For the 2025 Homecoming Week here at UW-Madison, the Art Department has been celebrating with special posts each day to our Instagram account of selected alumni. Please enjoy these features on each artist collected here and find the full catalog of artworks posted over on Instagram.
This September, 2022 MFA alumna Esther Jihye Cho completed her first residency at The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. The highly competitive 2025 Open Studio Residency is designed to foster artistic exploration at the highest level. In 2026, Cho will participate in a second residency at Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, engaging with the public while creating a body of work at a state of the art studio space.
This year, Cho’s work has been on display in two exhibitions: Basketry Now 2025, a biennial juried exhibition in partnership with the National Basketry Organization at the Textile Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, thru October 18th broadly surveys artistic expressions in basketry and showcases diverse approaches. Cho’s piece, Baggage I, was made by combining handmade hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper) with recycled thermal foil takeout bag plastic. Hanji, carefully crafted, valued for its strength and history, and plastic, everywhere but often tossed after just one use. Weaving them together, Cho asks: What makes something “worth keeping”? Her work was also included in the 46th Annual Contemporary Craft Exhibition at the Mesa Arts Center in Arizona this past spring, highlighting the finest in contemporary crafts from across the country.
An interdisciplinary artist and designer working in wood, paper, and performance, Cho’s practice focuses on preserving traditional Korean craft techniques while reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens. Central to her work are meticulous and labor-intensive processes, such as joomchi (paper felting) and jiseung (paper weaving), serving as both inspiration and a means of creative expression to explore themes of identity, storytelling, and materiality.
Cho has received the Center for Craft’s Windgate-Lamar Fellowship, the Arts + Literature Laboratory Prize, the Caxton Club Grant, and the UW–Madison Division of the Arts Creative Arts Award. She holds two MFAs from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Woodworking and Furniture Design and Design Studies, as well as two BFAs in Interior Design and Craft/Material Studies from the Virginia Commonwealth University.
Congratulations to 2020 MFA alum Pranav Sood, the 2025 recipient of the Stillman Prize from the NYC Culture Club! This annual art award is given to an emerging artist in the New York metro region to acquire a piece for its permanent collection, endowed by artist Abbott Stillman.
In 2024, Sood completed the large-scale porcelain enamel mural “I Am More Than Who I Am” at the Manhattan Oscar De La Renta Educational Campus. Commissioned by the NYC Department of Education, the NYC School Construction Authority’s Public Art for Public Schools program, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ Percent for Art program, the landmark public art mural highlights Sood’s commitment to making art accessible to all.
Born in Punjab, India, Sood is a New York-based artist celebrated for his intricate patterns, dynamic color palettes and richly stylized iconography that explore themes of divinity and resilience. A profound reflection of self-experience, his work grapples with the acceptance of decisions and their outcomes, rooted in the ideals of radical optimism and unwavering devotion influenced by Indian philosophies and formative childhood memories. Each painting transforms personal struggles into universal narratives, offering viewers a poignant glimpse into the human spirit’s strength, vulnerability, and capacity for renewal. Through his art, Pranav Sood invites viewers to find strength in their vulnerabilities and embrace life’s difficulties with resilience and grace, each piece a testament to our capacity for growth, perseverance, and self-discovery.
Sood’s work has been shown at the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2019) and the Museum of Wisconsin Art (2023). His solo exhibitions include I Reap What I Sow (2024), I Am Absolutely Absolute (2022), and Life is About Love & Love is Complicated (2020) at the Abel Contemporary Gallery in Wisconsin. His pieces have been featured in prominent publications, including Bushwick Daily, Up Magazine, Madison Locally Sourced, Epicenter NYC, and the Wisconsin State Journal. In 2021, he gained national recognition with a solo booth at the Spring/Break Art Show in New York City. He earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
2021 BFA alumna Jocelyn Chan is the recipient of the First Prize of the Stanislav Libenský Award 2024 for her installation piece “The Melody of Memories.” This international competition, known as the “Oscars for Young Glass Artists,” honors legendary glass artist Stanislav Libenský and features works that transform glass into breathtaking masterpieces. Chan’s award-winning installation consists of a hanging piece of engraved glass and a piano bench, visualizing the movement of Chan’s fingers on the piano keys while playing a melody and expressing memories of music and sound through glass.
Wandering around the world with her ability of perfect pitch and quadrilingual skill, Chan creates installation and interactive artworks using sound, music, language, and culture. Born in 1998 and raised in Hong Kong, surrounded by the rich history of neon lights, Chan was initially drawn to glass through the process of neon bending at UW–Madison where she received her BFA in Glass and Printmaking, discovering a passion in glassblowing in the hotshop. She also creates works related to being underwater about her time as a Hong Kong swimming representative. Chan has been a Production Glassblower at AO Glass in Burlington, Vermont, Studio & Teaching Assistant at the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio in Norfolk, Virginia, Teaching Assistant for Bohyun Yoon at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington, and works for the DOUBLE Q Gallery in Hong Kong.
Chan’s artworks have been published in the Corning Museum’s New Glass Review 42 & 45, and have been exhibited across the US, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong. She continues to create challenging works and explore different opportunities when traveling the world. She recently graduated from the Advanced Research Studies Program of Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Toyama, Japan, and serves as the International Student Rep on the Glass Art Society Board. She currently works and is based in Hong Kong.
2019 MFA alumna Chloe Darke’s exhibition with artist and metalsmith Professor Jennifer Crupi, Figural Apparatus, is now on display at the Curfman Gallery of the Lory Student Center for Colorado State Universoty through October 31st.
In Figural Apparatus, the work of metals artists Crupi and Darke defies traditional metalsmithing, viewed primarily as materials used for bodily adornment particularly in the form of jewelry. Using themes of fiction vs reality, social media and misinformation, and the exacerbation of digital communication, their work addresses the ways in which we as a society can turn inward and return to our bodies amidst the conventions of contemporary culture, while continuing to relate to the human body.
Darke explores the division between fiction and reality that can be a struggle to distinguish. Inspired by false narratives that draw viewers into believing their authenticity, such as Cabinets of Curiosity that document seemingly natural wonders of the past to misinformation that floods social media in the present, her pieces engage with a fictional laboratory or examination room, referencing an assortment of instruments and surgical tools of the past, their functions ambiguous and impractical. Environments where the microscopic world is augmented and made easily observable. Microbial colonies are cultured, studied, and disseminated as the body is observed, manipulated, and controlled.
Originally from Groveland, Massachusetts, Darke received her BFA with honors in Metalsmithing & Jewelry from Maine College of Art. While employed as a silversmith at Old Newbury Crafters, she was featured on the PBS series Craft in America episode “FORGE.” Darke received her MFA in Metals from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Darke was an artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft from June to August 2021. Her work was recently on display in Fertile Ground at the Donner, wie Blitz Gallery in Munich. She is currently based in Upperville, Virginia.
2021 MFA alumna Rita Mawuena Benissan’s London debut solo exhibition The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold opens next week, Tuesday, October 14th, with the reception from 6 to 9pm at Gallery 1957! On view thru December 20th, Benissan’s new body of work transforms colonial-era photographs into richly embroidered textile pieces and sculptural installations. Known for her research-led practice and material explorations of Ghanaian cultural memory, she draws on work conducted during her 2025 residency in London—including engagements with the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, National Archives, and her own foundation, Si Hene.
A Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist, Benissan reimagines the royal umbrella, transforming it from a protective object into a potent symbol of Ghanaian identity. With a passion for art and cultural history, she collaborates with traditional artisans to breathe life into archival photos, immortalizing individual figures and communal scenes while embodying the beauty and power of her people. Benissan has garnered global recognition with exhibitions at the Arts + Literature Laboratory in Wisconsin, Gallery 1957 in Accra, the Foundation Contemporary of Art at the 2021 Afrochella Festival, the 2022 Dak’Art – Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain at the IFAN African Art Museum in Dakar, Senegal, the 2024 1-54 Marrakesh in Morocco, the Sharjah Biennale 16 in UAE, and group shows EFIE: Museum as Home at Dortmunder U in Germany and the Mitchell and Innes Gallery in New York and the 60th Venice Biennale in the exhibition Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream is the Truth curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton. Benissan’s first museum show One Must be Seated is on display at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa through October 19th.
In 2020, Benissan established Si Hene, dedicated to preserving the country’s chieftaincy and traditional culture, where she played a pivotal role in the reopening of the National Museum of Ghana in 2022 and served as Chief Curator at the Institute Museum of Ghana (Noldor Artist Residency). Furthermore, Rita served as the artistic director for the Open Society Foundation’s Restitution Conference in Accra, demonstrating her commitment to cultural preservation and representation.
Benissan holds a BFA in Apparel and Textile Design from Michigan State University and an MFA in Photography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Photography courtesy the Artist & Gallery 1957. One Must be Seated photography by Dillon Marsh, courtesy Zeitz MOCAA.