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

How do rising effective artists discover group and help after grad college? What outlooks and sensibilities do they share with the opposite members of their cohort? Six new RISD Photography MFAs and 11 Painting MFAs confirmed work in group exhibitions this summer time in New York City that exposed every artist’s singular imaginative and prescient and the delicate methods by which they’ve influenced and impressed each other. 

The Painting present, which was on view from July 10–August 28 at Uffner & Liu on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was curated by artist, educator, and author Ajay Kurian, who started educating at RISD in 2025. The present’s title, Marooned, loosely references enslaved folks of the Americas and the Caribbean who fled into the mountains, swamps, and unreachable inside to stay as free folks (and in addition to return and rescue others from the communities the place that they had been enslaved). 

In the exhibition’s curatorial assertion, Kurian explains how the idea pertains to the present. “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.”

For Lloyd-Princeton Cangé MFA 26 PT, whose piece Into the Hinterland (oil and ink on canvas and linen) was included within the present, the marooned idea served as a generative immediate. “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 among their large-scale drawings, The Immaculate Self Conception (charcoal and acrylic on paper) to the present. “My practice constructs autofictonal worlds whose logic stems from queer theory, auto mechanical systems, Medieval medicine, and eschatology,” they observe. “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 items 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 couple of blocks away on the Camera Club of New York’s BAXTER ST gallery, a equally tight-knit group of current Photography MFAs debuted new work in Written on the Wind, a gaggle present 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 narrative of need, wealth, jealousy, and self-destruction among the many members of a Texas oil dynasty. 

“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 level out that the items on view complement and bolster each other. Portraits by Tomorrow Blake Chapman MFA 26 PH share a way of intimacy with video and sculpture by Wen Zhang MFA 26 PH. The ghostly shoreline construction documented by Virginia Hanusik MFA 26 PH mirrors The Image Falls Apart, a video set up by Alexa Nikol Curran MFA 26 PH by which the composition of a 14th-century altarpiece is slowly restaged by practitioners of postmodern dance. And a subtly playful dissection of imaginative and prescient by Kyle Gyumin Dong MFA 26 PH gives 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.”

Hanusik agrees and says she is worked up to point out 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 provides. 

Leifheit poignantly describes this late-summer collaboration because the final second earlier than departure: “Six artists sharing the same air, moving in formation, but ultimately bound for other shores.”

Simone Solondz / prime photograph courtesy Uffner & Liu
August 27, 2026