BFA Senior Honors Studio

In an era defined by misinformation, a global health crisis, sociopolitical unrest, and a media landscape shaped more by algorithms than integrity, both collective and individual voices are heralded for their potential and scrutinized for their intent. The world has grown increasingly complex and unfamiliar, exposing the contradictions of our leaders and the biases within ourselves—laid bare for friends and strangers alike to witness, and for some, to despair. Today, the political reality of the United States feels less like the promise of an American Dream and more like a dystopian satire, where absurdity and consequence collide. The very foundations beneath us seem to be liquefying, grasping at our ankles like quicksand made of political nightmares, crumbling institutions, and commodified self-care. And yet, our heads remain above water, and our voices, however uncertain, can still persist.

Disintegration emerges from this moment of instability, an exhibition that confronts the shifting terrain of contemporary existence, where certainty dissolves, leadership falters, and the future feels increasingly unmoored. Pulling inspiration from Karl Marx’s famous assertion—“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”—the show explores how artists grapple with the erosion of stability in a post-pandemic, meme-saturated, and algorithmically governed world. Through works that engage with political discourse, personal interiority, and evolving identity, the exhibition illuminates new ways of forging human communication amid disillusionment and fatigue. These pieces remind us that perseverance is not a passive act but a movement—an insistence on speaking up, sharing space, and imagining beyond the constraints of the present. In a time when logic itself is shifting, and the familiar fractures into the surreal, the artists here reveal that the act of creation is, in itself, an act of resistance—one that encourages us to dream of an other, and perhaps, a world remade.