LOS ANGELES — Few art schools are more rooted in Los Angeles history than Otis College of Art and Design. Founder Harrison Gray Otis, a conservative politician and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, bequeathed Otis’s original campus — his own Wilshire Boulevard home — to the City of Los Angeles after his passing in 1916 for “the advancement of the arts” in the area. Its broad, civic-minded approach is still prevalent in its students today: Across 13 solo thesis exhibitions on view this winter and spring, Otis’s most recent graduating class takes up its founder’s creed, rendering the city — its structures, landscapes, art, and people — anew.
Institutions often adhere to specific visual codes, referencing artistic legacies in order to establish power through storied conventions. At Otis, recent graduate students intervene in these assertions of authority. Manny Valdez’s exhibition coheres around the fictional school superintendent campaign of “Bronze Brownman,” a mustachioed figure — perhaps the artist themself — who appears across a series of fabricated promotional materials, from screenprint campaign flyers to seated black-and-white portraits in large, gilded frames. Kader Amkpa’s exhibition, Cartographies of Conflict, similarly subverts visual tools — in this case, maps — that can both provide information to large populations and exercise control over them. In “From Redcoats to Redlining” (2025), a 20th-century Hagstrom’s map of the Bronx is overlaid with previously redlined blocks and subdivisions — a now-illegal cartographic technique that has become shorthand for structural inequality in the United States. Amkpa interrupts these problematic geographies with more hopeful images: A painted bluebird soars over “From Redcoats to Redlining,” and a pair of colorful hummingbirds gather on a branch above a parchment sheet marked “British Empires of the World” in “Empires Crumble” (2025).
LA’s natural world infuses much of the artwork on view, depicting collisions between local environments and artistic interventions. Jazmine Hernandez Sanchez’s large-scale, mixed-media “Overpriced Sketchpad” (2025) features a photograph of a street sign’s previously blank reverse side, now covered in a collage of stickers and graffiti; the photograph itself is in turn scrawled on by members of the artist’s community. Common urban refuse forms the basis of Tia Xia’s “Between Roots and Wings” (2025), in which black rubber gloves rest atop thin wire extending from rocks placed along the floor. The stuffed latex resembles flying birds, their rubbery fingers like crows’ wings. The line between manmade and natural blurs further in Priscilla Mondo’s floor-mounted sculpture, “Unidentified #VII” (2024–25), which looks, at first glance, like a gravity-defying tree trunk, spiraling toward the gallery’s ceiling. Then Mondo’s materials reveal themselves: Papier-mâché forms the sculpture’s armature, and a thin, silvery mesh is laced over its exterior.
Familiar landscapes slant grotesque and comedic in Jessica Wilcox and Alexandria Lee Bevilacqua’s exhibitions, both of which center scenes along California’s periphery. In Wilcox’s exhibition, THIRSTY, the artist captures the darkly comic, gendered dynamics of a suburban golf course, morphing its structures and figures into surreal satire. In her sculpture, “Here, Let Me Show You” (2025), painted plastic planters form an oversized thermos, the top of which is a small putting green where a blocky male figure teaches a woman to play golf, his body subsuming hers in cartoonish hyperbole. These darkly comic scenes become transcendent in Bevilacqua’s captivating, psychedelic paintings, which stage examinations of femininity against chaotic backdrops of desert casinos. In “Eye in the Sky but No Eyes on the Sky” (2024), a female figure straddles an oblong craps table that, seemingly, has become a small pond surrounded by cacti — defying a security camera that appears alongside a bright chandelier at the canvas’s upper edge.
This art feels like the West: It is laden with bougainvillea, deeply troubled, and at least a little bit funny. Over a century after Harrison Gray Otis donated the college’s first building, Otis’s MFA graduates display the breadth of LA’s institutional art ecosystem today, offering a range of approaches to making art this side of the Mississippi. The resulting shows feel equally experimental and skilled, introducing 13 new artists into the city’s fold — just like its founder planned.
Otis College of Art and Design 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibitions continues at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard, Los Angeles, through April 24. The exhibitions were organized by the artists and the institution.