ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Cynthia Nathan

cynthianathan.com
@cynthu_art

Cynthia Nathan is a multimedia artist whose practice spans steel fabrication, painting, and immersive installation. She holds a BFA in Studio Practices from the University of Missouri–St. Louis (Magna Cum Laude, 2023) and is currently pursuing her MFA at the Maine College of Art and Design (2025). Her work explores themes of Hypervisibility, representation, and beauty through rich material contrasts to create speculative environments and Safe Spaces.

Nathan has exhibited her work extensively in both solo and group shows, including Hung Together and BFA Senior Capstone at Gallery 210 (St. Louis), as well as Peach Fuzz and Pictures at an Exhibition in Portland, Maine. Her upcoming MFA Thesis Exhibition will be held at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D in 2025. In addition to her studio practice, she has served as a teaching assistant and gallery technician, contributing to community-based and collaborative projects that center marginalized voices.

Her work has appeared in publications such as Bellerive: Addressing the Self and Brain Stew, and continues to push the boundaries of immersive storytelling through sculpture, scent, sound, and worldbuilding.


I create multimedia installations that serve as sanctuaries for those in need, while deliberately unsettling those who take daily security for granted. My immersive spaces combine paintings, found-object sculptures, and elements of sound and smell, conveying the duality of attraction and discomfort inherent in marginalized experiences. Through my processes of welding, abstract painting, and worldbuilding, I depict the everyday experiences of a marginalized individual in a way that is both attractive and repulsive.

My process begins with the research of historically idealized traits that have been weaponized against marginalized groups and how as a queer Black woman I can assert what I see as ideal by enlisting the ideas of Hypervisibility and Selective Opacity. In tapestry-style paintings, I layer glitter and gold leaf on top of deep-seated layers of acrylic paint, reflecting the metaphor of superficially adorning something to make it “palatable.”

This theme is further illustrated through “proxy weapons”—sculptures shaped by steel fabrication. I work the resilient steel until it threatens to collapse, covering its trauma with artificial ornamentation. This practice mirrors the pressures on marginalized individuals to conceal the impacts of oppression, reinforcing the tension between beauty and brutality.

The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.