Cross Talk brings together seven artists whose practices have developed alongside one another. As graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s 2026 MFA cohort, their work has taken shape through shared studio visits, critiques, and ongoing exposure to one another, to feedback, to precedents and emergent possibilities, and to the ambient and explicit pressures that leak into studio practice.
Across the exhibition, the work engages a range of contemporary concerns: alienation produced through black-boxed AI systems / precious metals circulating through formal and informal extractive economies / transgenerational memory and Black cultural production / destabilization of the body through image-making and spatial interventions / questions of abjection, intimacy, erasure, and framing / the emergence of conspiratorial and cultic dynamics within visual culture. Rather than resolving into stable subjects, these concerns remain mid-formation, held in tension across the works.
Cross Talk names the interference between channels, where one transmission contaminates another. It also describes a social field shaped by partial overhearings, contingent adjacencies, and shared frequencies that never fully resolve. Within the exhibition, crosstalk becomes both condition and method. Signals bleed, interfere, double back, and accumulate noise. What emerges is a dense weave of entanglements–deliberate, accidental, and resistant–through which practices remain distinct even as they become enmeshed.
Featuring works by:
Ana González
Cacie Rosario Jackson
Sol Kim
Dylan Li
Jingyi Ling
Noa Mori Machover
Shay Myerson