RISD MFA Students Paint Through the Heartbreak
Each painting is like an island awash with yearning, sending out a lighthouse signal into a fractured world.
Clingy, thick-hot summer air followed me into Uffner & Liu gallery on a recent Friday afternoon. But as soon as I reached the top of the gallery’s stairs, I found myself pulled into a more temperate realm. Standing on the top step, peering through a steel grid covering Isabel Horgan’s egg-tempera painting “Mirage” (all works 2026) like the mesh of a fence, my eyes traced a light-dappled path into a verdant forest clearing. A lone figure clad in a spotless white gown appears to be digging, searching for something unseen. This enigmatic, fairytale-esque scene could have been plucked from any number of historical eras, were it not for the gas pipes poking up in the foreground. So begins Marooned.
The exhibition brings together 17 artworks by the 11 artists who comprise the Rhode Island School of Design’s 2026 Master of Fine Arts in Painting program cohort: Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, Callie Coccia, Siran Liu, Kati Lowe, Lucy Luckovich, Banshee Maria, Shiyeon Monk, Pavol Roskovensky, Talha Shams, and Ricky Vasan, as well as the aforementioned Horgan. Though this group represents a breadth of interests and aesthetic sensibilities, from airy, tactile abstractions to glossy, unsettling realism, curator Ajay Kurian unearthed enough throughlines in the selected works to knot together a visually and emotionally resonant net.
