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The offending image: a gelatin-silver print made in a film enlarger from a digital image printed in negative on an overhead transparency with a Xerox photocopier, a process which I was originally told would not work, and so became determined to make work. 

The final concept sketch of my original thesis show. I was beginning production on materials for it when COVID-19 closed the SJSU campus and indefinitely postponed our round of thesis shows.

The John Pickelle Gallery, located in the SJSU Industrial Studies Building (left; featuring Sentimentality; or Unimportant Object #200108), and John Pickelle's presumed thesis, located in the thesis cabinet in the SJSU Art Building.

My fellow grad Alana Rios and I eventually stumbled across a thesis by one John Pickelle while researching in preparation for writing our own. The 2010 project was untitled, and contained only ten or so abstracted nude portraits and a handful of vague sentences for an artist statement. An attempt was also made to find and reach Mr. Pickelle through social media, to no avail. Following this, another grad jokingly suggested that perhaps John Pickelle had never in fact existed, and was instead some sort of “collective fever dream” shared by SJSU art graduates. This idea was so amusing that I wrote the phrase down in Sharpie on a loose piece of paper and hung it outside of my studio. 

Eventually the title found its way into my thesis and I began planning my installation, but in late February 2020 campus was forced to close as COVID-19 swept through Santa Clara County. By the end of March the semester — and our thesis projects — had been suspended indefinitely.

On March 9th, university president Mary A. Papazian announced that in-person classes would be suspended for two weeks in preparation for the university to “transition from in-person instruction to ‘distributed’ or ‘fully online’ instruction” in partial response to the first death linked to COVID-19 recorded in the county. During that time, campus and most of its facilities remained open; however, by March 12th, the situation had become dire enough for the university to order all instruction to move online. Campus and facilities closed shortly thereafter, thesis shows were cancelled without notification, and access to graduate studios was revoked without opportunity to gather personal belongings.

In hindsight, this sweeping response to the rapidly evolving situation was a wise reaction to the first wave of an illness that hit the city of San José and its surrounding county particularly hard. However, once the school had been shut down, there seemed to be little incentive for the department and university administrators to act quickly (or at all). In April, graduate students were finally offered three options to graduate: turn in all materials by the original deadlines in May — including a digital presentation of your thesis work — and graduate on time; delay graduation until August, using that time to develop a digital presentation of your thesis work; or delay graduation until the end of the Fall 2020 semester and hope that the student galleries reopened.

The SJSU MFA thesis guidelines are lacking to begin with. Last updated more than a decade ago, the three-page document suggests that the required book is not itself intended to be an actual thesis so much as formal documentation of the accompanying gallery installation. There is little in the way of additional guidelines for the installations themselves other than the expectation that they will take place in the student galleries during the allotted week. While this system works well enough under normal circumstances, in a situation where physical thesis shows become unrealistic or impossible — say, during a pandemic of society-disrupting proportions — these guidelines become effectively unusable. As we students have repeatedly attempted to make clear over the past eight months, if there is no show to document, there can be no document of a show. It would seem sensible, then, to adjust expectations and communicate clear, concrete guidelines for those of us unable to meet the standing expectations. This never happened.

An open letter, written by me and co-signed by the other two members of my original graduating photography MFA class, sent to the Department Chair and Graduate Coordinator seeking clarification on how we would be expected to complete our degrees. We had recieved zero guidance from the department at that time, and would not recieve a concrete plan for nearly another month.

I live nearly one hundred miles from campus, in the nearest affordable rental market I could find. I spent early every week for three years commuting by some combination of car, bike, and train to one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world, where I would rely on the kindness of friends and family to provide me with a place to sleep in the surrounding Bay Area until the weekend, when I would return to my apartment and part time job until the next week. And at the California State University with the shocking distinction of having the largest population of unhoused students — as well as a documented history of failing to effectively correct that distinction — I realize am one of the lucky ones.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that an institution so unable to guarantee the safety and well-being of its own students would ultimately be equally incapable of finding a way for those of us who completed our coursework to graduate on time. Students are fleeting in the eyes of a university, despite being the institution’s means to generate profit and prestige. When this is all over, this graduating class will be gone and replaced by new bodies and minds. 

The earliest solution suggested was for students to simply move their graduation dates back another semester. Explanations as to why this was not a realistic option for many were met with frustration and dismissal. Inspite of these realities and due to inaction on the university's part, delay was the option a number of us were ultimately forced into.

While the university requires us to exist, we as individuals are inconsequential.
We are ultimately expendable.

So,

It would be easy to chalk this all up to the stereotype of art school being a place without structure or decorum, but SJSU is not an art school. This is a state school with an art program, and like most California State Universities, SJSU places a great deal of emphasis on their structures and paperwork and pyramid-shaped programs. The MFA thesis projects, though, have long been followed by a specter of insignificance — a suspicion reenforced in part by the oft-grumbled complaint from full-time and tenured faculty that they do not get paid extra to serve on graduate committees (one would think that a retirement program, health benefits, job security, union protection, and permanent access to funding and facilities that most graduate students will never receive would be compensation enough). This on its own should be a loud enough alarm-bell to warrant change.

But what if the thesis books were significant enough on their own? What if they were made easily and readily available to both the student body and the general public? The thesis shows are transient and, as this year has shown us, far too fragile to base a terminal degree around. The thesis books, however, are permanent. John Pickelle the Artist may have slipped from this place, but John Pickelle the Untitled Thesis, underwhelming as it may be, is a permanent part of this department. To relegate these books to mere documentation is misguided. As an institution based fundamentally in the belief that ideas ought to be maintained and dispersed, our program should end with an opportunity to do just that. Perhaps we've simply been doing this all backwards: the show should not make the book, the book should make the show.

I believe in this program; I believe that is capable of giving its students what they deserve. The problem is that you — the keepers of our institution — are so hung up on your process that you have forgotten to consider the full picture, and this year has rendered that process irrelevant. So now will you wait until the offended parties are gone and leave this all as it is, hoping — though you know better — that it will never be challenged again? Or will you challenge it yourselves, and finally build something meaningful out of what you now know was always on the verge of collapse?

I know from experience that there is a correct answer.