CFA’s Spring 2025 Highlights
CFA's vibrant spring semester featured memorable performances, exhibitions, productions, and events engaging the BU community and beyond
The CFA Color Garden, adjacent to the CFA building at 855 Commonwealth Ave., is a new on-campus color garden that allows student-artists to sustainably grow their own pigments, dyes, and fibers.
In Full Bloom: Spring 2025 at CFA
CFA’s vibrant spring semester featured memorable performances, exhibitions, productions, and events engaging the BU community and beyond!
Stages, studios, and spotlights
Another semester in the books for Boston University College of Fine Arts! Join us as we celebrate the artistic excellence of CFA’s Spring 2025 semester. Music students took the stage at renowned music venues in Boston and New York City, visual arts students set up an exhibition in response to an inspiring show honoring the legacy of a remarkable artist and BU faculty member, theatre students dove into the world of repertory for two mainstage productions running back to back, and CFA’s Schools and Units hosted events that evoked meaningful conversations and brought communities together. What a season! Let’s jump in.
PROUD TO BU
We’re kicking off our spring highlights with a major achievement by one of our dearest faculty members. Renowned printmaker Lynne Allen, CFA professor of art, printmaking, and chair of BU’s MFA print media and photography program, was awarded the honor of a Guggenheim Fellowship, along with five other BU researchers and scholars.
Allen’s work has been shown in some of the world’s premier galleries and museums, from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Allen, who uses a variety of media and techniques in her work, plans to use her Guggenheim Fellowship to expand her use of textiles and step into new realms, including native quill and beadwork.
“These are practices I’ve long been interested in but haven’t had the time or resources to pursue fully,” says Allen, a winner of two Fulbright scholarships. “With the freedom to travel and dedicate focused time to this exploration, I can finally bring those visions to life.”
See the list of bu Guggenheim fellows
Our community of student artists was truly supported this past BU Giving Day. On Wednesday, April 9, CFA surpassed its goal of 250 donors by more than 100 donors! CFA expresses sincere gratitude to CFA alum and Dean’s Advisory Board member, Jason Alexander (CFA’81, Hon.’95), who was this year’s Challenge Sponsor. Thanks to actor, director, and podcaster Alexander, known for his role as George Costanza in Seinfeld, CFA unlocked an additional $20,000 in bonus funds. CFA held a Pizza with Dean Harvey Young event where students had the chance to learn about why philanthropy matters at a place like BU.
watch an inspirational video from jason alexander about cfa
Speaking of alums… a new issue of CFA Magazine came out this semester!
The issue featured stories about CFA’s new sustainable pigment and dye garden; David Hoffman (CFA’99) and how he’s found success as a commercial actor, portraying Liberty Mutual’s Doug, alongside his Emu in an ad campaign with the catchiest jingle of all time; costume designer Esther Marquis (CFA’91,’92) making sci-fi space travel look realistic on TV and also for actual astronauts; and more alums!
EXPERIENCE THE BRILLIANCE ON STAGE
Each year, BU School of Music produces hundreds of concerts and recitals, from student recitals to faculty spotlights. They also host two major concerts in world-renowned venues where legends and top-tier musical groups perform.
This March, the winners of BU School of Music’s annual Carnegie Hall competition showcased their talents through the infinite variety of short works for soloist and piano accompaniment by the world’s great composers at New York City’s Carnegie Hall (Weill Recital Hall) for the 2025 BU Spotlight Concert.
The BU musicians—Ana Díaz Asencio (CFA’27), Catherine Butler (CFA’23,’27), Yun-Chen Chou (CFA’27), Lily Uijin Gwak (CFA’27), Kyunga Lee (CFA’27), Erin Matthews (CFA’27), Ethan McGrath (CFA’27), Alexandru Prigalo (CFA’21,’26), and Libang Wang (CFA’26)—were selected through a rigorous multi-stage competition held in the fall of 2024, involving preliminary auditions within each applied department within BU School of Music—Voice, Piano, Strings, Woodwinds, Brass, and Percussion. Finalists then competed before a panel of esteemed external adjudicators, culminating in the selection of performers and program under the curatorship of the School of Music’s director.
see HIGHLIGHTS OF THE BU SPOTLIGHT CONCERT
Also this spring, the BU Symphony Orchestra, Wind Ensemble, and Symphonic Chorus proudly represented BU at Boston’s historic Symphony Hall, performing on the same stage as the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
BU Symphony Orchestra & BU Symphonic Chorus, led by conductor Daniel Parsley, performed Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, featuring countertenor Sergio Raúl Savala (CFA’26). BU Wind Ensemble, led by conductor Kenneth Amis (CFA’91, BUTI’86,’87) performed Arnold Rosner’s Symphony No. 8, Op. 84, Trinity. And BU Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Sarah Ioannides, performed Richard Strauss’ Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59 and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 (with BU Symphonic Chorus).
see more of the 2025 bu concert at symphony hall
IMMERSE YOURSELF IN A NEW WORLD
BU School of Theatre’s 2024-2025 production season was an impressive one! This spring, senior acting majors presented their thesis presentations, sophomore students became familiar with the rehearsal process and an actor’s creative practice through the School’s Sophomore Festival, and 10+ shows ran during the season.
This spring’s mainstage productions at BU’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre were Florencia en el Amazonas, a co-production with BU Opera Institute; DESDEMONA, a play about a handkerchief; and Emilia.
The opera Florencia en el Amazonas took the audience on a boat ride through the Amazon, following the journey of the legendary diva Florencia Grimaldi and her fellow passengers. As they travel through the magical rainforest toward their destination, the opera house in Manaus, each passenger harbors a secret hope of what the trip will bring.
Empowering explorations of womanhood and amplifying historically marginalized voices from the Renaissance were the main themes of BU School of Theatre’s productions of DESDEMONA, a play about a handkerchief, and Emilia, which ran in conversation with each other, mirroring somewhat of repertory theatre.
Paula Vogel’s DESDEMONA brings a whole new attitude to the wife of Shakespeare’s Othello. Malcolm’s Emilia focuses on Emilia Bassano, a female poet and contemporary of Shakespeare who may have been the “Dark Lady” of his sonnets, yet has been largely overlooked by history. There’s even a character named Emilia in Othello; she also appears in DESDEMONA.
Both shows had an all-female cast, with DESDEMONA having a cast of 3 and taking place over the course of one day in one location; whereas Emilia had a cast of 13 and took place over many years in multiple locations. The productions shared certain aspects like having the same set and lighting design teams.
DESDEMONA
EMILIA
The word of the month at CFA?
DESDEMILIA
It’s a portmanteau combining the titles DESDEMONA a play about a handkerchief, and Emilia, BU School of Theatre’s spring productions at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. The two plays are linked by connections to Shakespeare and an exploration of women’s roles—and they even share a set.
HONORING A LEGACY
The soul of John Wilson’s work is an insistence that Black people be fully seen in all their humanity. Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest-ever exhibition of work by the late painter, sculptor, and educator, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through June 22, before it travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Co-organized by the MFA and the Met, the exhibition in the MFA comprises about 110 works, including drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and illustrated books, most pointing to Wilson’s continued artistic exploration of Black lives.
At its center is a scaled-down bronze maquette (or model) for his monumental sculpture Eternal Presence, a revered landmark, installed in 1987, on the grounds of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in Roxbury, Mass., where Wilson grew up. Known as the Big Head to local residents, the piece radiates dignity and beauty. Though the maquette is located near the end of Witnessing Humanity, a large cutout in a wall frames the piece for visitors as soon as they enter the exhibition.
Accompanying the show on its run at the MFA are two projects by groups of students from BU School of Visual Arts, where Wilson was a distinguished member of the School’s faculty from 1964 through 1986. A dozen BU visual narrative students produced a comic book in which each responds artistically to Wilson’s work. Created to be handed out at the exhibition, the comic is already in its third printing.
Students in SVA’s current first-year drawing classes were invited to visit the MFA Boston to experience Wilson’s work firsthand. His prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and illustrated books are largely figurative and call attention to racial, social, and economic injustice — themes that remain powerfully relevant today. In response, students created their own works to display in CFA’s Commonwealth Gallery.
Foundation Drawing: The Legacy of John Wilson, was on view in CFA’s Commonwealth Gallery from March 17 through April 18. Wilson primarily taught undergraduate foundation drawing, which remains an essential part of SVA’s curriculum and is required for all first-year students.
The way that Wilson’s work speaks to issues of identity is incredibly important. In the contemporary context of the art world, we see a lot of artists who use figuration as a way to give representation to people of different backgrounds and identities who have not necessarily seen images of themselves in museums and galleries before.
read more on wilson’s impact in bu today
THE ART OF WELLNESS
Last fall, Igor Iwanek (CFA’15), lecturer in music and music theory at BU, launched Breath, Rhythm & Music for Your Wellbeing, a workshop for members of the BU community. At each session, Iwanek and live musicians lead 15 to 20 people through Rhythmic Breath Control (RBC). The practice involves using the rhythms of North Indian classical music to guide your breath. The goal is to improve cognitive performance, overcome consuming thoughts, and recreate the relaxation of deep sleep.
The workshop is sponsored by Student Wellbeing, CFA, BU Arts Initiative, the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, and the BU Center for the Study of Asia.
learn more about the wellbeing workshops
At the College, the Artist Wellbeing Series continues to thrive, with programming that supports our students’ social, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, financial, physical, and environmental wellbeing.
In March, CFA hosted its fourth annual DIY terrarium-making stress reliever event. There were about 100 succulents and 40 air plants, along with all the tools needed to make a take-home plant display.
EXPLORING LANDSCAPE, PERCEPTION, AND MEANING
In BU Art Galleries‘ Spring 2025 exhibitions, four artists—Michael Zachary, Juan José Barboza-Gubo, Cathy Della Lucia, and Nicholas Anthony Mancini—invited people to explore the intricate relationships between perception, landscape, and meaning in two new exhibitions that challenge our thinking of how we make sense of the world and remind us how nature and art remain a refuge for clarification and reflection.
Trasluz / Translucent brought together the work of Michael Zachary and Juan José Barboza-Gubo, creating immersive environments that blend physical terrain with metaphysical space. In their first exhibition together (and in the city where they studied together), Zachary and Barboza-Gubo explored contemporary circumstances in which nature, technology, and humanity are enmeshed and inseparable.
Zachary and Barboza-Gubo’s decision to ground their exhibition in depictions of the natural world highlights a similarity in inspiration and approach, but each artist freely acknowledges that their technical processes are unique. While Barboza-Gubo works with large-format acrylic paintings/installations that border on the sculptural, Zachary is engaged in a technique-oriented approach that limits his color usage to the CMYK color model—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, as is used in four-color process printing—and combines them in intricate, cross-hatched grids to create verdant green, buttery ivory, and rich copper. Like a post-Impressionist painting for the digital age, his images coalesce more clearly the farther away you stand: a heron, overgrown vines on a fence, a skein of tree branches. The closer viewers get, the more they can understand the work’s assembling parts.
Many of Barboza-Gubo’s works on view are the result of the artist layering bright oil paints within a thick, frosted acrylic medium, which is meant to dissolve the piece’s borders and “allow you to see the interior of the [work].” Unlike with a canvas, light is able penetrate the material he uses, creating a dimensional effect on the paints trapped within.
read bu today feature on trasluz / translucent
BUAG’s other spring exhibition was Constituent Parts: Cathy Della Lucia and Nicholas Anthony Mancini in Dialogue, which was on view at BU’s 808 Gallery from January 23 through March 7. The exhibition, curated by Phillippa Pitts, highlighted a decade-long conversation between Della Lucia (CFA’17) and Mancini (CFA’17), who met as MFA students at Boston University in 2015.
Della Lucia’s modular sculptures—crafted from hand-finished wood, 3D-printed silicone, ceramics, and found objects—invite viewers to assemble meaning through tactile interaction, reflecting her personal journey as a sculptor, athlete, and Korean-American adoptee. Mancini explores perception through a unique process of translating images between print, photography, painting, and video. His series of paintings play with the contradictions of depicting three-dimensional space on a flat surface.
“It’s always exciting to showcase artwork from our former students and faculty,” says Lissa Cramer, Director of BU Art Galleries. “It’s fascinating to see how their practices have evolved over time—what’s changed and what has remained the same. Both Cathy and Nick have taught here [at BU] in the past, and we’re proud to highlight the excellence of our faculty.”
see virtual tour of constituent parts
A SPRING TO REMEMBER FOR WHEELOCK FAMILY THEATRE
This spring at Wheelock Family Theatre, the audience got to enjoy seeing the unexpected friendship between 10-year-old self-proclaimed cynic Flora Belle Buckman and a squirrel named Ulysses who after being sucked into a vacuum cleaner emerges with superpowers in Flora & Ulysses!
A theatrical adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery Award–winning book, Ulysses isn’t the only one who undergoes a metamorphosis. Flora, struggling to find her place in the world following her parents’ recent divorce, emerges stronger and more secure, buoyed by the unexpected friendships she makes after helping Ulysses.
CFA alums involved in WFT’s production of Flora & Ulysses included Danielle DeLaFuente (CFA’22), Scenic Designer; Saskia Martinez (CFA’20), Props Designer/Scenic Charge; Takiyah “Taki” Harris (CFA’24), Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL); Mackenzie Adamick (CFA’24), Composer/Sound Designer; Nia Safarr Banks (CFA’23), Costume Designer; and current student, Justin Lahue (CFA’26), Projections Designer.
learn more about flora & ulysses
At CFA, we’re continuously finding ways to make the arts accessible for all. Wheelock Family Theatre has done that, as one of the most recent organizations to be included in the expansion of Boston Family Days. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s expansion of Boston Family Days gives all school-aged children and families in Boston access to historical sites and world-class performing arts institutions.
“Wheelock Family Theatre at Boston University is excited to partner in the expansion of Boston Family Days. Increasing access for the families of Boston to the city’s outstanding arts institutions is a shared priority. As Boston’s only professional theatre dedicated to serving children and families, Wheelock Family Theatre’s participation in Boston Family Days embraces our 44-year commitment as a ‘theatre for everyone,’” says Harvey Young, BU College of Fine Arts Dean.
read the city of boston’s official announcement
More than 140 nominations in over two dozen categories of outstanding actors, directors, designers, choreographers, musicians, and productions were announced this spring by the Boston Theater Critics Association (BTCA) for The 42nd Annual Elliot Norton Awards, the biggest night for Boston theater.
Wheelock Family Theatre’s production of SpongeBob, The Musical, which ran in the fall of 2024, received four Elliot Norton Award nominations in design. Four of the five recognized designers are CFA alums! Saskia Martinez (CFA’20), BFA Scene Design, nominated for Outstanding Scenic Design, Midsize or Small; Gage Baker (CFA’24), MFA Sound Design and Peter DiMaggio (CFA’24), BFA Acting, nominated for Outstanding Sound Design, Midsize or Small; and Chloe Moore (CFA’21), MFA Costume Design, nominated for Outstanding Costume Design, Midsize or Small.
COMMUNITY @ CFA
Events that bring people together. That allow for cross collaboration among different majors. That invite our Boston neighbors and friends to Terrier Town. That inspire. That create joy. Check out some of our favorite events from this spring!
GRAD SEASON
The latter part of spring at CFA is all about celebrating our soon-to-be graduates! Nearly 50 dazzling projects were on view at BU School of Visual Arts’ annual Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibitions. The shows offered a comprehensive look at the breadth and depth of talent found in the cohort of the five SVA graduate programs—Graphic Design, Painting, Print Media & Photography, Sculpture, and Visual Narrative.
read more about this year’s mfa thesis shows
how i made this: maithili rajput’s thesis project
BU School of Theatre proudly presented its annual Theatre Showcase in Boston and New York City, which serves as a celebration of the graduating class and the group’s formal introduction to the professional theatre community.
meet the incredible sot class of 2025
At 808 Gallery, the works of 66 graduating seniors in painting, sculpture, and graphic design were on view as part of BU School of Visual Arts’ annual undergraduate thesis exhibitions. This year’s graduating seniors represented a remarkable range of voices and ideas. From environmental awareness to cultural memory, the themes reflected in the individual projects reveal the rich creative energy found among this year’s BFA and BA in Art graduates.
hear from the exhibiting students
The weekend of May 17-18 was an unforgettable one for the CFA Class of 2025 as they walked across the stage, shaking hands with CFA Dean Harvey Young, and graduating with their degrees after years of hard work and dedication, mastering their craft and preparing to make an impact in the world! CFA was honored to have CFA alum, actor, and animal rights activist Emily Deschanel (CFA’98, Hon.’25) as the 2025 Convocation Speaker. Deschanel was also the University’s Commencement Speaker, addressing one of the largest graduating classes in BU’s history and President Melissa Gilliam’s first Commencement. MA Art Education major Amira Sheikh (CFA’25) was the Convocation Student Speaker and BM Vocal Performance major Delaney Finn (CFA’25) proudly represented CFA as the official Commencement singer.
