Holding Still, Holding On

March 14 – April 21, 2025

A whimsical still life display featuring a variety of objects including a dolphin statue, plush toy, golden plush balls, an angel statue, a silver heart keychain, and a cartoon character-like star, set against a textured blue background adorned with twinkling tinsel. — Photograph by the Carnegie Mellon School of Art MFA Class of 2025

For the first time, The Warhol and Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA Program co-present a joint exhibition.

Holding Still, Holding On launches an exciting new series spotlighting the MFA program from the school where Andy Warhol earned his degree in pictorial design in 1949 (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University).

Holding Still, Holding On features new works by the CMU School of Art MFA Class of 2025—Frankmarlin, Izsys Archer, Tingting Cheng, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, and Max Tristan Watkins. The exhibition spans wide-ranging media and highlights the distinct perspectives of these five artists as they complete their final year of study. Presented in The Warhol’s rotating exhibition gallery, the exhibition offers a dynamic exploration of contemporary artmaking.

The featured artists in Holding Still, Holding On each employ diverse approaches to storytelling, through mediums including photography, painting, archival assemblage, sculptural installations, text, sound, and film. Their works collectively explore the intersections of memory, place, and belonging, together revealing art’s unique capacity to hold and transform complex personal and collective histories.

The Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA Program is an interdisciplinary, experimental, research-based program that provides students with a challenging and supportive context to expand and develop their work and thinking as artists. As one of the top-ranked graduate programs in the country, the school views artmaking as a vital social, critical, and intellectual pursuit. Graduate students are encouraged to employ a comparative and intersectional approach to critical and cultural theories, and to allow this inquiry to inform and expand what it means to be an artist and to make art within the contemporary condition.

Contributing Artists

Izsys Archer

Instagram: @Izsys

Izsys Archer is a self-proclaimed Space Taker-Upper originally from Lafayette, Indiana. She graduated with a BFA in photography from the Kansas City Art Institute. Within her practice, she explores her intrinsic need to create through physical, digital, and ritualistic spaces of the Archive. Perpetual self-portraiture becomes a performance of identity as she interrogates notions of domesticity, memory, and Black iconography to wander on a journey of self-actualization and representation.

Archer was a Durwood Intern, in which she focused on curation and research at H&R Block Artspace in Kansas City, Missouri. She has shown work at Haw Contemporary and co-curated exhibitions at Leedy-Voulkos Arts Center. While in Pittsburgh, Izsys has been a BOOM Universe Resident and currently a part of 1Hood Media’s Artivist Academy Cohort.

Tingting Chen

Website: tingtingcheng.com
Instagram: @Tingting_Cut

Tingting Cheng is a cross-media artist whose oeuvre is deeply informed by the ritualistic traditions of the Chu state and the cultural hybridity shaped by globalization. Working across diverse media, she mobilizes cultural archives as forms of “contemporary witchcraft,” integrating natural, synthetic, and vernacular materials to cultivate ritualistic engagement with audiences while subverting commodification.

In her exploration of appropriation and the semiotics of advertising, Cheng incorporates elements such as detritus, propaganda imagery, anime, and conspiracy discourses to scrutinize mechanisms of influence and dissemination. By synthesizing poetic and political dimensions, Cheng critiques consumerist ideologies, explores relational poetics, and engages with techno-animism. Cheng received her BFA from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, where she was honored with the K11 Emerging Artist Jury’s Special Recommendation Award in 2021. Her work has also been supported by The Sylvia and David Steiner Film Fund in Carnegie Mellon University.

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza

Website: chantalfeitosa.com
Instagram: @ChantalFeitosa

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza is a Brazilian United Statesian from Queens, New York. She is a filmmaker, a learner, and a facilitator of workshops and public events beyond the traditional classroom setting. Her practice is guided by the visual process of collage and its potential to create new histories from found fragments. Her work is always proposing slower methods of thinking, remembering, and storytelling for an audience.

Chantal received her BFA in film/animation/video from Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in literary arts & studies in 2018. Her work has screened at locations including Bodega Film Festival, Harlem International Film Festival, Vidlings & Tapeheads, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. She was an artist in residence at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Residency Unlimited, and Smack Mellon.

Frankmarlin

Website: frankmarlinsantos.com
Instagram: @Frankmartian

In his practice, Frankmarlin takes a look into the invisible, sees beyond what is presented and asks questions he doesn’t know the answers to. With a sense of urgency, his works explore themes of erasure, lineage, surveillance, healing, and the beauty of mundane Black experiences.

Frankmarlin, graduated with a BFA in studio arts from Kutztown University in 2020. Throughout his life, he’s made messes, spoke when spoken to, and danced to bring his family joy in moments of sorrow.

Max Tristan Watkins

Website: maxtristanwatkins.cargo.site
Instagram: @MaxTristanWatkins

Max Tristan Watkins is an artist and writer born in Canterbury in the UK. His practice draws from various historical tools of control and their absurdities. Currently, he is interested in the European early-modern book as an information technology. With a literary sensibility that favors quotation, citation, trope, and idiom, he takes pleasure in following rabbit holes and constructing webs of footnotes. At the center of his work is the precise absence of something unarticulated, gestured towards and acted out in miniature, euphemism, or parable. His prints, paintings, and books often toy with ideas of the body double, the facsimile, or the absent original. A subject he returns to often is the disjointed, open(ed) or chimeric body – and its misrepresentations in taxonomies, anatomies, and histories.

Max received his BFA from the University of Oxford, where he was a Waugh Scholar, Stuart Morgan Prize winner, and Gibbs prize winner. His work has been supported by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan Research Fellowship. He is a current Tomayko Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and will be the recipient of a Maker-Creator Fellowship at Winterthur Museum in 2025.

About the School of Art

The Carnegie Mellon School of Art is the premier location for the interface between art, technology, and interdisciplinary art practice. Combining the advantages of a renowned studio program with the resources of a top-tier university, the School offers two fine arts degrees, the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts, and supports three interdisciplinary degrees known collectively as the BXA Intercollege Degree Programs.

Connect with us on Instagram at @cmuschoolofart or visit us at art.cmu.edu for more information.

About Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 13,000 students in the university’s seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.