There’s no art without an audience, so we’re all very happy to present CCA’s annual MFA exhibition. This dynamic and diverse show is the fulfillment of two very intensive years of study by our graduate designers, writers, artists, and curators. I’m especially pleased this year to include our very first class of graduating Curatorial Practice students. At CCA, we aim to develop students who will become leaders in their fields. So this exhibition is a particularly exciting event. If we have done our job, the slice of culture you see here will prove to be not just a snapshot of the zeitgeist but a harbinger of great things to come.

     California College of the Arts’s graduate programs provide emerging artists, writers, and designers an extraordinary opportunity to stand back from their respective practices in order to critically reexamine and reevaluate their motivations and intentions. Central to this process is an individual’s desire to locate his or her concerns (and experiences) within the larger framework of a community of engaged thinkers and makers, both within the college and beyond its borders. CCA’s various graduate programs, which embrace art making, writing, criticism, curatorial practice, and design, provide a fertile environment for cross-disciplinary interaction, the fruits of which are evident in this year’s MFA exhibition.

     Over the past two years, our Fine Arts students have worked in an experimental atmosphere in which the studio or classroom functions as a kind of laboratory. They have had the opportunity to engage with the college’s diverse and highly accomplished faculty members as well as with an incredible number of nationally and internationally recognized guest artists and writers. This ongoing and open-ended process has created a dialogue that seeks to amplify and challenge all of our most basic assumptions about the current state of our visual and literary cultures. Being a part of this extraordinary process is both a responsibility and a privilege. We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate CCA’s 2005 Fine Arts graduates for their patience, diligence, good humor, and intelligence. They have made innumerable thought-provoking contributions: we sincerely look forward to seeing their individual careers unfold.

-Lawrence Rinder