As CCA’s First Year Program concludes, Taxidermy will serve as its final exhibition, featuring work produced by First Year students across disciplines. The show brings together projects from 2D, 3D, 4D, and Drawing studios, all created within First Year Core Studio courses. Work by every student currently enrolled in these classes will be exhibited across both floors of 184 Hooper.

Taxidermy names the impulse at the heart of this exhibition: the desire to preserve what is already slipping away. As the ultimate group of CCA First Year undergraduates, we find ourselves in a charged moment—part elegy, part archive—where memory lingers like a body not yet at rest.

What do we do with what remains?

Do we desperately hold on to what we have, stitching it back together, packing absence with form, preserving it—carefully, artificially—so that it may be admired from afar for years to come?

Do we make it appear still, immaculate, and untouchable, a relic to be observed rather than experienced?

Or do we, perhaps, put it to rest and simply let it go?

Taxidermy does not resolve this tension. It suspends us within it.

Afterall, only time will tell.

Join us for an artists' reception in 184 Hooper. Thursday, May 7, 2026. 5pm to 7pm.