This exhibition highlights the ambitious and impactful thesis work of the Department of Art & Art History’s 2026 art practice honors students—Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch and Zoë Rehnborg.

Art practice majors are accepted into the honors program based on the strength of the portfolios and written proposals submitted at the end of the student’s junior year. As honors students, Kea and Zoë have worked throughout the fall and winter quarters of their senior year, mentored by faculty and Art Practice MFA students, to develop their proposals into the bodies of work on display.

The title of the exhibition, selected by the students, is excerpted from the first line of a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem begins: “Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring.” The author continues through lyrical descriptions of natural elements, moving through dirt, plants, birds, celestial objects, and even weather. The poem concludes “But you were something more than young and sweet and fair, - and the long year remembers you.” Through the cyclical act of the year’s remembering, the “you” Millay is mindful of becomes all the things described—a vast and multitudinous self. With their thesis work, Kea and Zoë offer us a similar proposition as Millay. They invite us to find ourselves in expansive worlds where it is possible for our boundaries to fail, for us to become porous and multiple—more than a single self could ever be.

—Camille Utterback, Exhibition Curator and Honors Director

On View: April 14-30, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 16, 4-6pm
Coulter Art Gallery (McMurtry Building)
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 12-5pm
Free & open to the public

Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch is a Native Hawaiian visual artist from the Island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Through painting, Kea activates family and historical archives to bring her ancestors and the practices that sustained them into space and vibrant color. Her work reflects a personal reclamation of her mo’okūʻauhau (genealogical story) in a settler-colonial context, where knowing and reciting one's genealogy often requires re-learning — calling out, listening, diving and digging. Painting has enabled this process, allowing an intimate engagement with her own genealogy. As she gathers stories from her grandmother, spends time in the guava fields her grandpa once tended to, paints the hands of her great-grandma she never knew, she reclaims her right to remember while creating space for her familyʻs moʻolelo in historical and visual canons.

Zoë Rehnborg (b. 2003, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Informed by her experience working in microbiology labs, her practice explores the ecological and existential dimensions of decay, with a particular focus on microorganisms as agents of transformation in both natural systems and human narratives. Rehnborg works with organic materials — soil, SCOBY, mycelium, salvaged wood, and beeswax — to create sculptural forms that engage processes of decomposition and regeneration, treating fungi and bacteria not as mere subject matter but as active collaborators in the formation of the work. She is currently completing her BAS in Art Practice and Biology at Stanford University.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Coulter Art Gallery is located at 355 Roth Way (McMurtry Building) on Stanford campus. The gallery is open Monday-Friday, 12-5pm. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. This exhibition is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free. 

Connect with the Department of Art & Art History! Subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.