Sophia Hatzikos, MFA in Visual Art ’24

Sophia Hatzikos earned her MFA in Visual Art from the Sam Fox School at WashU in 2024. In the 2024-25 academic year, she was the second person to hold the school’s Post-MFA Studio Fellowship, which provides a recent MFA graduate studio space in Weil Hall and access to university making spaces, libraries, and more. In April 2025, Hatzikos mounted a solo exhibition, “Zestí,” at the Kranzberg Arts Foundation. In this article, she shares some of the most significant things she learned during her fellowship year.

Her next steps include serving as a studio assistant for artist Tamara Johnson, the school’s 2022-23 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Hatzikos will return to St. Louis in fall 2025 to conduct a Fox Friday workshop and present an artist talk on her work.

#1 Keep making like nobody’s watching.

After graduating, there’s no assignment, no assigned exhibition, no deadline. It’s on you to maintain your practice. It was challenging, at first, to figure out where I belonged. I wasn’t a student, faculty, or staff. But that also meant that I was in charge of how I worked and had the freedom to build a more intuitive studio practice.

#2 Be intentional about how you spend your time.

I wanted to give myself the year after graduate school to make. I prioritized that over everything else. I tried to be in the studio any time that I wasn’t making income or taking care of myself.

I learned I really like full days, at least three a week. I don’t want two hours in the studio here and there; I want a solid, uninterrupted stretch. I’d set up my meetings and part-time work in a way that would leave me more time in the studio.

There are different elements of your studio practice to manage and make time for. There’s making, and there’s also applying to opportunities, managing email, engaging with community and conversation, and logistics.

#3 It’s ok to go where the wind takes you.

I’ve always walked into the school year ready to start a new piece of research. Last year, I thought my thesis work was going to be about the River Des Peres. This year, I was set on a body of work about viewing the Olympics as landscape. But once I’m in the studio, I go with my gut on what feels most intuitive to make at a given time. It turned out this year that I was captivated thinking about the wind and atmosphere of Greece and trying to sensorially relocate back there. I think that’s when opportunities come your way — when you have a focus and sense of direction.

#4 How to put together an exhibition on your own

I decided that I wanted to build out a body of work that would become an exhibition this year — that was my goal for the fellowship. I had been thinking about my MFA thesis work and how there were other gestures I wanted to add, but the capacity, time, or ability just didn’t fit into that timeline.

Advocating for my own success and visibility is something I really took the reins of this year, especially by inviting the community in for studio visits. I still don’t know a lot, but I’m learning.

Putting an exhibition together on your own is really hard. I was planning nine months out, and I learned that most exhibitions are planned out multiple years in advance, especially if you want a space to yourself. This one almost didn’t happen, but I really hustled, and finally someone said yes. A studio visit with Gina Grafos, the chief curator and director of visual and literary art at the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, opened up an opportunity to have a pop-up exhibition in their space. I appreciate that visit and Gina’s support so much—the exhibition wouldn’t have happened without it.

Zestí