Chelsea, New York
Group Exhibition
A New Place to Be From: Boston University 2025 MFA Painting Graduates
Morgan LehmanSam Bittaker, Adel DiPersio, Grace Giordano, Nasiri Guzman, Ivo Makianich, Andrea Manning, Sylvie Mayer, Dylan Mintz, Miranda Pikul, Lemuel Saputra, Hannah Stoll, Noah Wertheimer Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present A New Place To Be From, an exhibition showcasing the 2025 graduates from Boston University School of Visual Arts’ Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Painting program. Beyond its spatial coordinates, a locational place can be defined by its environment, culture, architecture, and objects. We are composed of a network of these places, both those that we have physically occupied and those that we are tied to, however distant. Graduate school is a locational place as well as a social and experiential one. Two years of shared dialogue, time, making and unraveling has informed this community of painters collectively building a new, locationless site. This exhibition brings together the work of 12 artists who now carry this place with them in their expanding web of experiences as they approach new beginnings. Woven together through engagement with place, the works in this exhibition were created within the shared context of graduate school. Nasiri Guzman, Ivo Makianich, and Lemuel E. Saputra investigate locational place through their engagement with memory, history, and time. J. Grace Giordano, Dylan Mintz, and Noah Wertheimer construct mythical and imagined worlds through speculatively examining the real, using world building, storytelling, and the fantastical to search for understanding. Andrea Manning, Sylvie Mayer, and Miranda Pikul deal with mental and emotional placemaking, depicting intense moments of inner, theatrical, and embodied experience. Sam Bittaker, Adel DiPersio, and Hannah Stoll create environmental and optical spaces, manipulating paint and material to build places of visual and tactile encounter. Showcasing the range of experimentation that has emerged over the course of their MFA program, this exhibition highlights the cross-pollination and unexpected discoveries that arise when individual practices evolve in community. Developed through shared engagement with a collective place, these works offer a glimpse of what’s to come. As these artists depart from the physical structure of graduate school, they carry with them new experiences, insights, approaches to making—and a new place to be from.