RISD Class of 2026 Painting and Photography MFAs Show Work in New York City

How do emerging fine artists find community and support after grad school? What outlooks and sensibilities do they share with the other members of their cohort? Six new RISD Photography MFAs and 11 Painting MFAs showed work in group exhibitions this summer in New York City that revealed each artist’s singular vision and the subtle ways in which they have influenced and inspired one another. 

The Painting show, which was on view from July 10–August 28 at Uffner & Liu on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was curated by artist, educator, and writer Ajay Kurian, who began teaching at RISD in 2025. The show’s title, Marooned, loosely references enslaved people of the Americas and the Caribbean who fled into the mountains, swamps, and unreachable interior to live as free people (and also to return and rescue others from the communities where they had been enslaved). 

In the exhibition’s curatorial statement, Kurian explains how the concept relates to the show. “The feeling of being left behind—not by accident, but by design—is one of the defining emotional facts of this moment,” he writes. “It is the ground these artists are standing on.”

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For Lloyd-Princeton Cangé MFA 26 PT, whose piece Into the Hinterland (oil and ink on canvas and linen) was included in the show, the marooned concept served as a generative prompt. “With this history as a stage, I allow my myriad other influences and interests—from Arthurian legend to voodoo to class politics—to seep in and inform what is becoming an epic story,” he says. 

Multimedia artist Banshee Maria MFA 26 PT contributed one of their large-scale drawings, The Immaculate Self Conception (charcoal and acrylic on paper) to the show. “My practice constructs autofictonal worlds whose logic stems from queer theory, auto mechanical systems, Medieval medicine, and eschatology,” they note. “These seemingly dissonant subjects collide through their similarities, with a particular focus on the fragile, self-reliant systems that make up our understanding of machine and body.”

Also included are pieces by Callie Coccia MFA 26 PT, Isabel Horgan MFA 26 PT, Siran Liu MFA 26 PT, Kati Lowe MFA 26 PT, Lucy Luckovich MFA 26 PT, Shiyeon Monk MFA 26 PT, Pavol Roskovensky MFA 26 PT, Talha Shams MFA 26 PT, and Ricky Vasan MFA 26 PT.

Just a few blocks away at the Camera Club of New York’s BAXTER ST gallery, a similarly tight-knit group of recent Photography MFAs debuted new work in Written on the Wind, a group show on view from August 20–September 3. Curated by RISD alum Matthew Leifheit 11 PH, the exhibition takes its title from Douglas Sirk’s 1956 Technicolor melodrama, a story of desire, wealth, jealousy, and self-destruction among the members of a Texas oil dynasty. 

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“What is written on the wind is simultaneously inscribed and disappearing,” Leifheit explains. “That relationship feels particularly apt for a group exhibition that gathers artists whose principal connection is circumstantial.”

But he goes on to point out that the pieces on view complement and bolster one another. Portraits by Tomorrow Blake Chapman MFA 26 PH share a sense of intimacy with video and sculpture by Wen Zhang MFA 26 PH. The ghostly shoreline structure documented by Virginia Hanusik MFA 26 PH mirrors The Image Falls Apart, a video installation by Alexa Nikol Curran MFA 26 PH in which the composition of a 14th-century altarpiece is slowly restaged by practitioners of postmodern dance. And a subtly playful dissection of vision by Kyle Gyumin Dong MFA 26 PH provides a naturalistic counterpart to exactingly printed studio constructions by Elliott Golden MFA 26 PH. 

“We have spent the past two years sharing our work and being inspired by one another,” says Dong. “Our practices are diverse both visually and conceptually, but ultimately we share a common sense of care and curiosity for the medium of photography.”

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Hanusik agrees and says she is excited to show in New York City. “My piece is part of a larger project titled Property Studies that analyzes the home as a symbol of permanence in the American landscape amid rising sea levels and coastal erosion,” she adds. 

Leifheit poignantly describes this late-summer collaboration as the last moment before departure: “Six artists sharing the same air, moving in formation, but ultimately bound for other shores.”

Simone Solondz / top photo courtesy Uffner & Liu
August 27, 2026