2025 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition: ‘Acceleration Without Arrival’

The gallery is humid, its tall white walls echoing with color and artistry. Each piece offers a portal into an artist’s mind — from a life-size sculpture made of BIC pens to a detailed pencil drawing stretching across four walls. The artists walk with flowers in their hands, and the word “congratulations” floats around them. Two years of hard work and anticipation has brought these graduate students to this very moment.

“This is an accumulation of a certain time,” said Tova Katzman, a second-year Master of Fine Arts student in photography and video.“We’ve all had to tell ourselves that this is just the beginning of something. Something that will go beyond and take us into the next chapter. This is the opening of a sentence, rather than the closing of one.”

Fourteen graduating MFA students unveiled their work at the opening of the 2025 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition: “Acceleration Without Arrival.” The exhibit at the UT Visual Arts Center runs until May 10 and showcases works from painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, performance and other extended media.

For some of the student artists, the most vulnerable parts of themselves are laid out before the public — parts that can only be told through their art and parts they can only understand through their art.

Katzman said this program has been a valuable opportunity to dedicate herself full-time to her art. The facilities and resources at UT allowed her to create intimate work she wouldn’t have recognized when she first arrived.

“This work is very personal,” Katzman said. “It doesn’t really look personal on the surface, but there’s a video piece that kind of goes into my own personal loss and grief, and that’s connected to this site that I’ve been working in. I’m stepping in a vulnerable place that I’m definitely not used to being in.”

Twelve video channels play in the darkest room of the exhibit, each showing Katzman interacting with the gradual rise and fall of an island — echoing her waves of grief and loss. The dirt she once held from the island, before it was submerged, now rests on a rounded table beneath the spotlight.

It’s especially rewarding for Katzman to watch people engage with the work because she’s put so much of herself into it. However, this makes it even more intimidating to show.

“There’s an element of separation that I have to learn to do this week,” Katzman said. “Realizing what it means to do that has been the ultimate challenge.I think it’s in waves of feeling so emotionally invested and then completely detaching myself. I need both of those to be able to make the work and then show the work.”

Phoebe Shuman-Goodier, a second-year MFA student in photography and transmedia, brought an ongoing photo project centered around her childhood home and relationship with her father to the exhibition.

“I think the work with my family is always vulnerable because it’s putting ourselves and our stories and our failures out there,” Shuman-Goodier said. “I don’t know if I’ll succeed in conveying myself correctly. I think that’s always the fear as an artist is that you’re going to not come across the way you intended.”

Some of Shuman-Goodier’s work also sits in that same dark room as Katzman’s, featuring a cluster of objects found in a West Texas dump that gleam with metal and rust under the spotlight. Behind it, photos show where the piece was made and connect the work back to its raw environment.

“That’s been really special,” Katzman said. “That’s so vital. Just getting through these times and being in conversation with other artists and having the space to connect with each other about this really specific and intense experience that we’re going through.”

Like many graduates in the program, Shuman-Goodier is from out of state and had to adjust to living in a new city and becoming a student again.

“I was really nervous, but we’ve done a pretty decent job of building community together, ” Shuman-Goodier said. “It’s not to say we always get along. I think putting this show together is definitely testing that, but it’s also producing a lot of beautiful moments and heightened emotions, laughter, tears, all of it.”

Nathan Anthony came even farther than out of state. He is an international student from the United Kingdom and a second-year MFA student in sculpture and extended media.

He focuses on index artwork, which tells a story in an indirect way that bears a physical relationship to a process or an event that took place in the world, he said.
Anthony took metal plates that sit at the bottom of doors to protect them from damage and made an imprint of all the wear and tear they endured over the years. He captured the marks etched into the metal and turned them into prints, revealing the hidden history of everyday activity on the surface.
“I felt I was seeing a concrete result of what I was doing, which is kind of helpful,” Anthony said of joining the program. “I suppose art practice in a studio can be quite open-ended. I find it helpful to have something you can come back to. I guess it came out of this idea of a daily practice of something you can do every day that kind of grounds you, that clears your head, that sort of centers you.”

Similar to Katzman, Anthony values public feedback because it allows him to hear what people liked or disliked, whether it’s achieving what he intended and the overall perception of his work.

“When you’re in the program, you’re talking about it and showing it to people, but it’s kind of a closed ecosystem,” Anthony said. “I hope to just get some feedback from the public and other students and people that aren’t necessarily artists or necessarily art people.”

All three artists uprooted their lives to devote themselves to their MFA degrees and pursue creative endeavors that had been on the sidelines.

“To have full on time and space and the only expectation of me is to be producing art, there’s a lot of pressure involved in that, for sure, but it’s such a blessing overall to have that be the thing I’m here to do,” Katzman said.

Shuman-Goodier was a server from Rhode Island and had kept a toe in the art world as a studio assistant. Now, it’s been two years of doing what she loves and meeting people who made the experience even more rewarding.

“I was really hustling before coming here, and I kind of thought maybe I wasn’t a real artist anymore because I’d been out of school for seven years,” Shuman-Goodier said.
The thesis exhibition serves as both a celebration of their hard work and the possibilities that lie beyond.
“You go through this two-year process, and quite fast paced,” Anthony said. “It’s accelerating … It might be quite different from what you were doing when you came in, and I suppose you arrived at this thing. It’s a destination, but it’s a kind of intermediary thing. I guess without arrival, it’s what you’re doing now, but it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be doing it forever.”

It’s “Acceleration Without Arrival.”

Correction: A prior version of this article incorrectly titled Shuman-Goodier as a gallery assistant instead of a studio assistant. It also incorrectly named Anthony’s area of study. BurntXOrange regrets these mistakes.