Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition 

Re: Turning

Curated by Prem Krishnamurthy

March 30th – April 19th, 2025

Opening: Sunday March 30th, 5-8pm

Curator walk through: Friday April 4th, 5pm.

Dear dear Kevin Eubanks, 

How are you? We met years ago after a show of yours in NYC. More recently, while curating the Parsons Fine Arts 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition, I’ve returned to listening to your 1992 song “Turning Point.” It still leaves my heart pounding—calculated at times and unforeseeable at others. The melody, folding back upon itself at the song’s close, time rewinding for a moment before launching forward again… 

Working on this MFA show, I’ve recognized your singular song as an apt model for the restless, wide-ranging creative path. Our cohort of emerging artists—Andrew Samuel Harrison, Danielle Sargeant, Faith Henderson, Felisa Nguyen, Guangyuan (Sam) Xing, Hannah Bang, Jinghui Chen, Qasim Ali Hussain, Shangari Mwashighadi, Sona Lee, Spencer Strauss, Sumaiya Saiyed, Teresa Olds, and Yeabsera Tabb—are right in the thick of it, exploring the cyclical transformations of artistic practice together. 

Re: Turning lives and breathes in this uncertain space between past and future, repetition and reinvention. The artworks exist in flux: even when they appear still, they mirror acts of turning. Think of re-turning—to past ideas, to unresolved gestures, to critical influences, to the moments when meaning bends and reshapes itself. 

Across fourteen distinctly different artistic approaches, common connections arise: between memories and materials, movements and multiplicities. Like time, artistic practice rarely moves in a straight line. It doubles back, speeds up, lags, changes its mind, swerves. Are these repetitions an undoing or a deepening? Is a turn breaking from the past or cycling back towards it? What does it mean to return even while arriving at an unfamiliar destination?  Will (re)turns that appear today as accidents reveal themselves later as necessary steps? 

I don’t have the answers, Kevin. But I hope that, like your brilliant, timely tune, Re: Turning keeps pointing towards somewhere else. As a dear friend often reminds me, life and art are “never straight, always forward.” I’m looking forward to what’s yet ahead. 

Warmest,
P! Krishnamurthy
New York, March 2025

Sheila Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York, NY 10011

Opening hours: 10am – 8pm

P! Krishnamurthy explores how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities, and institutions. He currently runs Department of Transformation, an artist-organized group that prototypes new modes of togetherness, learning, and collective healing. He received the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015, and Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies acquired his professional papers in 2019. In addition to directing design studios, establishing art institutions, organizing large-scale exhibitions, and teaching widely, he has also authored several books. These include P!DF (O-R-G, 2017–2020), On Letters (Domain, 2022), and Past Words (König, 2024), an anthology of his writing and experimental curatorial projects. He served as artistic director of FRONT International 2022: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01, Sharjah, UAE (2018). Previously, he founded the design practices Wkshps (2018–), Project Projects (2004–2017), and the exhibition space P! (2012–2017) in New York. 

Parsons Fine Arts MFA is a two-year, cross-disciplinary program led by an internationally accomplished faculty committed to expanding the formal, intellectual and conceptual dimensions of emerging artists’ work. Embracing interdisciplinary approaches to making and thinking about visual culture, the program promotes global understanding of the arts through one-on-one studio visits, group critiques, critical theory seminars, studio electives, writing/research, professional training seminars, and interactions with an array of visiting artists and curators. This year visitors included Morgan Bassichis, Gregg Bordowitz, Patty Chang, Jordan Ann Craig, Joy Episalla, Emily Jacir, Emily Johnson, Hannah Levy, Helina Metaferia, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tuesday Smilie, Alexandria Smith, Anna Martine Whitehead, Constantina Zavitsanos. In 2024, QS World University Rankings, a London-based higher education organization, named Parsons as the number one college for art and design in the US and number three worldwide.

For more information about Parsons Fine Arts MFA program, visit our website / Facebook / Instagram or contact the MFA Director Soyoung Yoon, soyoung.yoon@newschool.edu