FAKE NEWS: VCUarts 2020 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition

undergrad juried exhibition poster

The Anderson (VCUarts), is pleased to present Fake News, the 2020 VCUarts Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, juried by Anna Katz, Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition will be on view Nov. 6–21, 2020.

Fake News opens with a physically distanced reception on Friday, Nov. 6, 5:00–8:00PM at the Anderson, VCUarts, Richmond, VA. The reception will be preceded by a public Zoom lecture and Juror Awards ceremony at 3:30PM, during which Katz will discuss her practice as a curator and announce her selections for this year’s Juror Awards.

Juror Award Recipients

Best in Show, Dean’s Award: Marisa Stratton (Communication Arts)

Awards of Distinction: Ian Donegan (Kinetic Imaging), Raeann Love (Photo + Film), Lindsey Mechuta (Craft/Material Studies), Eileen Morley (Art Foundation Program), Amuri Morris (Painting & Printmaking), Isabelle Roque (Communication Arts), and Samuel Schneider (Sculpture).

Physically Distanced Opening

We welcome the students along with their friends, family, and departmental cohorts to attend the opening event on Friday, Nov. 6, 5:00–8:00PM at the Anderson, VCUarts, Richmond, VA. Visitors must wear appropriate face coverings and observe physical distancing measures. Registration is not required, but building occupancy is limited to 20 people at a time. If the building is at capacity when you arrive, you may be asked to wait outside for a few minutes while we cycle visitors through the exhibition. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we try to provide a safe viewing environment for all our guests! 

Fake News

Organized around Katz’s timely provocation (see “The Call” below), Fake News is a far-reaching and multifaceted exploration of states, modes and the consequences of mis- and disinformation. Featuring 37 artists representing 9 VCUarts departments and an incredible plurality of media and practices, Fake News offers both playful and poignant answers to its founding question: “In the so-called “post-truth world” that we now occupy… what is, or ought to be, art’s relationship to reality, illusion, and fact?”

The Call

Much of the art of the recent past has taken up postmodernism’s critique of metanarratives, offering instead multiple histories and herstories and contending that “truth” is a construction contingent on cultural meaning and subjective experience. In the so-called “post-truth world” that we now occupy, we are compelled to ask what is, or ought to be, art’s relationship to reality, illusion, and fact? Does art have the capacity, or even the responsibility, to burst filter bubbles in an effort to regain a sense of shared reality? What can art help us understand about the reasons that objective facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion, while appeals to emotion and personal belief have become more influential? This call invites the submission of artwork that addresses questions of medium, such as photography’s status as a documentary medium; engages modalities such as parody, satire, fantasy, futurism, and science fiction; takes seriously the phenomena of “truth decay,” “alternative facts,” and the rise of social media and its bots, trolls, climate change deniers, and holocaust revisionists; considers the complexities of identity, such as the fiction of “race” as a biological category and the non-fiction realities of systemic racism; evaluates the relationship of reason and emotion, the weight of feelings, the value of perceptions, and the significance of subjective experience; pursues fields of inquiry including current events, public opinion, the archive; deals in trompe l’oeil and illusionism; and/or participates in the longstanding notion of the artist as trickster, among many other possible topics of artmaking in the age of “fake news.”

Juror Bio

Anna Katz is Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where she is currently organizing the first West Coast survey of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. Recent exhibitions at MOCA include With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first full-scale, scholarly survey of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which travels to the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in 2021; Give and Take: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions (2018); and Peter Shire: Naked Is the Best Disguise (2017). From 2015 to 2017 Katz was the Wendy Stark Curatorial Fellow at MOCA, during which time she organized the museum’s public programs. Previously a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2008 to 2013, she holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her doctoral dissertation is the first book-length study of sculptor Lee Bontecou’s oeuvre during the most active period of her production, 1958 to 1971. Katz has taught art history courses at UCLA, Pratt Institute, Occidental College, and Pomona College

Participating Artists

Adam Goodman, Adam José Santiago, Alexandra Mihalski, Alexis DeJesus, Amuri Morris, Arrington Peterson, Baotran Vo, Cecilia Ford, Chloe Posthuma-Coelho, Colleen Topping, Cynthia Orenday, David Ignacio, Dylan Krinberg, Eileen Morley, Ellyx Martinez, Eric Couture, Harris Erickson, Hazel Zarzycki, Hee Yoo, Ian Donegan, Isabelle Roque, Jack Fox, Jack Lwin, Jillian Altstatt, Kayleigh MacDonald, Kristen Rankin, Kristen Wheatley, Lindsey Mechuta, Madeline De Michele, Marisa Stratton, Mark Nathan Hosmer, Mattie Hinkley, Niki Jiang, Raeann Love, Samuel Schneider, Surya Punjabi, and Syd Lewin.

Gallery Hours & Location

Tuesday–Friday 12–6pm & Saturday 12–5pm

The Anderson is located at 907 1/2 W. Franklin St., Richmond, VA 23284, on Virginia Commonwealth University’s Monroe Park Campus. On-street, metered parking is available.

Poster designed by Lihua Yu.