and formal experimentation, the thesis exhibition is a moment of deep import and impact,” said Sharon Hayes, Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts. “This is not only because it is the culmination of each artists’ two-year MFA study but also because it is through publicness that each artists’ work gathers meaning and develops relationships beyond the artist’s own control and understanding. This inspired transformation from studio to public is deeply moving and a pleasure to witness.”
Emily Zimmerman, the Arthur Ross Gallery Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs, is the exhibition curator. “These eight artists examine the infrastructures, systems, and histories that quietly organize daily life, engaging with urgent questions about power, technology, and representation,” Zimmerman said. “Whether it is the informal economy around catalytic converters, instruments that have played pivotal roles in cultural movements, or the remnants of an obsolete power station, these artists are asking us to consider the material histories, economies, habits of language, and embedded systems that evade our attention.”
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..
Under Scores is presented through a collaboration between the Graduate Fine Arts program at the Weitzman School of Design and the Arthur Ross Gallery.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Under Scores
May 1 – 31, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 30, 5 pm – 8 pm
Arthur Ross Gallery
Fisher Fine Arts Library
220 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA
Gordon Gallery
Weitzman Hall
205 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA
Admission is free and open to the public.
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday: noon – 5pm
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MEDIA CONTACTS
Michael Grant
Executive Director of Communications
Stuart Weitzman School of Design
mgrant@design.upenn.edu
Miranda Powell
Gallery Coordinator
Arthur Ross Gallery
powellmj@upenn.edu
Louisa Shepard
LJS Communications LLC
ljscomms@outlook.com
ABOUT THE MASTER OF FINE ARTS PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA STUART WEITZMAN SCHOOL OF DESIGN
The two-year Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is focused on the professional development of studio artists. Through studio work, seminar courses, international residency opportunities and interactions with vital working artists, the program provides an open intellectual framework to foster critical awareness and independent methods of artistic research. Students extend their conceptual strategies while inventing and then refining their own hybridized forms of art making methods. The program encourages exploration, extending studies into other disciplines within the Weitzman School and the university-at-large with a rich selection of outside electives and optional certificate and dual-degree programs.
ABOUT THE ARTHUR ROSS GALLERY
The Arthur Ross Gallery is a catalyst for creativity with a mission to engage, educate, and inspire. Founded in 1983, the Gallery is a resource for the entire University across schools and departments, the local Philadelphia community, and scholars worldwide. We are a learning lab where people engage with important, and often rarely seen, art and artifacts from a diverse range of time periods, media, and cultures.