MFA Thesis Exhibition 2023

Gregory Allicar Museum of Art

Colorado State University

1400 Remington St, Fort Collins, CO 80524

April 28-July 23, 2023

Admission: free

Review by Mary Grace (MG) Bernard

This year’s Colorado State University (CSU) Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition celebrates the culmination of artworks by three graduate students. Leila Malekadeli, MFA Graduate in Sculpture, Sam Hamilton, MFA Graduate in Painting, and Vicente Delgado, MFA Graduate in Printmaking, completed three years of study in the Department of Art and Art History’s creative studio arts program. By fostering individual research, CSU’s MFA program encourages graduate students to focus on a specific medium and complete a strong body of work in their chosen field. [1]

An installation view of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Vicente Delgado, *Ask Us About In-Cart Financing* (center), Sam Hamilton, *As Above So Below* (right), Leila Malekadeli, *In Absence* (left). Image by MG Bernard.

Leila Malekadeli is a Michigan-born artist and as she explains, “a product of combined cultures.” Her father is an Iranian immigrant and her mother is from the American South. [2] Malekadeli’s artwork continuously explores and represents her opposing identities. Sam Hamilton grew up in a working class family in rural northern Louisiana. Her intersectional identity as a blue collar Hispanic woman connects her work and aesthetic perspective to rasquachismo—a “perspective and a class-conscious attitude toward the material.” [3] Vicente Delgado is an artist originally from El Paso, Texas. His artworks, and especially those on view in the exhibition, narrate memories from his childhood crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Mexico border. [4]

Together, the three artists analyze, and even sanctify, themes of childhood, identity, and memory. By combining new and recycled materials, Malekadeli, Hamilton, and Delgado visualize their intersectional identities and forge an uninterrupted timeline between the past, present, and future.

Vicente Delgado, *Ask Us About In-Cart Financing*, 2022, mixed media. Image by MG Bernard.

Upon entering the Griffin Foundation Gallery at the Gregory Allicar Museum, viewers are greeted with large-scale artworks full of vibrant colors. In the middle of the gallery sits Delgado’s Ask Us About In-Cart Financing (2022), a mixed media sculpture that might instantaneously remind viewers of attending county fairs during their childhood. A shopping cart contains brightly colored, vinyl, inflatable toys: donuts, crayons, fish, octopuses, cars, monkeys, birds, frogs, dolphins, ninja turtles, and cartoon characters. Each inflatable toy is piled on top of the next creating a giant balloon onto itself.

A detail view of Vicente Delgado’s *Ask Us About In-Cart Financing*. Image by MG Bernard.

Delgado grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and often traveled to Mexico—just a fifteen minute drive from his house—to visit his grandparents in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In his artist statement, he recounts the drive back to Texas from Mexico: “the ride back to the States…could turn into an hour to three-hour traffic jam as the border patrol agents evaluated people’s passports and responses.” [5]

The long line of cars attracted street vendors who sold snacks, toys, and last-minute souvenirs. According to CSU's Department of Art and Art History Communications Specialist Shelby Skumanich, Delgado’s work expresses the experience of his liminal identity by utilizing iconic American and Mexican imagery. [6] As made material in the overlapping of inflatable toys hovering above the shopping cart, Delgado’s identity as both American and Mexican is intersectional, colorful, and layered.

Vicente Delgado, *Built Structure: 113*, 2022, mixed media. Image courtesy of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.

On the wall opposite Ask Us About In-Cart Financing is Delgado’s mixed media work Built Structure: 113 (2022). On a large roll of paper the artist layers collaged paper maps, screen prints, and paint to create a colorful and geometric playground set reminiscent of a futuristic city. In actuality, the painted, angular, black lines signal the surrounding area outside the playground: cars, houses, a chain-link fence, a street, and trees. As Associate Professor of Printmaking Johnny Plastini explains, “Vince Delgado exemplifies the capacity of printmaking to create an interdisciplinary bridge between journalism, political activism, archeology, and poetic moments of deeply personal narrative.” [7]

The layering of recycled materials—paper maps, and new materials—the paint and screen prints, reconstructs Delgado’s multiplicitous identity by connecting his past to his present and future. The work also comments on how his identity—and even all our identities—is formed by the socially and politically constructed environments and borders. As Delgado explains, “I use painting, sculpture, and drawing, and collage to investigate metaphors of invisible borders…to show how our built environment stratifies us into different groups from youth and even to death.” [8]

Sam Hamilton, *As Above So Below*, 2022-2023, acrylic on reclaimed sunshade. Image by MG Bernard.

Across the gallery from Delgado’s works are those created by Sam Hamilton. The artist presents As Above So Below (2022-2023) and Marian (2023): two large paintings on a reclaimed sunshade and a recycled piece of tarp. Hamilton’s works are heavily influenced by rasquachismo, a theoretical term developed by Chicana/o art scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Ybarra-Frausto defines the concept as an attitude, sensibility, and aesthetic quality of objects, materials, and artworks that are “rasquache,” meaning “low-class,” “bad-taste,” and/or “too frugal.” [9]

As Hamilton explains, her paintings “recontextualize kitsch floral patterns taken from thrift store scraps and inherited objects from maternal figures to discuss themes of gender, class, and politics.” [10] The artist materializes her complex identity in her paintings by connecting gender, labor, utility, and mass production through the lens of rasquachismo.

Leila Malekadeli performing inside of *In Absence*, 2023, mixed media. Image courtesy of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.

At the end of the gallery is Leila Malekadeli’s mixed media installation In Absence (2023). The artist has constructed a wooden structure of a house attached to the gallery walls that she continues to construct throughout the duration of the exhibition. As the artist explains in her artist statement, “in this domestic construction, physical and metaphorical thresholds allow measured access to weavings made from my own old, worn clothes, mimicking the curated information I expose to the world about myself.” [11]

She considers the richness that exists between her distinct backgrounds—Iranian and the American Southern—by recontextualizing her lived experiences through new building materials and reclaimed fabric materials (her old clothes). To blur the boundaries between time, space, private, and public, Malekadeli combines the domestic with the political while performing with her own body in the gallery.

Although each of the artists has experienced different upbringings and childhoods, they each recreate intimate memories through material constructions and reconstructions of old and new. This physical and immaterial connection between time, identity, and memory gives an intimate look into how the artists’ see themselves in the past, present, and future. In turn, Malekadeli, Hamilton, and Delgado’s artworks ask viewers to reflect on their own upbringing and how society, politics, and economics have shaped their current identities and memories. What materials (i.e., objects, photographs, maps, old clothes, etc.) do we continue to hold onto into adulthood and how do they shape our individual identities?

Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/her) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism.

[1] Madeleine Boyson, “Graduating Master of Fine Arts students showcase work in museum exhibition, local pop-up,” Colorado State University College News, April 23, 2023. https://libarts.source.colostate.edu/graduating-master-of-fine-arts-students-showcase-work-in-museum-exhibition-local-pop-up/. Accessed May 11, 2023.

[2] Leila Malekadeli, “Artist Statement.”

[3] Sam Hamilton, “Artist Statement.”

[4] Vicente Delgado, “Artist Statement.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] Shelby Skumanich, “Liminal Spaces: Nostalgia and the Borderland in Vicente Delgado’s Prints,” LIBARTS.Source.colostate.edu , March, 2022. https://graduateschool.colostate.edu/success-stories/vicente-delgado/. Accessed May 11, 2023.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Vicente Delgado, “Artist Statement.”

[9] Maria Anderson, “A lesson in “rasquachismo” art: Chicano aesthetics and the ‘sensibilities of the barrio’,” Smithsonian Sparks, January 31, 2017.

[10] Sam Hamilton, “Artist Statement.”

[11] Leila Malekadeli, “Artist Statement.”