Coming together to create a collective show, graduate students at the MU art department created [“Gradualism”](https://coas.missouri.edu/event/gradualism-graduate-student-showcase-2018), an art show and reception from Jan. 16-25 that displayed their work as MFA candidates.
“Every year, we do an exhibition of all of our work and just about all of us participate,” said Zach Nutt, a third-year graduate student and president of the Association of Graduate Art Students. “Everybody was allowed two works to display, whatever they wanted to choose. It gets to show the diversity of the program.”
Paying homage to the wide range of art materials used in this exhibit, Erin King used pieces of pianos to recreate the idea of music and art in coexistence. King displayed three pieces in the exhibit, including “Performance of Etude 1, Opus 2,” a structure created from a music box, a music program and piano parts, “Manuscript for Etude 1, Opus 2,” a wooden piano panel with intricate weavings of white cotton thread dispersed inside the wooden frame, and “Piano Descending a Staircase,” a loosely structured cube composed of piano action parts and string.
“I’m kind of finding my way back to making music into a part of my art, with the end goal of trying to figure out how would one go about interpreting a weaving into music,” King said. “I ended up plotting out the points where I wove on the piano keyboard based on the idea that the openings within the weaving structure would serve as where the hole punches on my music box scroll would go. In that respect, the weaving is actually the source of the song in the music box.”
Using her resources, King found a nonprofit that would donate the supplies she needed to build this series.
“So, I actually got two pianos from a nonprofit in St. Louis called Pianos for People this summer,” King said. “I sent them an email and said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about doing artwork on pianos. Could I have a piano?’ And they said, ‘We’ll give you two!’ I decided to find some people within my network who could get trailers and drove to St. Louis and hauled the pianos back.”
Another artist using unconventional materials to design xyr project, Nessi Alexander-Barnes, created a spiral-shaped installation made entirely of quilting fabric. Inside the installation, Alexander-Barnes featured a quilted storybook with laser-etched drawings.
“Quilting fabric is something that makes up beds, and it’s brightly-colored and reflective of individual people, and so it’s the material I’ve chosen to tie into the concept of identity,” Alexander-Barnes said. “[The storybook is] based on my experiences with internal mythology, so I am literally burning my internal mythology onto fabric that means ‘people.’”
Alexander-Barnes, who created the book with the intention of telling xyr stories as a queer person, used the structure itself to represent xyr queer culture.
“I wanted to create a space that you could enter, a space where you could confront a culture that is not your own,” Alexander-Barnes said. “It’s my personal queer experience. So I made a little spiral-ish where you could walk in and be alone with the story.”
After receiving xyr MFA, Alexander-Barnes desires to continue telling xyr story and inspiring others to tell their own.
“I would like to teach college,” Alexander-Barnes said. “Specifically, painting and drawing. I intend to keep making my own work separately and involving [my stories], but the more important thing is that I want to enable students to tell their own stories.”
_The Maneater used the gender-neutral pronoun ‘xyr’ at the request of Nessi Alexander-Barnes._
_Edited by Brooke Collier | bcollier@themaneater.com_