The MassArt Graduate Programs invite you to the 2025 Low-Residency MFA January Colloquium where we are pleased to welcome Bow Ty Enterprises Venture Capital as our Visiting Artist speaker. Join us via Zoom on Thursday, January 9 at 6:30pm ET.

~ To receive the zoom link please RSVP here ~

Every winter, students in MassArt’s MFA: Fine Arts (low-residency) program gather virtually for five days to engage in a colloquium and review. Each of these intensives are organized around a theme and features guest speakers and visiting artists. 

2025 January Colloquium Theme: Imposters Only: Fake It Till You Break It
“I do not belong here.” Impostors Only invites you to investigate your responses to such a statement, often unspoken, but deeply felt. Together, we will unpack this internal feeling of fraudulence not just as personal anxiety, but as a socio-political construction shaped by external power relations. We will then ask: What becomes possible when we embrace impostorship in our creative practices? How do we turn fraudulence into a radical, generative tool for art? How do we shift our understandings of amateurism, belonging, and kinship? And how, after all, do we fake it till we break it?

Bow Ty Enterprises Venture Capital (i.e. BTEVC, a.k.a. Bow Ty) is an action artist and multidimensional human business conglomerate working in the mediums of time, care, fear, identity, ambition, and career. Bow Ty produces rules, images, events, situations, and enterprise solutions which playfully deconstruct institutional foundations, attempt impossible feats, flip hierarchies, trial the limitations of popular wisdom, and open up discourses on conformity and difference. Bow Ty is known for combining ephemeral, socially intervention works which resist traditional forms of documentation with the highly stylized aesthetics of business enterprise and personal branding. Some of their most well known projects include meeting and memorizing the names of 2700 people in 3 months, a cross-industry trade show of experimental businesses worn as a garment which became a meme in at least 10 different countries, and the interdisciplinary new media collaborative LIZN’BOW formed with artist Liz Ferrer.

Bow Ty’s work has been featured at Locust Projects, MOCA North Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Young at Art Museum, David Castillo Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Ignite Festival, A.I.R. Gallery, Squeaky Wheel, iii Points, Borscht Film Festival, Wassaic Projects, Tempus Projects, Pique Gallery, the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, xTED Cincinnati, 2nd Floor Rear, The Defibrillator, The James Baldwin Library at MacDowell, The Taiwan Art Center, The Trail of Shit Performance Festival, The Chicago Subway System, The Wicker Park Bar District, Panera Bread, House Parties, Private Dinners, Bedrooms, and Streets Everywhere.

This event is free and open to the public.

Questions? Contact gradprogram@massart.edu.

Image detail: courtesy of BTEVC