Friend of a Friend @ Minnesota Street Project
Anna-Isabelle Bruey-Sedano, Ana Díaz Korin, Arielle Harvey, Brennan Lynch, Camila Michaliszyn, Kamyar Mohsenin, Lara Rabinowitz, Leyla Rzayeva, Gabby Severson and Ethan Wright
Friend of a Friend, is a group exhibition featuring works by current MFA candidates from California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. On view from. The exhibition is supported by each program’s faculty and student communities and organized by MFA Candidates from each program, Alex Ehmer and Mary Lou Grace Robison. The exhibition highlights the diverse and vibrant work of emerging artists and aims to foster stronger institutional connections between the two remaining arts programs in San Francisco.
Despite the changing arts ecosystem of the Bay Area, MFA programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University continue to cultivate diverse,rigorous, and committed artists. Through ceramics, painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition highlights the work of artists responding to contemporary conditions while exploring alternative ways of being. Each artist’s practice is developed with care, intention, and a commitment to the future of contemporary art.
CCA Program Overview + Artists
California College of the Arts Master of Fine Arts Program supports an approach to art making that is self-critical and engaged, understanding art as a form of knowledge production and exchange. The program values diverse perspectives, lived experiences, and methodologies as essential to an engaged artistic community.
Ana Díaz Korin’s practice uses inversion and repetition, including collaged caution tape, to transform tools of warning into ambiguous gestures of refusal. Her work considers how language breaks down under pressure, emerging from a sense of political disempowerment within ongoing institutional instability.
Arielle Harvey explores memory through paintings of empty interiors, disembodied objects, and fragmented archival materials. By enlarging these traces, she examines loss and the persistence of memory, staging domestic spaces as emotional environments shaped by absence and inheritance.
Gabby Severson combines photography, digital mapping, and beadwork to explore her Indigenous Siletz identity. She translates pixelated phone images into beaded works, using the process to reflect on how cultural knowledge is transmitted, altered, and remembered across generations.
Lara Rabinowitz works with weaving, sewing, and constructed textile forms informed by family history and chronic pain. Her work explores material, labor, and embodiment, creating forms that move between object and presence, often existing in states of ambiguity.
Kamyar Mohsenin’s practice is a site of cultural reclamation and self-exploration, engaging inherited memory through multiple media. His work explores vessels, stories, and objects as carriers of subjective memory and spiritual experience.
SFSU Program Overview + Artists
San Francisco State University Master of Fine Arts Program is designed to foster an interdisciplinary, contemporary, and personal art practice based in current critical and theoretical thinking. The program emphasizes equity and supports a diverse student body, including many first-generation college students.
Anna-Isabelle Gabriel Bruey-Sedano examines stability through industrial materials such as steel, aluminum, and ceramics. Her sculptures rework familiar domestic forms to reveal how systems of labor, migration, and design shape bodily experience and belonging.
Brennan Lynch observes environments and human behavior through ceramics and drawing. His work translates patterns of movement and perception into slow, intentional processes that balance repetition, play, and reflection.
Camila Michaliszyn’s practice explores the relationship between humans, nature, and material systems through sculpture and installation. Her work considers transformation, interdependence, and classification through processes of walking, collecting, and
reassembly.
Leyla Rzayeva draws on theatrical production to explore spectatorship and the internal gaze. Through installation, photography, and sculpture, she stages environments that examine visibility, fragmentation, and processes of self-construction.
Ethan Wright reflects on Blackness, class, and institutional experience through clay and sculpture. Drawing from cartoon aesthetics, his work balances humor, care, and critique while addressing systemic harm and fractured innocence.