Graduate Students

C Armstrong (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based out of the Midwest. They received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2021. Their practice combines painting and sculpture to explore the system of language as it relates to objects. Their most recent group show was Meet the Painters with the OOO Collective in Cleveland (OH) in 2024. They have been in multiple other shows across Cleveland such as SHABANG, DayGLO, and its ðə θɔːt ðæt kountz. C has taught at the Columbus College of Art and Design in addition to giving several demonstrations and talks at MOCA Cleveland. They acted as a committee chair for the 75th Student Independent Exhibition. They have received awards including the Student Independent Exhibition Board Prize, CIA Gund Family Scholarship, and the Max May Memorial Scholarship.

Luisé Cisneros (ze/hir/elle) is a non-binary Mexican-Canadian artist born in Mexico City. As part of these two cultures, ze explores the ideas of land, ethnicity, immigration, identity, family dynamics, and queerness by questioning the biopower, otherism, body and gender politics in hir diaspora experiences. Ze create works in sculpture, wearable art and film where ze questions the barriers that ze faced as a queer immigrant but also celebrates hir Mexican heritage and its cultural traditions and hir identity as a Canadian immigrant.

Luisé completed a baccalaureate degree in Arts at the "UAM-Xochimilco" in Mexico City in 2001. Ze worked as a graphic designer in some studios until 2005, when ze moved to Canada. As soon as ze arrived in Toronto, Luisé participated in hir first art group show Artwherk! Collective where ze sold hir first artwork to the city of Toronto. After participating in multiple group shows in Canada, the USA and Colombia, Luisé applied to University to both further hir knowledge in art and to advance hir professional art career. While having solo shows in Toronto and Belleville, ze was awarded the Craft Ontario Community Award for an art installation honouring 2024 Pride Month, exhibited at the Quinte Arts Council Gallery in Belleville. In December 2024, ze designed the Statue Award for the Writers Guild of Canada. In May 2025, ze graduated with distinction from OCAD University's Sculpture and Installation program, with minors in Gender and Sexual Studies, Art in Public Spaces, and Materials Art and Design.

Personal Statement: My work is an eco-social restoration project that attempts to compost encrusted ideologies about what it means to be human, by following the roots of phenomenologically transformative affects like grief and rage. I employ two, three, and four dimensional objects in a reciprocal co-creative relationship between concept, material, and research, frequently by modifying and combining found objects and everyday ingredients to illuminate overlooked violences and open gateways to remembrance, speculation, and healing.

Personal Statement: In my practice, I am realizing A Metaphysical Guide to Surviving the Anthropocene. This work imagines the ways that collaborative institutional, spiritual, and ideological paradigms could enable humans to create a non-hierarchical interconnectedness with the Earth and the natural worlds—one that is healing to both human beings and to our planetary co-inhabitants. Through highlighting the rapidly occurring collapse of the extractive institutions of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and speciesism, a space is created where it is possible to manifest the world that will be made in the absence of these institutions. A new form of faith is posited; one where reverence and connection with Creation and all Beings is the genesis for humans to change their role from environmental extractors and exploiters to ones of Guardians and Caretakers of the living world. 

Huang I-Chieh (born 1992, Taiwan) is an artist working across installation, video, public intervention, and community-based projects. His work reflects concern with public space, collective memory, and contested histories, drawing on themes such as social resistance, vernacular tradition, and intergenerational tension. He has also worked closely with various groups and communities through participatory processes that bring out unofficial narratives and marginalized knowledge through acts of construction, ritual, and shared authorship.

His work has been featured in group exhibitions and festivals including the Yokohama Triennale (2024), Taiwan Biennial (2016), Taiwan International Documentary Festival (2018), Marseille International Film Festival (2017), Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2016). He has exhibited at institutions such as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; National Human Rights Museum, Green Island; Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab; Honggah Museum; Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts; Open Contemporary Art Center; TheCube Project Space; Taipei Contemporary Art Center; Fotoaura Institute of Photography; Absolute Space for the Arts. He was a finalist for the 20th and the 15th Taishin Arts Award (2022, 2017), and received the Grand Prize at the 14th Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award (2016).

Personal Statement: I am drawn to moments that feel timeless—experiences that exist outside linear chronology, yet remain anchored in personal perception. My work explores the connectivity of the invisible, where art becomes a medium to restructure sensory experiences and evoke mental journeys through time and space. I see the relationship between the city and its people as something woven, and I seek collisions that leave unexpected marks on the fabric. 

Through installations and visual experiments, I explore organic cycles unfolding at the boundary between reality and imagination, where sensory perception becomes a way of recognizing the world and a corridor to new perceptive dimensions.

Oneg Lim (Won Ji Lim) (she/her) (b. 1999, South Korea) is a visual artist based in Chicago, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea.

Oneg’s practice navigates the intersections of the human body, physical traces, and spatial memory. Through sculptural and performative approaches, her work examines how traces—often left unconsciously—emerge through weight, movement, and repetition. Her recent research focuses on the body’s morphological qualities—symmetry, uprightness, gravity, and collapse—to evoke a presence that is both intimate and totemic.

Moving forward, she continues to explore how ephemeral contact between the body and space can reveal layered histories and generate new spatial narratives.

Personal Statement: My artistic practice is rooted in my understanding of the Global South—where the Gulf South of Houston is geopolitically connected to the Horn of Africa by sedimentary rock. Ever responsive to the social and political conditions faced by Global Southerners, my work is an ongoing attempt to imagine possibilities for liberation. Through sculpture and performance, I create worlds of circumstance that explore themes of coloniality, borderlessness, Afrofuturism, Black female subjectivity, personhood, and the politics of rebellion, informed by a story that I instigate. In performance, my voice and body act as a host site for captivity and release, making sounds and shapes about power, love, and a guttural, thrashing rage. I incorporate tools and invite audience participation. In sculpture, I subvert the rigid forms of steel, making compositions out of space and forcing the hard material into precarity. I use ceramics to explore the dispossession of self occurring to African Diasporic people, as well as the subsequent gendered implications.

Personal Statement: I often think of myself as a fly in a glass house—I see the world around me crisply, but I can’t seem to live in it as completely as I might wish, or as society greatly suggests is the “best way” for me. Throughout the years, I’ve learned my “name” by what I crash into: the rigid systems of our world and my reflection through the lens of the structures that trap me.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I draw from the practice of Rasquache—the power to change the name of one thing so it might manifest as another—learning to make something whole out of the crumbs that have made my meals in this chosen and unchosen experience of mine: “life” in another definition.

My practice operates in the supple, “in-between” moments of a world made of windows and closed doors. Whether working through painting, sculpture, ceramics, or fiber, I rely on impactful, often unconventional material forces to mimic the systemic collisions of navigating a world not built for us. I make art to demand the agency that has dangled in front of me and many others for years, dismantling stagnant frameworks to build "liminal bridges" where marginalized communities can fully show up, create, and manifest without the threat of being swatted down. In doing so, my practice constantly buzzes with a persistent question: how much can art truly alter the architecture of the world around us?

Personal Statement: In my practice, I explore questions about power, influence, time, and energy through mixed-media work spanning sculpture and two-dimensional forms. How can we depict the messy relationships humans have with each other and the earth? How do we decide who has authority? How do we determine what should be prioritized? How do our understandings of authority and influence change over time?

These questions can be disorienting, complicating my relationship with truth itself and reflecting the emotional dissonance present within human connection. Drawing upon classical and archaeological imagery, I reflect on recurring patterns of human connection and separation throughout history and consider how contemporary structures and technologies shape the ways we relate to one another. Through experimentation with natural materials, developing rusting processes, and incorporating antique materials and contemporary objects intentionally altered to bear the marks of age and use, I explore the relationship between material, memory, and perception. By transforming materials and questioning their perceived authenticity, I examine how value and meaning are assigned while attempting to represent material stripped of pretense.

Gray Davidson (they/them) is a sculptor working in steel, glass, fabric, sound, light, and found objects. Based in Berkeley, California, they create monumental kinetic installations and intimate studio works that investigate ancestry, trust, and material persistence.

Since 2015, Davidson has received multiple grants for large-scale temporary public installations shown across the Western United States. Their public artworks are a collaborative practice, engaging teams of fabricators in realizing complex kinetic and interactive sculptures, several of which are now in permanent collections.

Recent exhibitions include Bombay Beach Biennale (2024); SOAK Arts Festival, Oregon (2025); a duo show presenting the RENDITIONS series in San Francisco (2025); and an upcoming group show in Seattle (2026). Davidson studied in Portland, Oregon, where they developed an interdisciplinary practice combining sculpture, performance, and site-specific installation.

Personal Statement: My practice spans sculpture, sound and installation, investigating unstable bridges such as trust, longing, care, and vulnerability. These "emotional ecotones" exist in the challenging transitional regions between psychological states. My recent work has explored philosophies of immortality, trust relationships through time and material, and ancestry and reproductive futurism.

My current direction explores what it would mean for an artwork to die. Who is empowered to determine its longevity or the conditions of its death? What is it worth to keep it alive? What would its wake and funeral be like? I am curious about an artwork’s ‘death’ in literal (the sculpture is crushed or dissolves) or representational ways (the sculpture becomes illegible or disperses) if not maintained, cared for or attended to by the audience. 

Who owns the self?

G (any pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist working across varying media to inquire on themes that center material culture, identity, fragmentation, and the self. My practice begins from a place of questioning instead of conclusions. Making is the way I process, investigate, and translate thought into physical form. I am particularly interested in how we construct ourselves. How identity exists as shifting. Who we are stripped down. Material becomes a place to encode meaning, tension, and emotional weight. I’m drawn to contradictions and their inevitability. Protection and exposure. Visibility and erasure. I’m not looking to provide any fixed answers with the work, but to create a dialogue where the work exists as an ongoing conversation about embodiment, perception, and existing within systems designed to define, categorize, and fragment the self.

Yuxin (Sansa) Liu is an artist from China based in Chicago. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at SAIC. Her practice focuses on sculpture and installation, moving between objects, spaces, and environments.

Liu draws from personal memory, lived experience, history, and the social systems around her. She is interested in how institutions and broader structures shape individual experience, often through ideas of expectation, repetition, progress, and belonging. Rather than treating these ideas as fixed subjects, she translates them into physical forms and environments that can be felt and encountered.

Her work also considers the relationship between the viewer and the sculpture. She often creates forms, openings, and pathways that bring people into closer contact with the work. She aims to strengthen interaction and create a greater sense of empathy between the artwork and its audience.

Ada del Pilar Ortiz (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the architectural condition, the meaning of home, and the remnants of built space through their intimate relationship with memory, identity, and material transformation. Through processes of molding, casting, and recomposition, she seeks to rematerialize the experiences we have with places and objects, engaging directly with physical sites or their documentation to extract, translate, and reinterpret architectural fragments. These elements become sculptural vessels that reveal the layered histories, absences, and evolving identities embedded within our personal landscape and structures of dwelling.

Ada obtained a BFA from the School of Fine Arts and Design of Puerto Rico in 2018. Her work has been presented individually and collectively in spaces such as the Penland Gallery (NC), Casa Quién (RD), El Kilómetro Gallery (PR), Embajada Gallery (PR), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte y Diseño de Miramar, Katherine E. Nash Gallery (MN), among others. She has participated in residencies including The Studios at MASS MoCA–Puerto Rico Artist Fellowship (2023), Penland School of Crafts Winter Residency (2024), Proyecto Casitas Artistas Residentes del Municipio de Bayamón (2022–2025), and The David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center residency–Pocantico Prize (2025). Her work has been commissioned by ArteYUNQUE: Cohort "Ensayos para la Naturaleza" (2024–2025) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico under the "MAC en el Barrio" program. Ada’s work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CATAPULT: "A Caribbean Arts Grant" programme and "Máquina Simple"–Beta Local grant from the Regional Regranting Program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

Personal Statement: As a landscape architect, my practice emerged from a desire to engage creatively with environmental issues but has evolved into a critical examination of how public space is shaped by systems of power. Working alongside the male-dominated fields of engineering and construction has heightened my awareness of authorship, access, and decision-making in the built environment. My work examines systems of publicness, infrastructure, gender, and class. Drawing from experiences in Houston and Chicago, I explore how public space is produced, controlled, and experienced, creating work that invites participation, reflection, and new possibilities for collective imagination.

Personal Statement: In my practice I consider how people’s relationships to objects are formed. Engaging with ideas of material culture, I explore the ways a familiar object can become significant over time through repetition, be it visually, audibly, or gesturally.

Working primarily in sculpture, I use the “object-ness” of an object to create narrative through my chosen mediums and subjects. I evaluate the context of each subject in both a general sense, and specifically to my own experience, considering the impact and connection of language. Always having had a love for word play and the poetics of spoken and written words, in my work I engage with the sensorial visuals that come from one’s relationship to an object and its subsequent relevance to words. 

Considering the impact of time on memory, my work takes shape in various malleable mediums that reflect the significance of an object’s perceived or given emotional influence, particularly through its subtleties. I take familial items and give new form to their context and meaning based on my relationship to the object, people, and memories. This coalescing of object, narrative structure, and meaning, both literally and figuratively, act to inform and understand the makeup of ideas of self.

Yiming Wang (she/her) is a multimedia artist working across installation, video, digital animation, and painting.

Yiming Wang's artistic practice mainly focuses on popular culture, Commodity Spectacle, and their "failure" and "collapse" in the contemporary context.

She pays attention to the highly dramatic images and narratives produced by popular culture, and disassembles the desires and meanings they create and foster, integrating them with reality, thereby revealing an inevitable contradiction and absurdity.

Absurdity also exposes the fragility of popular culture and Commodity Spectacle, showcases the fragmentation of narratives, and reveals the division of values. At the same time, it exposes the anxiety of existence, the endless desires, and the absence of meaning in life. And the tension between these desires and the nihility is the starting point of her creation.