January 4, 2024

Xiao (Smile) Ma ’23, from Suzhou, China, attended Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic high school in Louisiana. One of the staff members at the school recommended Bennington to her, and she applied. 

Of her initial visit to Bennington, Ma said, “I fell in love with the architecture and the buildings here. It stood out to me so much. I got to explore the field and see all of the classrooms, and everything was beautiful.” 

She intended to study literature, but her interest in reading and writing was soon eclipsed by photography and visual arts. She had always loved taking photos for people and even took several of her classmates’ senior portraits. At Bennington, she was driven to find historical evidence related to how photography evolved. 

“I just realized that there is so much about photography that I don’t know, about just the history of it, how hands-on it can be to develop things, to scan things,” Ma said. “It intrigued me a lot.”

Until she came to Bennington, she hadn’t considered shooting film. When she learned that the Visual Arts department lent analog film cameras to students, she bought some film and started shooting it. 

Later, Ma explored printmaking and tried many other classes, including continuing with some literature courses. Her class choices, she said, “are all just ways for me to use the resources here and try out different things.” 

Her path forward was clarified when she completed the Museum Fellows Term in New York City. She got to work for the Studio Museum in Harlem while also taking classes with guest faculty experts from the field, including the chief curator emeritus from the Bronx Museum and the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

“It really changed how I see studying and what I want to focus on later in life,” Ma said. “I gained a lot of knowledge going from one place to another and combining all of this together.”

During Museum Term, Ma curated a show with students from Union Theological Seminary, which inspired her to consider the nuances of contemporary art in religious spaces. In the first few years after graduation, Ma intends to pursue a Master in Divinity on her path to becoming an art curator in religious spaces. 

“I came from an atheist background in China, a communist country, and going to a Catholic boarding school was, in some ways, very uncomfortable for me,” Ma said. “And the tradition from there to Bennington was quite abrupt, but it got me thinking about how I can use all of my knowledge combined.”

She is eager to bridge the gap between the hierarchy of the art world and the hierarchy of the religious world, she said. 

“I am thinking of using art and religion as tools to help each other to break down the inherent barriers,” Ma said. 

When asked what she will miss about Bennington, Ma said, “It is very emotional these days. I will really miss the place. Just everything about it. I really enjoyed my time at Bennington. I say it very sincerely.” 

After four years at Bennington, she said, “It made me realize how much I love to be with nature. I came from a really big city, and I always thought I would only like cities. I really learned to be myself here and really want to carry on with that feeling of what I want to be or what kind of things I want to do and hold on to that.” 

“That collective feeling of belonging and community, having a sense that I have a lot of people around me who care about me a lot and would dedicate their time to me and vice versa, it might be hard outside of Bennington, just because of how scattered the world is,” Ma said. “The sense of security and community is something I will miss. I am just very grateful for Bennington.” 

After graduation, Ma is looking forward to returning to China for the first time in four years and, eventually, traveling to the American west. 

For more information about studying visual arts at Bennington, visit the visual arts page. To learn more about becoming a student at Bennington, visit https://www.bennington.edu/hyphenate.