2022 Senior Exhibition Artists

Cartoon Me, 2022, digital drawing

Mya Ferreira

Art + Design: Jewelry/Metals

About Mya Ferreira

Mya Ferreira is an artist from Swansea, Massachusetts currently earing a BFA in Jewelry/Metals. Beginning as a method of personalized gift giving, she has been making various types of art from jewelry to sculpture for as long as she can remember. Mya’s work primarily uses bright color and physical or implied movement. Citing rock music and childhood video games and cartoons as inspiration, she incorporates a sense of liveliness and fun in her pieces.

Statement

My body of work is based on my fascination with the hippie counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s. This fascination started through my discovery of the era’s rock music and spiraled as it seemed like every aspect of life at the time, from art to ideology, was optimistic and revolutionary. This hopeful spirit heavily informed my work to create a bright and flowing aesthetic representative of what I think the psychedelic lifestyle was like.

However, the hippies weren’t wholly original, as they drew from the Beat Generation, Art Nouveau, and op art. By incorporating these design inspirations, my art evolved into a sort of aesthetic timeline, giving each piece unique character.

Although my appreciation of the 60’s and 70’s brought me closer to those who experienced it, I knew that their accounts were nostalgic and somewhat romanticized. I was also aware that my perception is filtered through modern technology and drew from this feeling of corruption in my work.

With all these considerations in mind, this collection was a way to process and explain my obsession with the past and hopefully propel me into a future of artmaking.