Beyond Borders: Graduate students pop-up during Dallas ArtWalk
Emelie Stenhammar, Shuang Gou, Conrad Nkamwesiga and Ben Terry at Beyond Borders pop up in Dallas. April 2025. Photo: Lilia Kudelia
On April 5, 2025, in conjunction with ArtWalk | West, an event that celebrates the creative energy of West Dallas, our faculty Benjamin Terry and Justin Ginsberg worked with graduate students to organize a pop-up exhibition in a spacious warehouse in the Tin District area.
Emelie Stenhammar, Shuang Gou, and Conrad Nkamwesiga shared the corrugated metal walls to show their paintings in a group project, which they titled Beyond Borders – to reference their international background. Loosely hung without stretchers, most of the paintings on view are the results of their work in the studios in the last two semesters. For all three artists, new ways to approach painting have resolved recently in their practice here on UTA campus.
Originally from China, Shuang Gou have started her MFA studies with a lot of intermedia work that involved video and projections. The new work shows her exploration of the different ways of applying paint onto canvas both with her brush and fingers. Figures in Shuang’s paintings are often captured in a state of sleep while others emerge within seemingly very fleeting and changing landscapes such as the portrait of a skipper on a boat.
Conrad Nkamwesiga came to an MFA program in Arlington from Uganda. In his new body of work he continues to depict people in beauty parlors, getting their haircuts, while delving deeper into the significance of historic accessories used to adorn and take care of hair in different regions of the African continent. His new paintings in a rondo format shown at this exhibition express Conrad’s confidence in rendering his compositions, such as, for example, a small tilt to perspective, which changes so much in how one perceives the depicted scene.
Emelie Stenhammar joined the MFA cohort from Sweden where she was a practicing dermathologist before. Mostly monochrome, with a delicate exploration of color in several cases, paintings are gesturally as assertive as the texts she weaves into the compositions. The words in her latest paintings reference biblical characters and quote religious texts. Emely showed over a dozen new large scale works, hung in a grid, that speak strongly about her disciplined approach to studio practice.
