Safe Keeping: MFA Group Exhibition

Languages of texture, color, symbol, and artifact offer possible futures. In the gallery, artists become responders and prognosticators, weaving stories out of strands of curiosity and restlessness, beauty and inequity, the abject and the comfortable.

Artmaking and understanding are interdependent, shaped by the gallery, the memory bank, the spoken or materialized story that traces the interplay between the incidental and the essential.

What do we hold dear to us? What do we decide to keep? Safe from what and from whom? These questions lie at the center of the exhibition as we consider the vessels of keeping and seek to reveal the underlying architectures that support and hold us.

What is in our custody and what is left unguarded reveals as much about value as it does about exclusion. To choose what is safe is to decide what remains. Just as you are in a state of choosing, the objects chose to be here (at least according to object-oriented ontology). Safe Keeping becomes a refuge, a reflective place to contemplate the precious, a temporary preservation in which to make meaning together. 

2026 MFA Candidates

Chris Borgia
Photographing from the perspective of a city dweller attuned to its transitional spaces, Christopher Borgia explores the overlooked thresholds of urban life. Borgia references Robert Moses’ urban planning legacies by focusing on infrastructure initiatives designed to displace marginalized communities, the connections between his family’s immigrant past during the late nineteenth century, and his current experiences in New York City. We follow Borgia in considering how the legacy of power, planning, and displacement continues to shape the city’s social and cultural landscape.

Tanisha D’souza
Tanisha D’Souza’s large-scale abstract paintings foreground form and texture over representation. Working primarily in monochrome, she builds dynamic surfaces that balance subtle tonal shifts with bold gestural energy. Drawing inspiration from the movements and presence of her cat, her work evokes textures and rhythms that blur the boundaries between the organic, the human, and the industrial.

Adrian Gray
Engaging with ideas and materials collected from the world around him, Adrian Gray explores intersections between fantasy and nature. Working with common and organic objects, Gray endues them with abstract qualities, playing with how they take up space. Inspired by abstraction, minimalism, and environmental art movements, he transforms objects through whimsy and animism.

Nyssa Juneau
Influenced by her surroundings, Nyssa Juneau discovers beauty in the everyday.
Drawn to vivid color and subtle detail, she captures moments that might otherwise go unnoticed, inviting viewers to pause and look more closely at the world around them, like a figure putting on a green sweater. Working in fresco, a technique in which pigment is applied to freshly laid wet plaster, she embraces both the immediacy and permanence of the medium. Each layer becomes part of the surface itself, transforming fleeting, ordinary subjects into enduring celebrations of the mundane.

Gabriella Mazza
Using vivid color and textile form, Gabriella Mazza creates dreamlike sculptures that
reimagine traditional religious imagery. Having grown up in Italy, she draws from the
rich visual culture of Roman Catholicism, its rituals and symbols, while infusing them with her own language, and a hint of the macabre. Mazza’s work becomes an act of custody, holding within it the memories, contradictions, and emotional residue of belief.

Yuka Nakamura
Departing from the depiction of daily routines, Yuka Nakamura’s recent work turns toward abstraction as a way of holding memory and emotion in color and form. Working primarily in pastel hues, she captures the quiet calm of domestic life through soft gestures and shifting tones. Her paintings could be considered acts of care, gentle spaces where traces of home, rhythm, and recollection are preserved within layers of texture and light.

Nena Smith
Nena Smith creates art as both archive and aspiration, envisioning herself and her loved ones within a future of peace and repair. Her sculptural collages give form to a deep sense of justice and compassion, offering visual expression to voices that resist silence and suffering. Using sentimental and sometimes unconventional materials, Smith weaves together fragments of memory, emotion, and hope. Each piece becomes an act of holding, a tender preservation of what is cherished, and a gesture toward the world as it could be.

Christian Wilbur
In a social landscape that often isolates, Christian Wilbur uses photography to
examine identity, masculinity, and the quiet solitude of suburban life. His images reflect a subtle dissatisfaction with the world inherited from modernity and past generations, spaces shaped by both comfort and emptiness. Through framing and stillness, Wilbur’s work holds traces of vulnerability and introspection within environments that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Animus Zhang
Creation, analysis, and recollection are at the heart of Animus Zhang’s practice. Working in drawing and video art, Zhang captures life through the lens of neurodiversity, translating sensory experience into moving image and animated form. The in-between spaces of supermodernity, those transient zones between presence and detachment, become both subject and setting. Through these layered works, Zhang transforms fleeting moments into acts of preservation, working against the speed and saturation of contemporary life.

2027 MFA Candidates

Kirsten Borror
Working in prints, Kirsten Borror develops intricate depictions of familiar environments and the natural or cultural forces that shape them. Engaging with native plants, human–nature interactions, and landscapes, her compositions bring together distinct elements into works greater than the sum of their parts. Experimenting with texture and reflection, Borror invites us to look closely and contemplate the relationship between detail and whole.

Jessica Dalrymple
Inspired by native plants and environmental reclamation, Jessica Dalrymple translates observation into compositions that blend memory and place. Using organic matter, she reveals how plants and wildlife adapt to human intervention. Her horticultural training informs both her research and her artistic process. Does this translation preserve the organic — does it keep it safe?

Ben Dimock
Ben Dimock transforms the hidden mechanics of the gallery into a site of growth and tension. Metal grasses emerge from the radiator enclosure, turning a structure meant to conceal the building’s heating system into something unexpectedly alive. The work draws attention to what is usually overlooked or kept out of sight — the pipes, vents, and coverings that regulate comfort — reimagining them as part of a living system. What once functioned to contain, now appears to sprout, revealing the uneasy overlap between design, utility, and the natural world.

Alex Patrick Dyck
Alex Patrick Dyck’s work might be considered an appeal for connection. Taking inspiration from their spirituality, the intimacy of memory, acts of devotion, and an instinctual impulse to archive, Dyck uses plant-based materials and ephemera, keeping and interpreting objects that were once cherished by others.

Demi Johnson
Demi L. Johnson’s practice centers on self-reflection and the ongoing exploration
of identity through the act of making. Rooted in printmaking, she investigates the layered nature of personal growth and transformation. Texture is an essential element in her work, visible on the surface and tangible in the material presence of paper and ink. The deliberate pace of printmaking invites patience and contemplation, allowing her to engage deeply with each impression and
the emotions it holds. Rather than using color symbolically, she applies it to build tone, atmosphere, and depth. Favoring subdued palettes, her prints quietly convey the subtleties of emotion, memory, and becoming.

Anton Kaplan 
Working with texture and tactility, Anton Kaplan turns to black, white, and the quiet
tonalities of grisaille as a language of clarity amid chaos. His surfaces become quiet environments, anchored spaces where feeling can unfold without explanation. Each mark and gesture acts as a form of preservation, holding traces of thought and movement that linger in stillness.

Heather Kelly
Through collage and harvested imagery, Heather Kelly explores themes of American
culture and conspiracy. Growing up in Los Alamos, the New Mexican town where the
atomic bomb was created, Kelly questions the meaning of American identity. Her work incorporates imagery and magazines from the mid 20th century that reflect post-World War II vision of American life. She cuts out and creates images that are nostalgic and idealized images of the past to distort their original context and comment on contemporary political and cultural realities.

Teresa Ricci
Teresa Ricci draws inspiration from the drama and intensity of the Italian Baroque.
Her work resembles a fantastical dollhouse or cabinet of curiosities, where figures appear cramped within the frame as if pressing against the limits of their world. Dramatic lighting exposes their forms, while a natural yet uncanny palette heightens the sense of tension between beauty and distortion.

Hector Rodriguez
While incarcerated, Hector Rodriguez began using art to escape from the harsh
reality of imprisonment, immortalizing early childhood memories of him and his mother. Now, his art uses vivid colors and imagery to bring attention to the systematic injustices people of color face in our criminal justice system. Rodriguez also merges female figures with natural elements, symbolically challenging patriarchy.

Odette Steinert
Odette Steinert draws inspiration from medieval Italian frescoes and historical
clothing in nineteenth century photographs. This often manifests in her work through the way modern clothing takes shape around the human figure and how it can form and contain a body. You may notice the folds of the clothing or the luminance of colors.

Carlos Vargas
Departing from his earlier work in textile sculpture, Carlos Vargas turns to painting
to explore Aztec and Mexican mythologies through vibrant color and layered symbolism. At the center of this work stands Xolo, the sacred dog believed to guide souls safely through the underworld. Looming large across the canvas, Xolo embodies protection and passage, bridging the worlds of the living and the dead. Through this image, Vargas transforms myth into an act of conservation, honoring the guardian who carries spirit and memory across the threshold.

AJ Viner
AJ Viner is a collector of coastal remnants and nautical materials, drawing from a lifelong relationship with the Long Island Sound. Through sculpture and assemblage, Viner transforms found and weathered objects into meditations on memory, touch, and place. Their work engages the sensory and symbolic ties between the human and the maritime, where the boundaries between preservation and change blur. In gathering and reconfiguring organic materials, Viner’s practice becomes an act of conservation, holding fragments of the shoreline against the inevitable pull of erosion and time.

Leoni Voltz
Embracing emerging technologies, Leoni Voltz works at the intersection of artificial
intelligence and art, using video and digital media to explore the shifting boundaries between human perception and machine learning. Her practice investigates what remains beyond the reach of algorithms, intuition, emotion, and the unknowable. Through moving image and code, Voltz creates spaces for human experience, preserving traces of thought and feeling within the ever-expanding landscape of technological possibility.