Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Seven ArtCenter MFA Artists Turn the Recent Past Into New Work

Aylee Rhodes, He Love Me. [photo credit: ArtCenter College of Design]

Free Pasadena exhibition draws on pop culture and fading technology to explore how yesterday shapes today

The 1970s motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel has found an unlikely second act at ArtCenter College of Design, reimagined in new work by graduating Master of Fine Arts student and artist Milan Aguirre as part of a group exhibition that treats the recent cultural past as raw material for the present.

“Days of Future Past,” the Pasadena college’s annual Graduate Art MFA thesis exhibition, opens May 1 at the South Campus on Raymond Avenue and runs through May 22. The free show features work by seven graduating artists whose pieces range from Aguirre’s reinterpretation of Knievel to Jessie Edelstein’s installations built from near-obsolete digital content, according to an ArtCenter press release.

The exhibition takes its name from the 2014 X-Men film in which characters rewrite the future by acting on the past. Curator Hyesoo Christina Valentine, ArtCenter’s associate director and curator of exhibitions, organized the show around what the press release describes as a loosely shared throughline: the artists examine the recent past not with nostalgia but with curiosity, aiming to redefine the present.

The press release frames their approach through philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology,” the idea that the past persists in the present as a sense of loss for futures that never arrived. But the exhibition presents a twist on that framework, according to ArtCenter: rather than mourning what might have been, the seven artists mine their cultural inheritance to make something new.

Alongside Aguirre and Edelstein, the exhibition features work by Grace Eassa, Michael Montemayor, Velocity Parker, Aylee Rhodes, and Ryan Zhao. All seven are candidates for the Master of Fine Arts in Art from ArtCenter, which was founded in 1930 and has operated its South Campus in Pasadena since 2004.

The opening reception on May 1 runs from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. and is open to the public with no RSVP required. The exhibition is part of ArtCenter’s Spring 2026 graduation events, which include the Spring Grad Show the following day, May 2, from noon to 5:00 p.m. at the Pasadena Convention Center, 300 East Green Street.

The exhibition will also be open during Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, May 7 through 10, which takes place at the same South Campus location. The annual fair, organized by the New York-based nonprofit Printed Matter, brings together artists’ book publishers from around the world.

“Days of Future Past” is on view Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., at the Graduate Art Main Galleries, 950 South Raymond Avenue. Admission is free. Visitors should check in at the security desk upon arrival. For more information, contact ArtCenter Exhibitions at Exhibitions@artcenter.edu.

Evel Knievel as floorboard for the future. Edelstein’s dying formats as the ghosts in the machine. In “Days of Future Past,” the past is not a monument — it is a workshop.