Cross Talk brings together seven graduates of the University of Pennsylvania's 2026 MFA cohort whose practices have developed in sustained proximity — through shared studio visits, critiques, and the ambient pressures that leak into studio practice. The title names the interference between channels, where one transmission contaminates another. Across the exhibition, works engage AI's black-boxed systems, extractive economies, transgenerational Black cultural memory, bodily destabilization, abjection, and conspiratorial dynamics within visual culture — concerns held mid-formation rather than resolved, signals bleeding and doubling back through a dense weave of deliberate and accidental entanglement.
