Opinion: Why serious art lovers need to visit MFA & BFA thesis exhibitions

Installation view of Chipped Teeth & Empty Bellies: A Parsons MFA Fine Art Thesis Exhibition at Parsons School of Design.

 

By LIAM OTERO September 9th, 2026

Those of us in the New York Art World are really spoiled with the amount of art we have access to within a short walk or subway ride away through the vast terrain of museums and galleries marking our city. However, serious art lovers must not neglect the equally pertinent influence of colleges & universities, for these institutions operate as their own barometer for what the future holds for Contemporary Art (and if you are not a New York-based reader, stay put, because this essay will still apply to you).

Every educational institution and program has its own philosophies for how they teach their students, but the overarching constant between them is that this is where a student-artist finds their way in the journey of becoming a professional artist or maturing in their already existing practice. Unless otherwise noted, formal concerns and conceptual thinking are going to hold more sway than commercial motivations, although solid programs still provide reputable guidance for how one can succeed in navigating the world of galleries, collectors, and the general business of art.

Colleges & universities typically have Open Studio events in which members of the public are invited to visit an artist in their studio to see their art - completed and works-in-progress (WIP) - along with the chance to speak with them. These are wonderful events in their own right, but the thesis exhibitions are a pivotal, potentially career-defining moment for soon-to-be graduated MFA and BFA students. Furthermore, these shows happen almost year-round … school may be back in session, yet as many as four thesis exhibitions are still going on in New York right this very moment, potentially with more to come.

Broadstrokes Reasons

How thesis exhibitions are carried out is a case-by-case system among each school. Hunter College’s consistently robust MFA thesis exhibitions at 205 Hudson in Tribeca are more collectively-minded as the graduating students determine how to divvy up their works into different cohorts spread throughout the Spring semester. Meanwhile, the Parsons MFA Photography program - which currently has their Latency exhibition on view through September 18 - is curated by faculty.

 

Installation view of Zheming Yang’s work at Pratt Institute.

Unlike regular group exhibitions, any commonalities or affinities between artworks in a given thesis show is purely happenstance, for it is completely chance-based as to whom fellow artists find themselves graduating alongside. This randomness leads to a fascinating compilation of artists and mediums that one will normally not see in other contexts. In the Pratt MFA thesis exhibition, Zheming Yang’s taxidermied coyote installation, which feels conceptually attuned to the she-wolf sculptures foundational to the story of Rome’s origins, shares the same space as that of, say, Sefa Ozdogan’s eerily vacuous interior living spaces or Marie Moeller’s first-person, hyper-detailed tabletop paintings.

Curatorial logistics aside, thesis exhibitions are where unbridled, eccentric, and groundbreaking creative moves come to fruition. Only at a place like Hunter College could artists like Nick Peelor transform an entire room into a dark, claustrophobic cave that could be an imagined view of what it would look like if one were swallowed up by a Lee Bontecou sculpture. Meanwhile, Emmy-winning experimental animator Maya Edelman’s space featured wall-to-wall projected screenings of her psychedelically stylized short films in their distinctive flashes of color and illustrative marks that made the viewing experience feel all the more intimate.

 

Standout Examples

Having seen over a dozen thesis exhibitions the last several months, the below list is a selection of highlights that really blew me away. I should note that most of these are New York-based colleges & universities, yet we had the benefit of being a host city to quite a few schools from outside the area:

Barnard College BFA Visual Arts Program

Senior Thesis Exhibition, Barnard

 

Ray Atlas posing alongside her political artwork during the Barnard Senior Thesis exhibition opening reception, 2026.

 

I distinctly recall the opening reception for the Barnard students being on a Thursday night that coincided with one of the busier Chelsea openings. Much as I love the Chelsea galleries, it was worth skipping those in preference for what the Barnard students exhibited, including: Ray Atlas presented a sweeping cyanotype tapestry memorializing the lives lost in ICE custody; Romi Marckx debuted a new line of haute couture fashion designs made from synthetic hair; and Chase Taylor’s paintings encapsulate the mood and energy of the music she listens to such as 80s British New Wave bands like Depeche Mode. Bonus: Alongside the Senior Thesis exhibition, the public could also see what students from the other grades were working on across painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, etc.

Cooper Union MFA Fine Arts Program

Thesis Exhibitions, Cooper Union

 

Installation view of Julia Solines: 41 Cooper Square at Cooper Union.

 

Scattered across the school’s two buildings, graduating students maximize their allocated exhibition spaces to incredible heights. Liliana McGee’s solo showcase, Capillatus Sinew, gave a pronounced fleshiness to her use of threads for their blood red colors as they wrapped around mannequin heads and other surfaces suggested the interior mechanisms of the human body. Julia Solines’s reclamation of disused and damaged architectural fragments restores or excavates meaning from formerly lived spaces in her solo presentation, 41 Cooper Square.

Cornell University MFA Creative Visual Arts Program

I Happen to be Rock, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Gowanus, Brooklyn

 

Installation view of I Happen to be Rock at Ortega y Gasset Projects. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Possibly the most liberating exercise in thesis preparation undertaken of any of the institutional shows I visited where the 7 participating students had free reign to truly generate work at their heart’s content such as Faye Pamintuam’s bombastically resplendent abstracted mural or Sheila Novak’s unsettling and paranormal headless animal sculpture. 

Hartford MFA Photography Program

Drift / Align, Baxter Street Camera Club, Lower East Side

 

Wyatt Angelo, Page spread from Salad Days, 2025, photobook.

 

Though the installation and presentation of each students’ works deserves praise, the ultimate success for this exhibition comes down to the exceptional quality photobooks each student produced, which are artworks in themselves. The ultra-crisp, artificially-clean aesthetic of Wyatt Angelo’s Salad Days (2025) made for an aptly biting social critique of the Finance Bro lifestyle, while Marge Westreich’s black-white photos of the Austrian countryside literally read like stills from a film with the inclusion of text formatted like that of a major motion picture script.

Hunter College BFA Program

surface/tension, Hunter College

 

Grace Naydeck, In the Shadow of the Living Wood, 2026, steel, ceramic, patina, dye.

 

This year’s cohort took on a noticeably dark, edgy, and gothic look about their works, such as the following: a contemporary Danse Macabre of Leo Sano in which a subject’s performative movements are situated in the niches of an architectural adornment; Grace Naydeck’s enchanted woodland lamentation of a slain deer mourned by a coven of cloaked animals; or Sky Morales’s paintings of a contemplative Joan of Arc, complete with Medieval armor, navigating the New York subway system.

Hunter College MFA Program

Studio Art Thesis Exhibitions, 205 Hudson, Tribeca

As mentioned at length above, the Hunter College MFA program has demonstrated its ability to cultivate one of the more diverse art programs in the city where a multiplicity of mediums and methodologies are encouraged, including: Janos Cseh’s structurally curved Minimalist paintings; Theophilus Gaffney’s queering of space with their playground-like sculpture / painting / video installation; or Selena Cisnero’s simulated local restaurant environment that appeared to have been summoned from one of her many storefront and streetside paintings.

New York University MFA Steinhardt Program

Two-part Exhibitions, 80WSE Gallery

 

Richard Medina, Hellmouth, 2026, acrylic, silkscreen, and image transfer on panels. 220 x 72 inches.

 

Daring experimentation lies at the heart of what the NYU students have been cooking up in their graduate program. Richard Medina, an artist who keeps abreast of the goings-on in the New York art scene, unveiled a humongous, Neo-Medieval painting of monstrous scale, while Roxie de La brought her illustrated storybook, Dymek in the Forest, to life through a site-specific installation complete with animated screening, works on paper, and sculptural figures evoking a darkly romantic woodland setting.

Parsons MFA Fine Arts Program

Chipped Teeth & Empty Bellies, Parsons School of Design

With much chaos and confusion plaguing our world, the students behind this exhibition used their creative voices to invite viewers to find and interpret meaning amidst our contemporary mess. Jackie Brady’s two-channel video presentation of flashing lights is counterbalanced by screen recorded notes written on an app that read like passages from a diary. Both Becca Dugas and Juana Vargas Moreno re-assemble meaning from the combined built and found objects they employ, the former in architecturally-conversant sculpture and the latter in text-inscribed spherical markers.

Parsons MFA Photography Program

Latency, Parsons School of Design

 

Eugene Lee, What can we build from memory, 2026, laser-etched acrylic cards. 50 x 60 inches (installation dimensions variable). Installation format: modular installation composed of laser-etched acrylic cards (postcard-sized), assembled through interlocking slot structures. Image courtesy of Parsons.

 

Much of this year’s cohort upends the traditional notion of photography as a two-dimensional medium, with its spatial parameters explored in works that take on decidedly sculptural dimensions. Tania Quintanilla’s mixture of cut photo prints, 3D-printed materials, and charcoal scattered across the wall speaks to the silent transformations undergone by women through aging. Elsewhere, Eugene Lee’s laser-etched acrylic cards contain imprints of familiar places now captured in dayglo shades while arranged in stacked formation akin to life-sized Lego bricks.

School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Program

Finding Here, Art Cake, Sunset Park, Brooklyn

 

Installation view of Sarah Parker’s work at Art Cake.

 

Compared to standard Fine Art or Studio Art programs, Art Practice is an inherently more interdisciplinary program where students are encouraged to think more holistically about how connected mediums and disciplines function together. A few examples to cite: Sarah Parker’s theatrical costumes of winged bird-people as a statement against the prison industrial complex and late-stage capitalism; Fan Lyu’s mesmerizing video installations that make use of footage from her equally active involvement in cave diving; Richard Montañez’s play on language to determine how this understanding shapes and molds personal identity. 

Yale University MFA Painting & Printmaking Program

Somehow Desire, James Fuentes Gallery, Tribeca

 

Inkpa Mani, I Didn’t Have a Grandfather Before Stone, 2026, oil, acrylic, soil, earth pigments, mica, and marble / granite dust on canvas. 36 x 36 x 2 ½ inches.

 

Though not completely absent of figuration, the Painting and Printmaking programs at Yale appear to prioritize a post-painterly and conceptually abstract approach to image-making. Inkpa Mani’s intriguingly titled I Didn’t Have a Grandfather Before Stone (2026) would immediately strike one as formally related to a Frank Stella painting - perhaps the grandchild of said Modernist icon? Or take Amy Chasse’s gradually dematerializing figures that seem to bleed into an amorphous mess in Two Heads (2026).

Yale University MFA Sculpture Program

No Neutral at YveYANG Gallery, SoHo

 

 

Amanda Atria, Inc. 2026, Volkswagen Beetle front fenders, metal, foam, Hydrocal, fiberglass, paint, tire tube, 2026. 82.55 x 193.04 x 43.18 cm / 32 ½ x 76 x 17 inches.

 

Sculpture as we know it and expect it to be is radically turned on its head by the Yale MFA Sculpture artists. Amanda Atria, a favorite since discovering her work at Will Shott Gallery last Winter, knows how to defamiliarize the most recognizable objects into something altogether unrecognizable; this time, her massive banana-looking sculpture could just as well be a vegetal anomaly or even a weighted-down crescent moon. A.Y. Wang’s narrowly confined greenhouse experiment challenges the stasis of sculpture through the 24/7 growth and changes brought to a container of stored buckwheat and soil, a work that becomes something entirely new by the show’s end.

Thesis Exhibitions Beyond New York

If there are colleges & universities within your immediate vicinity, then that is a sign for you to pay attention to what the art programs at those institutions are churning out. Rural or urban, those distinctions do not matter, for high quality work can be found anywhere. This reminds me of when I visited Philadelphia last October and happened upon a thesis show - yes, in the Fall - at AUTOMAT Gallery titled Hold Fast, which was by the studio art graduates from University of Connecticut. 

Honorable Mentions

Though the focus has been on thesis exhibitions, there are a few other types of exhibitions and capstone projects worth spotlighting that are closely aligned with the examples listed above:

Fashion Institute of Technology

#chalkFIT

A section of the #chalkFIT murals along the 7th Avenue facade of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Since 2013, there has been a fun tradition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in which fourth-year Illustration students create their own murals along the concrete facades of the school’s Brutalist building on the 7th Avenue-facing side. For much of late-Spring going into Fall, passersby can enjoy the colorful and vivacious images the students produced, numbering more than 25 unique public artworks.

Marymount Manhattan College Film Program

Wildest Dreams Film Festival

 

Poster for Until the Last Letter. Directed by Angelina Roby (2026)

Students studying film at Marymount are required to complete their capstone project at the end of their graduating year - a short film - which is screened before an audience of at least 200 in the school’s spacious auditorium, which is open to members of the public. Film is definitely not dead, for here is an institution where young filmmakers, actors, and cinematographers can make their “wildest dreams” come alive, from Angelina Roby’s high-quality, emotionally-gripping historical romance Until the Last Letter to Caroline June’s wordless, beautifully choreographed dance film Whatever You, I Shall Love.

School of Visual Arts Master’s in Curatorial Practice

Year-End Student Exhibitions, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

 

Installation view of Present Continuous at the Pfizer Building.

Master’s students at SVA must apply all that they have learned about the art of curation to the test by staging a short group exhibition, with some students having a single room or expanded spaces. N30_iD011z - curated by Colleen Dalusong, Justin Apice, Diana Sardaryan, Kiera McIntosh, and Naomi Moser - was probably one of the most technologically relevant exhibitions I have seen in recent years with the questions its artists raised about the ethical challenges of Artificial Intelligence, social media and the pressures of algorithmic influence, and cybernetic futurism. WM