Second-Year Students
From the ground we walk on to the water embedded in the air we breathe to the shadows that cling to our feet, the work of Häsler Gómez (b. Guatemala City, Guatemala) is steeped in issues of desire, labor, and visibility. By building entangled systems of unseen performance, sound, light, architectural intervention, and objects, he creates speculative spaces and encounters rooted in the inherent realities of materials, objects, spaces, and bodies. Through strategies that reorient and disorient industrial and domestic materials, objects, and processes embedded within our bodies, he aims to coax out and all but exhaust the limits of their poetic and aesthetic potential.
Through a sculptural practice rooted in material experimentation, Hannah Rotwein makes objects that challenge hierarchies of value and posit new possibilities for interrelation. Using both found fragments and readily available materials, she explores potential relationships between objects based on their functional and aesthetic properties rather than their prescribed uses. Rotwein has held residencies at Cel del Nord (Oristà, Spain) and Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas) and has exhibited her work at the Visual Arts Center (Austin), the Museum of Texas Tech University (Lubbock), The MAC (Dallas), and the Material Room (Richmond). Rotwein earned her BFA in Studio Art and BA in History and Plan II Honors from the University of Texas at Austin and was a 2018 participant in Land Arts of the American West.
Tyna Ontko is a sculptor and aspiring writer based in Richmond, VA. Working across woodcarving, object assemblage, photography, and sound, they consider sculpture as a form of sorting, where space is divided into myriad forms-- as blueprints, tools, dreams, or lived experiences. Tyna was recently awarded the Cy Twombly Fellowship through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2024/25), and is currently preparing for a group exhibition with Below Grand Gallery in NYC (May, 2025).
Anne Sarachan (b. 1990, Philadelphia) takes form as collage, installation, drawing, public intervention, and video. Sarachan’s practice is an inquiry into the construction of knowledges, tending toward the intimate and the logical. Her image/object re-imaginings are inspired by the right-to-repair movement, the unfinished project of dada, and the lineage of artists pursuing new (or ancient) language. She completed a BFA in Painting at Washington University in St. Louis, with a minor in History, then worked and learned for years out in the “world” before returning to school.
Through a study of and participation in the worlds of design and archaeology August Neuscheler (noy sheh ler) teases out trans-temporal relationships and impulses within the built environment. He believes the past is concurrent with the present and his work explores the implications of this belief. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, attended archaeological field school at Texas Tech University, and is the founder of the Richmond-based design company Mound.
First-Year Students
Frances Adair Mckenzie is a sculptor and animator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Quebec and Richmond, Virginia. Adair’s research into sculpture, digital materiality and its conceptual realms is expanded through rigorous studio practice and constant exploration of new technology and tools. Leading to questions regarding stability of identity, production and consumption of desire and the surface tension between digital interfaces and architectural space. Frances has had solo exhibitions at the Fonderie Darling and Centre Clark in Montreal and at Towards Gallery in Toronto. Two animations and a stop-motion virtual reality piece have been produced by the National Film Board. Her VR piece won a Canadian screen award for best immersive fiction. She was also long-listed in Quebec for the 2024 National Art Gallery of Canada’s Sobey Award.
Alexis Torres Marroquín is a Salvadoran-American artist, architectural designer, and educator based in Richmond, Virginia. Alexis’ mediums include soft sculpture, fiber art, installation, and mixed-media collage. Alexis is a 2025-2026 Visual Arts Fellow at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. They hold a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and are currently pursuing their Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Alexis is a former educator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, and is currently assistant teaching in the Art Foundations department at VCU Arts.
Erin Ehren (she/themme) is a first year MFA student in Sculpture and Extended Media at VCU. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and she completed significant coursework at the Jewish Theological Seminary of American and Hebrew Union College. Ehren’s sculptural practice is an act of yearning for material honesty and dissonance—a unification of surface that abstracts the concrete into an orientation toward the unknowable Sublime, the Divine. Her work has been shown widely across the US and internationally. She has participated in residencies including the Vermont Studio Center and is the recent recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Graduate Fellowship.
