The School of Art fosters a sense of community, encouraging students to engage with their peers, faculty, and industry professionals. The university promotes interdisciplinary collaborations and provides opportunities for students to showcase their work through exhibitions, such as the Senior Art + Design Show, performances, and other artistic events.
Below are examples of how our talented students and alumni have excelled in their chosen fields.
The Senior Art + Design Show is the senior capstone for BFA students. It provides a platform for students to display their diverse range of artworks and designs.
Alumna Kat Thompson (BFA Photography, '15), is an interdisciplinary Afro-Jamaican American artist based in Virginia, working in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. In 2020, Thompson had a solo exhibition at George Mason called Katherine Thompson: Raw Material, and in 2021, was awarded a Young Alumni Commissioning Project Award from the university's College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Murals at Mason commissioned School of Art alumna, Lecsi Pillar (class of '22), to design a mural that highlights landmarks and experiences in Fairfax, VA. Greetings from Fairfax, is from the perspective of someone planning a trip to Fairfax City, including a bus and metro card, and polaroid photos of their adventures. Read more and see photos of the mural.
Eighteen years ago, MFA student Traci Reynolds became a felon who today is an artist using her work as a tool to remind people to, “stop and think about the lives of women who are behind bars.” Her story was covered in The Washington Post, by Olivia McCormack. Her work, Weep Sister Sing (above), was on display at the Art and Design building until June of 2023. Reynolds molded 1,256 faces. Each face represents about 138 incarcerated individuals.
Andi Benge - Alumna
Alumna Andi Benge ('21) is a graduate of the MFA in Visual Arts program. She works in many different media including painting, drawing, mixed media, installation work, augmented reality and is also a multi-International award-winning filmmaker having had her work screened at over 20 film festivals around the world. She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of 3D Animation at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
At the south entrance of Manassas Mall you will find alumna Emma Dardis's mural, #OurManassas, 2022, inspired by specific memories that either she experienced or others have shared with her in the nearby town of Manassas, VA.
This mural at the Corner Pocket lounge was designed and painted by illustration major, Alecsis (Lecsi) Pillar, during the winter break before her final semester in Spring of 2022. The mural captures the various games they have available at the student recreation area. To play off the Corner Pocket’s name, Pillar said she had long envisioned a girl looking over her shoulder and the “energy,” or bright arcade vibes, of the space coming out of the corner of the girl’s back pocket. See more photos of the mural in progress.
Sisc Johnson - Alumna
Image: Resilience, by Sisc Johnson. Collage of 201 digital and 35mm photographs printed on matte paper.
Sisc Johnson's work has been shown nationally with several pieces of her work winning first place in competitions. She won a scholarship to study at The Humid, was awarded a $5k OSCAR grant, and developed a program where she teaches photography every summer to youth housed with Fairfax Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. She has performed at the Hirshhorn Museum and selected as one of the Seven Women of Mason. She graduated from George Mason University magna cum laude (BFA, Photography) and was selected to be a featured graduate for George Mason. Learn more about Sisc Johnson and her work.
See Sisc talk about her journey at George Mason.
Chen Bi - Student
We Crawl with Four Paws was an in-progress (through September, 2023) mural project featuring the work of Chen Bi, a current MFA student in George Mason’s School of Art and Graduate Assistant for Fenwick Gallery.
Learn more about Chen Bi's Mural
In November 2022, Ashby was commissioned to create life-size portraits of George Mason IV and other people who lived at his home at Gunston Hall, including some of the people held in slavery there.
Brianna Camp graduated in 2023 with a BFA in Painting. Her senior art project painting called Wash Over (above) was well-known at the School of Art building not just for the talent involved but for the sheer size. Her large self-portrait measured 12ft x 6ft and could be seen outside from within the School of Art building.
College Hall Mural
Murals at Mason was commissioned by the College of Visual and Performing Arts to design and paint a mural that captures academic concentrations offered by the College. This mural was designed by Raquel Bumgarner (Class of 2022) and painted by a number of volunteers (see below). A big thank you went out to Dean Rick Davis for asking these young artists to paint such a large mural in the hallway of CVPA’s Development Offices. Dean Davis was even seen lending a hand (see second image below) with the painting! See more photos of the mural being painted.
Steven Luu approaches traumas of war and violence through a means of personal healing of the psyche and a reflection on his physical healing. Luu works with fellow survivors of trauma to create art as a means of therapy to combat the damage done to his psyche through traumatic experiences. Former works from Luu have been made with materials from his role as a combat medic. Reinventing My Narrative, showcased in this exhibition, has been made with recycled medications and medical paperwork that Lu relies on as a result of physical and mental trauma.
Lecsi Pillar - Alumna
Two of the 'Ideal of Community' murals by Lecsi Pillar inside the SUB1 building on campus.
See the opening of the exhibition:
In May 2021, alumnus, Jeremy Kunkel, was featured in an article by The Washington Post's John Kelly about Jeremy's series of sculptures called Arm, in Case that he started in 2015 and finished in May of 2021, with his latest installation. The sculpture project includes 10 sculptures positioned on concrete slabs on the Maryland side of the Potomac River.
In 2019, photographer Valerie McKenna, BFA Art and Visual Technology ’18, was one of the three inaugural winners of the Young Alumni Commissioning Project Award. Young George Mason alumni were invited to submit proposals, across all artistic genres, for an award to support the creation of a new work. McKenna's project, Albright, was a continuation of her senior thesis, in which she used polluted water from the Cheat Watershed to develop photographs she took there, instead of typical distilled water. The film that captured her landscapes were exposed directly to the elements, such as the dirt, that make up the landscape which she was photographing.
Header image: Dragonstooth Cove, by Mason student Aidan Jones, 2024, BFA, Art and Visual Design, Drawing