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
Chris Borgia is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work captures moments of stillness in domestic life and greater New York City. Although subjects may appear to be random scenes and objects, Borgia explores themes of family, isolation, and change, revealing intersections of history and memory. By connecting images in ways that invite us to engage in our own narrative impulses, his work can prompt reflection on our own perspectives—and on those of others—encouraging us to reconsider our relationship to the world around us.

Tanisha D’souza
Drawn from memory, Tanasha D’souza approaches her artwork with a continuity of gesture and movement between recognizable and imagined spaces. She uses her paintings to connect us to a shared sense of home, identity, and belonging—a personal nostalgia of an immigrant in New York City. D’souza creates her paintings using scraps of used materials, engaging with a sense of loss for the past while making meaning of current experiences in the modern world. In her miniature paintings, the uneven surfaces are uncontrolled and random, signifying their previous life, now being reused in something new.

Adrian Gray
Adrian Gray is fascinated by the traditions of magic. Drawing on animism, Gray’s abstract imagery envisions worlds that parallel our own- metaphors for the traditions and rituals left behind as society became increasingly mechanized. Interactions between the natural world and everyday objects that once played central roles in shaping our pattern of life now fade into the backdrop of a technology-driven world. In Gray’s work, these objects are imbued with new significance, suggesting they possess a kind of agency and meaning often overlooked in modern life.

Nyssa Juneau
Capturing still life, living things, landscapes, and animals, Nyssa Juneau’s art invites us to reflect on natural beauty. Her work emphasizes unorthodox relationships to objects and canonical art history. The interplay of lines serves as metaphors, conditions of human experience and suggest pathways toward more sustainable living. Juneau’s fascination with accessibility and beauty is evident throughout her work, creating art that resonates with us and encourages inclusion and appreciation of the natural world.

Gabriella Mazza
Visualizing the celestial world of the divine feminine and ethereal, Mazza pictures herself through choices of colors, patterns and calculated compositions of spiritual deities. Robed in garments inspired by designer Anna Sui and contemporary and traditional fashion, these angels live atop our world in the astral realm, depicting notions of a feminine, nurturing elysian God. Weaving colors that are particularly foreign to nature- such as bright neon, eccentric pinks, peacock blues- are used, emphasizing the divinity of godliness, loftiness, and the exceptional glamour within femininity beyond the physical.

Yuka Nakamura
Yuka Nakamura’s work invites us into a space of world-building and discovery, where everyday objects and portraiture can become sites of introspection and exploration. From washing machines and stolen glances, to old magazines, Nakamura can find inspiration in people or common items, transforming them into points of connection and inquiry. Her diverse background as an artist, mother of two, and her experience living between Japan and New York provides a foundation for her work, which reflects the traversing and navigation of identities and cultural perspectives.

Christian Wilbur
An evocative representation of the complex emotions tied to love and loss, Wilbur’s work explores confusion, grief, and the bitterness of a formative relationship’s end. While healing may be part of the process, Wilbur’s practice extends beyond personal closure, daring us to confront our own feelings of mourning and broken connections.

Primarily a photographer, Wilbur works across installation and performance, embracing a more expansive, protean approach to his art. Often leveraging contemporary communication devices, Wilbur breaks traditional boundaries of how art is presented and received. His practice is not only about telling stories, but is also about creating an open, transformative space for us to feel and connect.

Animus Zhang
What does the world around you look like when you aren’t watching? Animus Zhang’s work invites us to explore this question. Moments we might otherwise overlook, the things we see in our everyday lives become the characters in Zhang’s stories. Each scenario offers a new perspective on the ordinary, revealing the extraordinary in the world around us. As you interact with Zhang’s work, you may find a shift in your feelings about ordinary objects and look at them with a new meaning.

2026 MFA Candidates

Kristin Borror
Jessica Marlowe Dalrymple
Ben Dimock
Alex Patrick Dyck
Demi Johnson
Anton Kaplan
Heather Kelly
Teresa N Ricci
Hector Rodriguez
Carlos Daniel Vargas
AJ Viner
Leoni Voltz