Where the Body Meets the Canvas: CGU’s 2026 President’s Art Award

The CGU MFA graduate channels basketball, biomorphic form, and the limits of the human body into work that will now hang in the president’s residence and enter the university’s permanent collection.  

When Alex Parrasch describes his paintings, he reaches for words like “floaty” and “intuitive,” deliberately light touches for work that is, by any measure, physically intense. 

His canvases are full of bodies in motion. Limbs stretching past the frame’s edge, biomorphic shapes overlapping geometry, lines that feel as though they’re still moving even after the brush has lifted. It is work that grew, as Parrasch tells it, from a deep and lasting love of basketball and from the years he spent training competitively, learning firsthand what the human body is capable of, and what it looks like when pushed to its limits. 

This spring, that work earned Parrasch the 2026 President’s Art Award, CGU’s highest artistic honor that’s bestowed upon a graduating student. His painting will hang in the president’s residence for the next year before entering the Presidential Art Collection, which has showcased student work across campus since 1989. Along with the honor comes a $5,000 honorarium and a lasting place in the university’s institutional memory. 

“New Color Jammers / Sam’s Toy Boat” 

The winning piece, “New Color Jammers/Sam’s Toy Boat,” is, in Parrasch’s words, about young adulthood. It’s the universal experience of embracing imagination, play, and self-expression while navigating the everyday chaos of life. It is also characteristically hard to pin down. Representational enough to suggest a body in motion and abstract enough to keep the eye searching. 

CGU President Michelle Bligh was moved by its vitality. “What struck me most about Alex’s work was the way he transforms personal experience into something that feels both deeply individual and universally accessible,” Bligh said. “His paintings are rooted in memories of basketball — its movement, rhythm, energy, competition, and joy — but they transcend the sport itself. Even viewers who have never picked up a basketball can recognize the emotions embedded in the work. It’s persistence, focus, playfulness, struggle, growth, and the pursuit of excellence.” 

She described the experience of viewing his work as kinetic. 

“The compositions are layered, dynamic, and constantly unfolding. Much like a basketball game, your eye is never standing still. It moves across the canvas.” 

What ultimately distinguished Parrasch’s submission, though, was a combination of artistic sophistication and authenticity. The sense of years of committed practice made visible on the surface of the paint. 

Sports, the Body, and the Sweet Spot 

Parrasch came to Claremont Graduate University after earning his BA from Bennington College in 2021. His artistic influences are eclectic and telling. He cites Ken Price and Philip Guston as central figures, drawn to Price’s variation between organic and geometric form and Guston’s willingness to push figuration to its edges. Takashi Murakami and Peter Voulkos also appear in his references. 

But for Parrasch, sports, and basketball above all, sits at the center of the practice. 

“Sports for me is a good way to examine the human body as art,” he said. “This is kind of my sweet spot. The convergence of art, sports, and the human body.” His years of competitive athletic training gave him something more than fitness; they gave him a vocabulary of tension and release, of natural and unnatural motion, that has never left his work. 

His process is, by design, hard to systematize. “When making original conceptions at a smaller scale, they really do their best to make themselves,” he said. “I always seem to lean towards line drawing of some kind to make a representational image that teeters on abstraction. But it’s fairly floaty and intuitive and maybe even instinctual.” Completion, too, resists formula. Sometimes he knows immediately; sometimes it takes a few days to be sure. 

Finding His Practice at CGU 

Parrasch chose CGU for its interdisciplinary approach and for the space it offered him to build his practice on his own terms. “I chose Claremont with the hopes of being able to build up my practice and spread positivity while doing it,” he said. What the program provided, he found, was a deeper comfort with subjectivity and uncertainty. “I learned that creating a good artwork can be a very subjective experience and we really don’t always know, let alone in the immediacy, what a good artwork really is. So, you’ve just got to embrace your interests and remain committed to your curiosities.” 

Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities Lori Anne Farrell pointed to the structural conditions of CGU’s MFA program as a key factor in producing work at this level.  

“Credit can be equally distributed between the strengths of our students, our faculty, and our staff,” she said. “The fact that every art student admitted to and enrolled in the MFA program is given a personal studio and is expected to participate both individually and collectively in professional-level exhibits on campus is our other great strength and sets us apart from many other university art programs.” 

Parrasch’s work is already held in several institutional collections, including Bennington College and The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach. For Farrell, the CGU community can expect to follow his trajectory closely. “I think Alex’s work is stellar, especially when viewed in exhibition,” she said. “I know he is already showing in professional galleries, and so I am looking forward to his impact on a world that desperately needs the challenge and solace of art.” 

A Perfect Ending and Beginning 

For Parrasch, the award carries particular meaning because of its permanence. Asked whether knowing the painting would hang in the president’s residence and enter the collection changes how he thinks about it, he was characteristically unfazed. “No, because I see the work fitting in any and all contexts. The work is about a shared human experience; therefore, it contains multitudes of perspectives from life and the possibilities one can get from it are always endless.” 

President Bligh, who will live with the work for the next year, sees that quality as central to what makes it a worthy addition to the collection. “Art has a different presence when it becomes part of your daily environment,” she said. “Over time, you notice details you may have missed initially, and your relationship with the work evolves.” The painting, she added, will become part of conversations with guests, colleagues, alumni, and friends of the university. It’s a piece of art that will continue to do its work long after its creator has moved on. 

For Parrasch, it is simply the right ending to his time at CGU. “It really is an honor and I am very grateful for it,” he said. “It is the perfect ending to my time at CGU. I love perfect endings.” 

Alex Parrasch lives and works in Claremont, California. His work has been exhibited at Good Mother Gallery and CMay Gallery (Los Angeles), SPY Projects (Los Angeles), and The Bunker Artspace (West Palm Beach, Florida).