I Happen to Be Rock

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present I Happen to Be Rock, a group exhibition by the 2026 Cornell MFA candidates in Creative Visual Arts. I Happen to be Rock is a culminating exhibition featuring the work of Marissa Cote, Michael Morgan, Sheila Novak, Onome Olotu, Faye Pamintuan, Carla Rangel García, and Yun Hsiang Wang. Across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation, writing, and expanded material practices, the exhibition gathers seven artists whose work insists on persistence, relation, transformation, and becoming. The title suggests contingency and endurance; something accidental and elemental, arrived at and borne through. It evokes a condition of having taken form under pressure, of becoming matter, presence, witness. Featuring works by graduating artists in Cornell University’s M.F.A. in Creative Visual Arts, I Happen to Be Rock brings together distinct practices that remain in dynamic conversation with one another. Material curiosity and conceptual range shape the exhibition, as the artists move through questions of identity, collectivity, visibility, repair, queer construction, memory, and the horizon of what might still be possible. The exhibition is funded in part by Cornell Council for the Arts.