The Florida State University Department of Art and MoFA are pleased to announce Origins & Afterlives, an exhibition of works by Florida State University’s 2025 MFA graduating class Lua Barbosa, Katie Grinell, Jillian Heusohn, Kalee Iturrioz, Hannah Keats, Tevin Lewis, Liz Masterson, Audrey McKenzie, Chloe Sailor, Kim Springs, and Alina Valenzuela.
Origins & Afterlives explores themes of memory, bodies, environments, and identity- examining how stories originate and how they are collected, fragmented, or reimagined in their afterlives. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and digital media, artists transform, deconstruct, and reconstruct- thread, pigment, pixels, organic matter- revealing cycles of preservation, entropy, and adaptation. Memory becomes subject and process through the collection of the ephemeral, and the ways personal and collective histories are altered and retold. Human and non-human bodies become vessels for resilience and fragility, a site of trauma, care, and transformation. Interspecies and intersystem relationships intertwine and shift, blending natural and digital to question hierarchies, networks, and speculative futures. As fragments are stitched, layered, and repurposed, Origins and Afterlives proposes an ongoing negotiation between presence and absence, permanence and decay- inviting viewers to reconsider what is kept, lost, or reborn.
Origins & Afterlives will only be on view from April 11 to May 3, so come out and celebrate the hard work of our MFA students over their time at Florida State. The opening reception will be on April 11 starting at 6 p.m., and will be opening alongside MoFA’s newest exhibition, Conversaciones: Latin American Indigenous Art. It will be a night to remember, so we hope to see you there!