What We Tend: The 2026 MFA Graduate Thesis Exhibition

Rest Here explores textiles as tactile records of histories, repositories of labor, and evidence of care passed from one generation to the next. This installation deconstructs how memory is preserved and transformed through textiles, performance, and installation; reimagining textile practice as both an archive and an act of care. Technique and understanding are inherited through these practices. Fabric holds time and connection. She reframes how domestic labor and regional craft traditions are seen: not as static histories, but as evolving systems of memory. Berry positions fiber as a living archive, a site where memory is continually made, unmade, and remade.

For more information, visit riverf​berry​.com.

Marzanna is the goddess of death, disease and winter in Slavic Mythology. In the annual Polish folk ritual of Topienie Marzanny, an effigy is built, paraded, and drowned in a body of water on the first day of spring. The ritual fulfills multiple cultural functions: to ensure a good harvest, to ward off plagues, and to banish winter. Marzanna holds many ​“feminized” identities: bride, harbinger of fertility, grim reaper, mother-earth, and old lady winter.

Through building effigies and leading year-round community events that expand the narrative of Marzanna’s life cycle, Michelle reclaims her myth and foregrounds the burdens she carries for the wellbeing of others. In revering and holding tenderly the vilified, scapegoated woman, Michelle recognizes parts of Marzanna in us — and ourselves in her. Michelle imbues her story with the intergenerational legacies of women who possess the power to heal and hold pain. By leaning into the potential for mimetic transfer that an effigy provides, Marzanna offers a gift: the release of our burdens.

The desire to understand one’s family is often a desire to understand oneself. When that understanding is obscured — by time, by complicated relationships, by the violence of assimilation and the scattered activity of immigration– how do we answer questions that remain?

A Story Like a Question Mark brings together four short films that invite us into Dong’s sometimes funny, sometimes futile, and always tender quest to connect to her long-dead relatives. Focusing on the history of her paternal grandparents’ immigration from Southern China to Detroit, Dong leads us through her family’s story by embodying and performing as her own ancestors.

For more information, visit: zoe​dong​.com

Crossways brings together sculpture and endoscopic video to explore borders and their paradoxes: their constructedness and their realness, their porosity and their solidity. A video projection invites viewers to follow the meandering pathway of an endoscopic camera as it simultaneously shows two sides of multiple borders, current and previous, between the US and Mexico and the US and Canada. Crossways also presents a series of sculptures that play with tools and materials – maps, mirrors, post diggers, and concrete– that have been historically used to construct or challenge the solidity of borders. 

Sometime in the summer of ____, EDEN emerged. A nonlinear series of pieces that follows the daily lives of characters in their pursuit of the so-called unreachable, ​“EDEN.” It’s another word for an old longing: heaven, nirvana, peace, or enlightenment. A longing that spans across millennia and cultures. A desire to escape the accursed world in which we dwell. This exhibition brings together works created over the past __ years. Each piece exists as moments within a larger world, rather than a linear narrative. So, take your time and *float* between worlds. Or don’t, the path to EDEN is yours to choose. 

For more information, visit: mod​ius​modi​.com

Miss Loretta’s is a three part body of work that focuses on the legacy of Black Candy Ladies and Neighborhood candy stores and their influence on their communities. Miss Loretta’s installation practices critical fabulation by combining archival materials with oral story telling and food installation to replicate Loretta Mims home, the grandmother of the artist. Loretta’s Legacy the food cart explores how communal care can be mobilized and displayed in unconventional ways. While asking the artist what it means to take on the role that her grandmother lovingly held. Lastly, Altar Keeper is a text based work that explores the findings from performances of Loretta’s Legacy and the feelings of the artist while working through archival materials of her grandmothers.

For more information, visit michae​lanichelle​.com.

A volcanic site is much more than a geologic landscape. It is a volatile creature, a pulsating performance, a harbinger of death, a catalyst of creation. Here, land is neither static nor perpetual. It is corporeal.

The exhibition investigates what – physiologically and elementally – brings volcanic land and human bodies into intimate union. How could one be seen as becoming the other, as possessing the materiality and tendencies of the other?

It proposes death, cremation and its resultant materials as a speculative route to answer these questions, actuating a subjective geology. Dying transforms the body into pure matter – into living land.

For more information, visit: sujaysaple​.com