Nate Berkus, Oprah’s Design Guru, Comes To Parsons Fine Arts
Today, a group of Parsons Fine Arts students were featured on a special live episode of Oprah celebrating the 10th Anniversary of O Magazine. Oprah’s design expert Nate Berkus visited the Fine Arts studios at Parsons last week to tape a segment about starting an art collection, which included nine students from the undergraduate and graduate Fine Arts programs. Under the guidance of MFA program director Simone Douglas, the students hung a gallery show in the fourth-floor studio and invited Nate and the crew inside to browse the work and the process of buying and selling student art. Berkus left the studio with three new pieces, one for a client, two for his personal collection.
The students are:
- Kate Baddeley, a BFA student, who explores abstract painting through the use of medical imagery.
- Rehan Bashir, an MFA student, who uses his art practice as an endeavor to channel the physical manifestation of emotion by exploring mark making and color.
- Monica Bernal, an MFA student, whose work shows the microstructures in biological life and their appearance when observed through a microscope.
- Casey James Diskin, an MFA student, who believes that art exists to represent people’s surroundings, thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and channels that in his work.
- Morgan Ersery, an MFA student, whose work explores the pervasion of technology in the most public and private realms of our lives. Berkus purchased Ersery’s piece A Human Stain for a client’s home, and it will be featured in the segment.
- Mauricio Herrero, an MFA student, whose works are microscopic views of the insides of living organisms.
- Rayna Savrosa, an MFA student, whose pictorial composites combine photography and drawing to closely study the abandoned remains of urban industrial sites. Berkus purchased her piece Study of Bus Graveyard, San Francisco, for his personal collection.
- Gabriel J. Shuldiner, a recent MFA graduate, studio artist, and jewelry designer, whose work highlights the subtle nuances of surface, space, form, and the act of looking. Berkus purchased Shuldiner’s piece I Think You Should See This (Version 3.0) for his personal collection.
- Alexandria Smith, an MFA student whose stylized domestic scenes, inhabited by only young girls, explore narratives of identity through the lens of childhood experience and memory.
To see additional samples of the featured student’s work, please visit the Parsons Fine Arts student gallery.