Graduate Critique Week October 27-30, 2025
The four-day event features six visiting artists and critics—Maria Maea, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Fiona Connor, Harry Dodge, Clara López Menéndez, and Sandeep Mukherjee—who engage with CSULB MFA students in public critiques and discussions. Each guest collaborates with a CSULB faculty member to lead conversations centered on graduate student work across diverse mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, performance, and interdisciplinary practices. The event fosters dialogue between emerging and established artists, with guests selected through a combination of student and faculty recommendations to ensure a range of critical perspectives and contemporary practices.
Date: Monday 10/27 to Thursday, 10/30
Time: 4:00 to 8:00 PM
Location: School of Art Galleries
- Chora Gallery
- Dutzi Gallery
- Gatov Gallery
- Merlino Gallery
- SSC Gallery
- Werby Gallery
Fall 2025 Visiting Artists
Maria Maea
Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, CA) utilizes assemblage and process-based figurative sculptures and installations to illuminate the relationship between land and the body, specifically focused on narratives around immigrant families and their labor in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on equitable futures and climate justice through food and water accessibility in marginalized communities.
Through her use of materials such as concrete, rebar, found objects, fruiting plants, seeds, and woven palm fronds foraged across Los Angeles, Maea creates future ancestor sculptures that act as intimate portraits of family and community as well as abstract cartography of the LA urban landscape. Many of her works structurally contain seed pods that, over time, will crumble to dust, leaving only the viable seed behind.
Through the act of propagation and stewardship, the artworks become multi-generational. These works seek to expand and complicate our relationship to issues around justice, stewardship, contamination, and preservation.
Esteban Ramón Pérez
Esteban Ramón Pérez (b. 1989, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) examines his subjectivity in relation to familial histories of migration, labor, and inherited cultures and spirituality, responding to lived experience while fluidly shifting between past and present. His work operates within borderlands where multiple systems of meaning converge, negotiating identities and histories through layered, at times abstract forms, realized in paintings, sculpture, and installation.
Fiona Connor
(b. 1981, Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland) studied at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts (BFA 2004), the University of California, San Diego (BA majoring in History 2008), and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA 2011). Vital, recurring concerns in her practice include the social and psychological life of the object, the politics of camouflage and mimesis, and the ethics and aesthetics of the built environment.
Harry Dodge
Writer and visual artist Harry Dodge’s book of literary nonfiction, My Meteorite; or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing — which was described as “truly beautiful” by Dazed, a “high-pressure, poetic approach to narrative and language” by Frieze, and named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times — was published by Penguin Press (US) and Harvill Secker (UK) in 2020. Dodge’s sculpture and video work have been exhibited internationally; his solo and collaborative work appears in several institutional collections, including NYC’s Museum of Modern Art. Dodge, a Guggenheim Fellow, resides in Los Angeles with his partner, writer Maggie Nelson.
Clara López Menéndez
Clara López Menéndez is an art worker practicing in curating, pedagogy, writing, and performance. Among her recent projects are HRLA Studies, a self-organized series of free classes at Human Resources LA; The Awakening, Antoni Hervas’ first US solo exhibition; and La Crónica Libre, a sporadic newspaper on the herstories of the Greater Los Angeles done in collaboration with Wes Larios. Her writings have been published by Performance Studies Journal, Sternberg Press, Semiotext(e), and Mousse magazine, among others. She is a regular faculty member in the Art Program at CalArts’ School of Art.
Sandeep Mukherjee
Born in Pune, India, Sandeep Mukherjee lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Mukherjee’s works are in numerous public collections, including those of MOCA, LA; MOMA, NYC; LACMA, LA; the UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; and the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, among others. Mukherjee was the recipient of the 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the 2017 Berlin Fellowship. He was also the recipient of the 2015–16 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship and the California Community Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship in 2008.
