I used to make mixtapes, back when that was a thing. It was a little mix made for a specific audience: for a friend, for a crush, sometimes just for me. The technology was in a sweet spot—cheap blank tapes and the radio—before streaming platforms locked down the means, and before file sharing flattened everything into an endless archive. There was magic in catching a song as it happened, and the impulse was to mark it: to build an assembly that made an experience. I had a double tape deck—one side recorded while the other played—and when the right song came on the radio, I would sprint to catch it (a chance operation if there was ever one). Sometimes, my own sound recordings or ambiences would end up there too, and instinctively I often left them in. The jacket and labels would be decorated and personalized for the receiver, turning the tape into an artifact of the moment.
A good mixtape transports the listener; an exhibition does much the same. Mixtapes are sequenced, exhibitions are curated, and in that assembly there is space for the viewer to make connections. We don’t just look; if we allow ourselves, we feel our way through it—the way we listen. Student work, especially, has the capacity to be a journal entry in the development of a creative spirit: less a finished monument, more a living record. Mixtapes are less about single songs than they are about a thread that becomes part of our memory—think of the road trip mixtape. If this exhibition is a mixtape, then the common thread is the excellence of our students, and those moments when instruction becomes inspiration.
I am once again honored to organize this exhibition, and to have such outstanding colleagues to work with and exemplary works to choose from. It’s pretty easy to make a good mixtape when you have nothing but hits to choose from.
–Nathaniel Sullivan, 2026
