2025/26 Merit Scholarship Recipient: Evelyne Anderson

How/why did you choose your major?

The photo department is the best department! Everyone from the faculty to the media center staff to the students loves what they do and are committed to learning and lifting each other up!

Describe the work you submitted for merits.

I Lived A Good Life // Under New Management is a series in progress. It addresses the inherited locational aftermath of my grandparent's passing, the complexities and responsibility of familial ties, and landscapes that bend to mirror grief when we are grieving. One image is a foggy morning in southern Minnesota farmland where I was haunted by a repetitive scene of dead whitetail deer while driving back to the city, this is one of many deer that were passed on the trip. Under New Management is also the title of a group show I organized and hosted at my Grandparent's home in collaboration with my Interdisciplinary Studio Hybrid class this past fall. Utilizing every inch of the home as an impromptu gallery space helped me to process the changing of hands the home was undergoing.

Why did you decide to come to MCAD?

I remember first touring MCAD and thinking it looked more like a museum than a school, it still inspires me like that- there's something installed around every corner that makes me think deeper!

What are your plans for your senior year? And beyond?

Senior Project is going to be so much fun! My friends and I are cooking up something good for Gallery 148, and I hope to host a second show at my grandparent's house! Stay tuned!

Favorite thing about college life (so far)?

Meeting my people.

What inspires you?

The Whittier Neighborhood- and hosting my friends for late-night important conversations.

Do you have a favorite piece you've made? Describe it!

I'm very proud of my series Girl Room- Since my sophomore year, I expanded my photo series, which began in Photo 2- Girl Room, to a cross-disciplinary exploration via a Super 8 short film. I revisited the comedy that is the set construction (borrowing mattresses from MCAD’s basements, hauling them around Stevens Ave, and stacking them in the black studio.) I envisioned a further performance for the camera per my assignment in Experimental Filmmaking: inhabiting a character, or caricature, for the bedroom in a void I had designed. I delved into the props I had unconsciously chosen in the initial photographs and focused on them in the film- reflecting on this series I realize just how much the works of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (which is read at the end of the film) and A Room of One’s Own inspired this series. To have a Girl Room of one’s own now has larger implications: the works of Virginia Woolf are subjected to bans in the US, and the notion of the room- a woman's right to autonomy remains challenged and restricted by the U.S. government. I’ve come to understand the set design of Girl Room as an homage to the many rooms I’ve inhabited over the past four years. From a dorm room to an apartment deal that fell through, to my Grandfather’s bedside, the Whittier neighborhood, and now The Burren in Ireland. Wherever I rest my head, I light a candle and I claim my space.

Anything you're obsessed with at the moment?

Anthotype photo developing processes!

What's the best thing you've found on the Free Shelf?

extension cords ;)