About the Exhibition

This exhibition gives a glimpse into the studio practices and processes of the four graduating Studio Art majors: Kirstin Elliott, Ava Robitaille, and Olivia Arslanian, painters, and Alex Stepanov, a ceramist.For their thesis exhibition, the capstone project for their major, they spend the year in their own studio space on campus, creating a body of work to be displayed in the Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery from April 22 through July 31, 2026. This exhibition includes artworks and materials from behind the scenes that viewers don’t typically see, such as small-scale painting studies, sketchbook pages, scraps of palette paper and reference material.

Direct from the Source explores the visual thought process of the artists and shares the beauty of the ever-changing studio environment. Oftentimes, the final body of work shown is a small portion of the making they do daily.This collection of work features remnants from their creative process, demonstrating the many iterations of work each artist creates along the way.

The year started with experimentation within their Senior Seminar in Studio Art class exploring a variety of subject matter, scale, and modes of working within their concentrations. These early stages of experimentation set the direction for their thesis exhibition.

Exploratory projects include 100 30-second drawings, a series of miniature paintings and sculptures, collage work translated into painting or sculpture, and a monochromatic book made using a Xerox machine. Each project reveals a different dimension of the artists’ process and concepts.