What We Tend: The MFA Class of 2026
On Friday, May 1, the Stamps School of Art & Design’s Master of Fine Arts program graduated a new cohort of talented artists. The Stamps MFA Class of 2026 includes seven artists whose practices unfold through care — care for land, for bodies, for memory, and for one another.
Art critic and writer Aruna D’Souza, who viewed and juried the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition as part of a panel of visiting critics, noted, “I’ve been to a lot of MFA thesis shows around the country and I can say with confidence this is one of the best I’ve encountered—not only because of the strength and complexity and pleasures offered by the individual projects, but also because of the sense that the artists were talking and thinking together, learning and being inspired by each other. That such a strong sense of conversation could result in really unique and individual artistic voices is truly remarkable.”
View each artist’s video profile and learn more about their 2026 thesis exhibitions below.
River Forest Berry’s Rest Here explores textiles as tactile records of histories — repositories of labor and evidence of care passed from one generation to the next. Through installation, deconstruction, and attention to heirloom objects and everyday fabric, Berry reframes textile practice as both an archive and an act of care: a place where memory is continually preserved, transformed, and remade.
“The work focuses on how these objects act as a living archive and how they preserve memory, tradition, and the people and places that they’ve interacted with.”
Learn more: riverfberry.com
Marzanna is the Slavic goddess of death, disease, and winter, often invoked through the Polish ritual of Topienie Marzanny, in which an effigy is paraded and drowned on the first day of spring. Through sculptural effigies and year-round community workshops and events, Michelle Cieloszczyk’s O, Marzanno! expands Marzanna’s narrative beyond a single sacrificial moment, reclaiming the myth to foreground the burdens Marzanna carries for others and invite reflection on care, illness, and tenderness
“I’m really hoping that people can also think about who might be a Marzanna in their life — who has held their burdens, who has cared for them — and acknowledge that invisible labor.”
Zoë Dong’s A Story Like a Question Mark: A Family Fabulation in Four Parts brings together four short films that follow Dong’s tender, sometimes funny, sometimes futile pursuit of her family’s history. Focusing on her paternal grandparents’ immigration from Southern China to Detroit, Dong embodies and performs as her own ancestors, moving through gaps created by time, complicated relationships, assimilation, and the scattered realities of migration.
“It’s a family history project, but it’s also a project about memory and storytelling… stories that parents tell us, and then stories that we tell ourselves to fill in the missing parts that have been lost in our family histories.”
Fiona Hoffer’s Crossways utilizes sculpture and video to explore borders and their paradoxes: their constructedness and their realness, their porosity and their solidity. A video projection follows the pathway of an endoscopic camera as it simultaneously shows two sides of multiple borders — current and previous — between the U.S. and Mexico, and the U.S. and Canada. Sculptural works engage maps, mirrors, post diggers, and concrete — materials historically used to construct or challenge border infrastructures.
“We talk about territory with such certainty, and that can enable such violence… it’s a great example of how borders are constructed and not fixed.”
Michael “Modius Modi” King Jr.‘s EDEN: Somewhere in Time is a nonlinear series of works that follows characters through daily life in pursuit of the so-called unreachable “EDEN:” a stand-in for “heaven, nirvana, peace,” and other forms of imagined arrival. Gathering drawings, paintings, and prints created over the past several years, the exhibition presents moments within a larger world rather than a single linear narrative, inviting viewers to move at their own pace.
“I want somebody to leave seeing my work, but feeling the same exact way that I felt in 2004 when I was three years old and I saw Dragon Ball Z for the first time: that moment right there inspired me to pick up a pen and try to create things… I want people to feel a bit more inspired to just create, even if it’s from the mundane things that life presents them.”
Michaela Nichelle’s Miss Loretta’s Living Room is a three-part body of work focused on the legacy of Black Candy Ladies and neighborhood candy stores and their influence on their communities. Combining archival materials with oral storytelling and food installation, Nichelle practices critical fabulation to replicate the home of Loretta Mims (the artist’s grandmother) and to ask what it means to take on a role of communal care — all while tracing the emotional and material work of engaging family archives.
“I’m working through our relationship with food, and with candy, and with passed down recipes along with archival materials, to show how vast candy ladies were as a site of knowledge production and communal care.”
Learn More: michaelanichelle.com
Sujay Saple’s Tangible Remnants investigates what brings volcanic land and human bodies into intimate union — asking how one might become the other, or take on the other’s material tendencies. A volcanic site is more than a geologic landscape: in Saple’s work, it becomes a living territory, a volatile performance, and a catalyst of creation. Death, cremation, and their resultant materials become a speculative route into “subjective geology,” where transformation is physiological and elemental.
“It looks at volcanoes as living territories, and I look at the dialogue between a living terrestrial body and a living human body. Land as body and body as site, when does one become the other?”
Learn More: sujaysaple.com
“Working across ritual, non-linear time, and intersectional inquiries into labor and domestic life, our graduating MFA students treat familial, site-specific, and sociopolitical histories as living structures rather than hermetically sealed archives. Through distinctive engagements with critical fabulation and unique approaches to mining of what has been, what could have been, and what could be — these seven artists model modes of resilient wayfinding in these fraught times. Within the backdrop of a shifting and uncertain sociopolitical landscape, our students are working toward alternative futures outside of traditional institutions, while calling on the wisdom of the rituals and care practices of ancestors, the teachings of the land, the agency of materials, and new modes of co-creation with both human and non-human entities to create spaces of respite, resilience, and imagination of other modes of being in the world. Their works are worlds and I’m incredibly proud of them.”
—Angela Washko, MFA Program Director and Catherine B. Heller Professor of Art & Design
MFA candidates presented their thesis talks on Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at Pierpont Commons. What We Tend: the 2026 MFA Graduate Thesis Exhibition was on view at Stamps Gallery March 20-April 11, 2026.