Open University at Dallas Contemporary, January 24–March 9, 2025
Christina Childress, “Do you remember how it feels to press your hands into earth?”
Taylor Cleveland, “SuperPOD0043- An American Painting”
What does it mean to be an artist before the art world has decided what you are? Open University, the sprawling survey of current MFA students across North Texas, frames graduate school as a site of transition, a period where artistic identities are still fluid, precarious, and — perhaps most critically — not fixed within the art canon. Curated by Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns, the exhibition resists institutional cohesion, opting instead for a fragmented snapshot of emerging artistic concerns. “Consensus,” Higgs notes, “is something that builds over time, shaping and reshaping an artist’s practice.”
Featuring 13 artists from six MFA programs, Open University functions as both a proving ground and a feedback loop. Third-year students, many of whom are on the precipice of their thesis exhibitions, present work that oscillates between self-contained statements and still-forming inquiries. The show is also a recruitment tool: for prospective students, it offers a glimpse of what an MFA can yield, including the possibility of institutional visibility. And then there’s the material incentive — an $8,000 prize.
Higgs, who conducted 29 studio visits in three days, describes this moment as “fertile” and in “flux,” terms which speak to both the excitement and instability of graduate work. The exhibition itself reflects this condition: makeshift wooden frames stretched with muslin partition the space, offering a noncommittal structure — something between a temporary wall and an armature in progress.
Certain tendencies emerge. The center gallery, for example, becomes an impromptu survey of craft-based practices, featuring weaving, tufting, and textile works. The artists, drawn from different programs, were unaware of each other’s work before the exhibition, but their adjacency underscores a shared engagement with material and process. Christina Childress (UTA) works with Texas-sourced soil — red, gray, and white earth collected from family-owned land — to create a sprawling composition that hints at territorial histories. Installed on mesh, the piece is designed to settle over time, potentially registering environmental shifts like a seismic record.
Elsewhere, the relationship between image-making and automation plays out in unexpected ways. Taylor Cleveland (SMU) presents a factory-produced reproduction of a digital collage featuring George W. Bush’s paintings, printed in China and shipped back to Dallas, where Bush maintains a presence through his presidential library and churchgoing habits. The painting rests on an easel salvaged from the estate of Arlington-based Western artist Joe Grande, embedding it within a lineage of Texan image production. The work teeters between satire and sincerity, questioning the mechanics of authorship and the entanglement of institutional legacy with personal mythmaking.
Sculptural works in the exhibition tend to foreground their internal structures. The lathe sculptures — some of the formally compelling objects in the show — reveal their compositions of cardboard and Styrofoam, their exteriors cut away to expose an underlying logic of assembly. The interplay of surface and core suggests a kind of geological process, layers peeled back to make visible the act of construction itself. A separate, fragile installation of eggshells, so delicate it resists viewer interaction, turns this impulse toward exposure into an exercise in restraint — here, preservation overrides intervention.
Despite the expansiveness of the survey, notable absences persist. Higgs expresses surprise at the near-total lack of film and video. Photography, too, is scarce, with Robert Cruz (UNT) standing as the lone exception, contributing a series of shockingly precise cyanotypes. The overwhelming presence of painting and craft suggests that, at least in this moment, materiality is a primary concern for North Texas MFA students.
For now, Open University is less about fixed positions than it is about movement — between processes, disciplines, and institutional thresholds. Its most successful moments emerge not from cohesion but from friction in the gaps between artistic intention and material resolution. As these artists move forward, their work will inevitably shift, calcify, or unravel. This exhibition catches them at the threshold, before consensus sets in.
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Agglomeration: Peter Abrami and Hava Toobian at Dallas College, Eastfield Campus, January 21–February 28, 2025
Hava Toobian, “*trot* trot trot* *eats chips* *munches*”
Hava Toobian, “>.< It’s Time!”
Peter Abrami, “MOMO”
By layering, accumulating, and compressing the visual detritus of contemporary material culture, Peter Abrami and Hava Toobian’s Agglomeration offers a meditation on the interplay of image, object, and identity. Installed at Dallas College’s Eastfield Campus, the exhibition presents two distinct but complementary approaches to assemblage: Abrami’s exuberant melds of color and surface and Toobian’s methodical, almost archaeological accumulations of found imagery and material.
While Abrami’s works coalesce into singular fields of color, Toobian’s operate more like a collection of discrete elements, pulling from the fragmented visual lexicon of the diasporic experience. “I think it’s the same as how I’ve been thinking about imagery, iconography, and visual signifiers for a diasporic person,” Toobian reflects. “But kind of in a more literal way — collecting objects that speak to that for me, specifically.”
Toobian’s assemblages evoke the casual abundance of a “junk drawer,” where the personal and the mass-produced, the sentimental and the disposable, gather into new constellations. Silicone caulk, a medium for figuration that she is currently developing, acts as both adhesive and boundary — a structural framework that allows images and objects to cohere while preserving their individual identities. The visual cacophony of Hello Kitty heads, clothing scraps, and other personal effects resists easy legibility, instead forming an intricate matrix of past and present, self and other.
One standout piece incorporates a chip bag — an outlier in Toobian’s usual sculptural vocabulary. Unlike the three-dimensional objects she typically embeds into her work, the bag exists in a liminal state: once voluminous, now flattened. This shift from object to image, from materiality to memory, underscores Toobian’s interest in transformation, particularly within the fluid space between identity and cultural artifact. Her use of fabric follows a similar logic. Working with scraps from her own clothing — discarded, then repurposed — Toobian stitches together layers of history, though, as she admits, her technique is intentionally simple: “It’s single stitch and a zigzag,” she told me.
While Toobian’s practice revels in the accumulation of signifiers, it resists simple nostalgia or direct narrative. Instead, her works function as speculative terrains — hybrid spaces where identity, material, and memory negotiate their place. In Agglomeration, this negotiation is presented not as a resolution, but as an ongoing process, shifting between cohesion and fragmentation, intimacy and distance.
By framing their works within the language of layering and accumulation, both Abrami and Toobian position material as a site of transformation. In Agglomeration, identity is an evolving structure — built, dismantled, and reassembled, over and over again.
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William Sarradet is the Assistant Editor for Glasstire.
