Daily Trojan Magazine
Teen dreams and art-grad screams
Four fine arts seniors explain their thesis exhibitions and career plans.
By NICO CHIERA SCIAMMAS
Terrie Yu, a senior majoring in fine arts, has a Baroque-style exhibition that probes the business of the art world. Meeting her in the echoey white walls of the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery at the Roski School of Art and Design, her soft-spoken voice and willowy gait fails to hide the sterling talent that won her the Ruth Weisberg Prize for Drawing — a $6,500 grant.
She isn’t the only grant recipient in her senior thesis cohort. Xyla Abella, a senior majoring in fine arts, was awarded the Handtmann Photography Prize and will also showcase in the Lindhurst Gallery. Georgia Helena Burki, a senior majoring in fine arts, creates mesmerizing abstract paintings and sculptural explorations of her heritage, which precede psycho-spiritual reflections. Talia Grossman, a senior majoring in fine arts, has reimagined archival videos of her Indonesian heritage in Australia via artificial intelligence.
All are equally upholding the fine arts program’s prestigious reputation.
Despite it, Yu, Abella, Burki and Grossman find themselves in the same daunting boat. In light of the charm, talent and success of fine arts Bachelor of Fine Arts students at Roski, the uncertainty of life after graduating from art school is a looming reality.
“Every stereotype and joke made about art school, it is true. There’s no money in art,” Abella said.
Data published in 2023 by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported the median yearly salary of an early-career BFA fine arts graduate to be $42,500, well under the $60,000 median of all bachelor’s degrees. Strikingly, the data reports an underemployment rate of fine arts graduates — the rate at which college graduates work in a field that typically does not require a college degree — to be 53.4%.
Associate professor of art Edgar Arceneaux, chair of Art 2D at Roski, has eclipsed this connotation of the starving artist. While his work now resides in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among others, Arceneaux spent the months following his BFA graduation on government-allocated funds and food stamps.
While scrambling to fulfill gigs to make ends meet, he centered himself around his own studio practice, a space where he developed art centered on his own wishes and motivations. After years of waxing and waning success, he was granted a public art project.
“My career sort of took off from there,” Arceneaux said. “I promised myself that I would do whatever I could to make sure that none of my students would have to go through that.”
According to Arceneaux, the senior thesis class of the fine arts program is intended to prepare students for life beyond school.
This culminates in the senior thesis, where students make and exhibit a seminal work from their time in college. They are guided through the responsibility of marketing, creating relationships with possible gallerists and curators, organizing their openings, making websites, and transporting and installing their work.
As Yu, Abella, Burki and Grossman walk the stage, they relinquish the guidance that comes from professors looking over their shoulders, and are freed from the constraints of creating for a grade.
As much as the senior thesis project is about the art world at large, it’s a glimpse into each student’s passions and individuality.
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Yu’s exhibition “Harsh Harsh Ribbon Flush,” whose name is based on a poem she wrote, is fairytale-esque and vibrant in color, but it isn’t painted — instead, it’s drawn in pastels.
The exhibition is supposed to evoke a sense of “[magic]al but also airiness with a subtle discomfort,” Yu said.
The sculpted and harrowing ceramic frames she’s handmade and tailored to each of the drawings — some spanning almost five feet in height — are purposely displayed separately because they cannot confine her art, as the pieces stretch beyond the frames. Yu’s ceramic frames represent the power of institutions, she explained.
“What we put into the frame automatically becomes much more important and separate from everything else,” Yu said, “The idea of art is really disconnected with how our society is built… art is the opposite of [our society’s capitalistic ways]… it’s really hard to value it.”
The separation of art and frame is a breach of that same institutional power that she will likely have to rely on once her art is exposed to the broader art market.
Yu’s “Harsh Palace,” an interpretation of the royal Baroque portraits of King Louis XIV, in which he is morphed with the faces of his heirs like clouds, is a reflection on the besieged livelihoods of their wives. Despite being high nobility, their power as women was diminished to marrying cousins as early teenagers and being treated as tools to produce heirs.
Hidden in the “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”-like visuals of the exhibition are recurring rabbits that share a similar duality to the theme of her “Harsh Palace” painting.
“In Western culture, rabbits are actually more portrayed as mysterious, but in Asian cultures rabbits are considered weak, soft, not able to fight back, and always so tolerable, but for me they have this subtle craziness,” Yu said.
The subtlety to the craziness, though ever-apparent in her work, is the necessary agent to Yu’s recreation of Baroque paintings. It’s also an indicator of the thematic depth of her exhibitions — a mark contemporary art museums look for in curating exhibitions relevant to their missions.
Yu’s work encompasses a range of themes, including the recreation of Baroque paintings with a modern sensibility, the portrayal of women, a surrealist perspective, and an examination of the business side of art. Though it’s unlikely Yu’s work will be picked up by a major museum so early in her career, her work poses the questions that museum curators are likely to seek.
(Ethan Thai / Daily Trojan)
Abella didn’t think she would attend art school until after graduating from high school, but has since flourished into the artist manifested in her final project.
“[The group thesis exhibition] was a practice in abstracting the self to the point of being unrecognizable, and then finding ourselves along in that practice, in the landscape of time,” Abella said.
The theoretical approach to the project caters to Abella’s perceived strengths, as she has struggled with comparing herself to her peers in the technical aspects of art, such as drawing. In a class during her freshman year, she distanced herself from others due to her lack of a classical drawing background.
“At the core of Roski are people who are very vulnerable, everyone is crippled by imposter syndrome, but what you end up getting is a practice you end up feeling so strongly about, and ideas that you feel worthy of pursuit,” Abella said.
Despite Abella’s previous imposter syndrome, her final work is an unsaid proof of her technical prowess. If she hasn’t gotten over her fear of competition, she’s pursued her ideas in the face of it. Her work combines photography in frames to convey a message with a ceramic interpretation of a de-horned longhorn skull, framed in its vertebrae.
“A lot of us made work that felt like it was trying to mirror the world, but also mirroring the world with us in it,” Abella said.
Her work of photography and sculpture — which she says are both incomplete without each other — will mark the last of her work at Roski, but Abella says that she’s indebted to the conceptual approach many of her assignments used to highlight her ideas.
“[At Roski] my concept carried the same weight as my technique,” Abella said.
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Burki has lived an international life. Born to a Bulgarian mother, she grew up in the south of France, where culture was heavily influenced by art.
After moving to London as a teenager, she realized she was destined for art school later when an academic advisor found Burki’s art portfolio and encouraged her to pursue it. She had previously dedicated her senior year of high school to science, and today, she takes classes in both fine arts and cognitive science.
Burki is passionate about her cognitive science counterpart, but admits that she has pursued it because of her mother’s wishes, although her father feels differently.
“He [said to pursue] whatever it is that you enjoy, even if that’s art,” Burki said about her father.
Though her previous paintings tell stories through color-driven landscapes, Burki is focusing her thesis project on the ritual of recreating her great-grandmother’s self-made hat — an exercise thought of as a rite of passage for Muslim Bulgarian Pomak women. But to Burki, it’s not her own Pomak exercise; the work’s aim is simple: Connecting with her Bulgarian heritage and recreating it through the lens of modern art.
It’s a sculpture, and through its structure — originally used to hold up and accentuate Mexican quinceañera dresses — she’s painted the inside as if it were a cave painted in constellations.
“It was a chance for me to bring everything I was exploring [during her senior semester] into one piece,” Burki said. “There’s so much to unpack once I finish school, I’m grateful I got to… learn about everything.”
(Ethan Thai / Daily Trojan)
Grossman is using her senior thesis to explore the White Australia policy, an exclusionary measure that lasted decades.
“It was a policy affecting [Asian and African immigrants] from immigrating to Australia,” Grossman said.
She’s taken photos she’s found of her grandparents who lived in Melbourne at the time, and has used artificial intelligence to enliven them, using inserted videos of herself as part of the process of imagining herself alongside her relatives.
“I’m a time traveler,” Grossman said. “My work tends to talk about the past, present and future, and how they are really not that different from each other. The past still lives in the present.”
The immigration of her grandparents to Australia, despite the White Australia policy, is the reason she’s here today. Grossman is as much connected to her Indonesian heritage as she is rooted in the modern world, and her project caters to her strength in another way.
“I’m very slow with drawing and hands-on work,” Grossman said. She loves to draw and make collages, but is limited in her efficiency because of her OCD diagnosis.
After a middle school teacher proposed photography to Grossman, she fell in love with the medium. As a teenager, on a school trip to a museum in Washington, D.C., Grossman remembers how she was pulled to an exhibition of National Geographic photos — that’s when her art dreams began.
Grossman remembers thinking, “Oh, I can do this — potentially professionally.”
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It’s curious what preparation is worth if what you’re preparing for doesn’t arrive, Abella dreams of getting an artist residency — she’s applied to multiple in Los Angeles and her hometown of Houston — and plans on moving to New York City in the meantime.
Grossman, who’s recently been offered a spot on the Indonesian national soccer team, plans to play professionally in Australia while still keeping up her practice. She was previously a member of the USC women’s soccer team from 2020-2024, before leaving due to injury.
Burki is torn between spending the last guaranteed years of her visa in L.A., or moving to New York City. Her plan is to work at an art gallery or as an assistant to a more established artist while she learns the business of selling her own work. She’s also interested in a residency and is especially excited about the chance to use it as a means of traveling the world.
“Depending on how you do it, [being an artist], you can really see the whole world: I’ve been all across Europe, Africa, Australia and North America,” Arceneaux said.
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Cultural Economics, reports that under 40% of fine arts graduates work in jobs closely related to their field of study. Yu wants to stay in L.A. and begin her career working in a gallery; she believes her life may get unstable quickly.
“You definitely have to figure it out yourself,” Yu said, suggesting that “figuring it out yourself” for many in the fine arts means choosing a different career path.
The Roski fine arts program’s strength is in its community of faculty and its network of arms. As far as the program’s resources to help students find opportunities, Burki says that it depends on your relationship with your professors and specifically what you can make of the connections they provide.
“I got way more out of it than I could have ever dreamt of,” Burki said.
Part of the BFA program is an investment in making sure students can deal with the financial hardships that may come in the early years of an artistic career.
“I’ve never been invested in the way [professors at Roski] have invested in me,” Abella said.
I see this in real time as one of Yu’s professors, assistant professor of teaching in art Karen Liebowitz, sees her in the hallway and offers to write her a letter of recommendation for another grant she’s come across for the spring.
Graduating from art school is far from the promise of white picket fences and American Dream stability, but you wonder if stability could ever have been the forefront goal anyway. It’s freeing for BFA students to be guided intrinsically, too much so to be daunted by statistics.
The work of Burki, Yu, Abella, Grossman and ten other BFA seniors can be found in the “always to be found” thesis exhibition, on view until May 16 by appointment.
“You see the richness of the world [with art] beyond the kind of binaries that oftentimes our politics want to push us into,” Arceneaux said. “It brings people together around a shared vision… art helps you see beauty when others see chaos.”
Disclaimer: Xyla Abella is a staff writer for the opinion section of the Daily Trojan. Abella is not affiliated with the Magazine and was not involved with the production of this story.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Talia Grossman was on USC’s soccer roster until 2022. The article was updated May 6 at 6:57 p.m. to reflect that Grossman was on the roster from 2020 to 2024. A previous version of this article also stated that Georgia Helena Burki was born to Bulgarian parents and her thesis project involved the ritual of recreating her grandmother’s hat. The article was updated May 21 at 5:00 p.m. to reflect that only Burki’s mother is Bulgarian and her project was based on recreating her great-grandmother’s hat. The Daily Trojan regrets these errors.
Editor’s note: This article was updated May 21 at 5:00 p.m. to reflect Georgia Helena Burki’s professional name.
