This is not a map brings together eight artists from Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Fine Arts program. This collection of new works addresses contemporary notions of place, time, and storytelling. Hailing from five continents, all now living and working in Pittsburgh, the artists are each presenting an installation informed by their diverse studio practices, utilizing a broad range of mediums, from textiles and collages to video essays and digital sculpture. Where traditional mapmaking creates rigid understandings of constructs like nationhood, gender, and language, this exhibition offers fluid systems of way-finding between shifting and interlaced worlds. A dance is re-choreographed, an altar calls the past into the present, discarded objects find a new sense of value, and sensory fragments from childhood are restaged. Memory plays a vital role across the works on view, exploring how a body can chart through space on its own terms.

Artists: 

Izsys Archer (MFA ‘25) 

Naomi Chambers (MFA ‘26) 

Tingting Chen (MFA ‘25) 

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza (MFA ‘25) 

Frankmarlin (MFA ‘25) 

Bulumko Mbete (MFA ‘26)

Afrooz Partovi (MFA ‘26) 

Max Tristan Watkins (MFA ‘25)

This is not a map is presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. Special thanks to MFA Director Katherine Hubbard, Assistant Director Julie Hakim Azzam, Head of the School of Art Charlie White, and the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. Additional thanks to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust team: Davine Byon, Tara Fay Coleman, Jesse Hulcher, George Dun, Kennedy Deen, Josh Rievel, and Chris Korch.