This year’s Kahn winners are Savannah Panah (CFA’22), music and vocal performance (from left), Devon Russo (CFA’22), music and vocal performance, grand prize winner Gavin Fahey (CFA’22), painting, Chen Peng (CFA’22), painting, Mya Ison (CFA’22), theater arts and performance, and Noah Putterman (CFA’22), directing. Photo by Dave Green
This article was first published in BU Today on May 17, 2022. By Rich Barlow | Photos by Dave Green
Excerpt
Gavin Fahey was your standard-issue overachiever—a double-major in math and economics at Swarthmore College—before a junior year drawing class roused the native Chicagoan’s inner artist.
He indulged his left brain after graduation with a job at RAND Corporation, the global think tank, while simultaneously exercising his creativity by teaching himself to paint. At the College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts, Fahey (CFA’22) studied for an MFA in painting, but gravitated to sculpture as well, an effort, he says, “to subvert the painted image.” “I even stopped painting altogether and made a series of fake political signs I created in Photoshop and printed out on a large-format printer.”
Today, Fahey says, “I still paint, but my new subversion is that I’m the only one who can see the paintings, as they are hidden inside a wooden sculpture. The paintings I bury are portraits of bad actors: corporate malfeasants, shoe-bombers, and ecoterrorists. They’re individuals who tried to remake the world, but ultimately failed to do so,” from Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (the George W. Bush aide jailed in connection with leaking a CIA operative’s identity).
Fahey’s work, viewable on his website, has earned the young artist the $20,000 grand prize in CFA’s annual Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Award competition.
Funded by a $1 million endowment from the late Esther Kahn (Wheelock’55, Hon.’86), the competition is open to CFA students in their final undergraduates or graduate semester.
“My sculptures are, in a sense, Trojan horses, smuggling sinister characters into the white-cube gallery under the guise of formalist sculptural explorations,” Fahey says. “I want my audience to understand the abstruse structures of power Ted Kaczynski fought against, and Scooter Libby fought to maintain. I want the audience to appreciate that the physical space these sculptures occupy is also a sociopolitical space.
“Finally, I want the audience to recognize that they themselves are not simply a group of powerless individuals, but rather a collective of political beings more powerful than the sum of their parts.”