RISD MFA Painting 2026 Graduates Present ‘Marooned’ at Uffner and Liu
Marooned Opens July 10 at Uffner and Liu with Work by RISD MFA Painting 2026 Graduates
July 10 – August 15, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, July 10, 6-8 PM
Uffner and Liu Gallery
170 Suffolk Street, New York
Banshee Maria. The Immaculate Self Conception, 2026. Charcoal and acrylic on paper, 112 x 105 in
NEW YORK – Marooned, a group exhibition featuring work by RISD’s 2026 MFA Painting graduates, will be on view at Uffner and Liu gallery from July 10 through August 15, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, July 10, from 6–8 pm.
Curated by Ajay Kurian, artist and RISD Painting faculty member, the exhibition includes work by Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, Callie Coccia, Isabel Horgan, Siran Liu, Kati Lowe, Lucy Luckovich, Banshee Maria, Shiyeon Monk, Pavol Roskovensky, Talha Shams and Ricky Vasan.
The exhibition’s title invokes the familiar condition of being stranded, cut off or left behind. In his curatorial statement, Kurian writes, “Many of us are living inside systems that were never designed to sustain us, inside structures that absorb our energy and return very little, inside a loneliness and alienation that does not diminish with time but accumulates. The feeling of being left behind — not by accident but by design — is one of the defining emotional facts of this moment. It is the ground these artists are standing on.”
Marooned also points to the history of marronage: the enslaved people of the Americas and Caribbean who fled into remote landscapes and built sovereign communities as a means of survival, resistance and return. “They did not simply escape,” Kurian writes. “They disappeared in order to return — to raid, to rescue, to resist. The leaving was tactical. The return was the point.”
Kurian is careful to acknowledge the weight of this history and the limits of carrying it into an exhibition context. “The Maroons were not developing a ‘practice’,” he writes. “They were surviving one of the most sustained and brutal systems of human domination ever organized. The stakes were not aesthetic.” For Kurian, the exhibition inherits this knowledge “imperfectly, partially, and with full awareness of the debt.”
At the same time, Marooned does not propose a single reading of the artists’ work. Kurian notes that any MFA group exhibition must contend with the difficulty of finding a frame large enough to hold distinct practices without flattening them. “The alignments here are real but they are not total, and the artists in this show are not illustrations of a thesis,” he writes. “They are individuals whose practices happen to share certain dispositions — toward withdrawal as method, toward the strategic use of distance — and the frame is offered in that spirit, as an opening rather than a conclusion.”
Top: Shiyeon Monk. Before the Bath, 2026. Watercolor, colored pencil, oil pastel, chalk pastel, charcoal, graphite, 30 x 20 in
Bottom: Talha Shams, بندھن (Bandhan), 2026. Ink, acrylic, bamboo and rope on canvas, 40 x 30 in
Within that frame, the exhibition considers what it means to remain in contact with a reality that can feel politically, ecologically or personally consuming, and how distance might allow for another form of return. “The artists gathered here have each developed practices of strategic withdrawal,” Kurian writes. “Sometimes this means moving through film and media, using the remove of the screen to return to the real with a sharpened eye. Sometimes it means stepping outside a self too burdened by a situation to move freely through it. Sometimes the departure is from pain itself — not as avoidance, but as the only route back to its source with anything useful in hand.”
For Kurian, the exhibition refuses the idea that seriousness requires constant proximity. As he writes, “In each case the work refuses the idea that rigor requires unbroken proximity. To leave wisely is its own form of commitment.”
About Rhode Island School of Design
RISD (pronounced “RIZ-dee”) is a creative community founded in 1877 in Providence, Rhode Island. Today, we enroll 2,577 students hailing from 60 countries. Led by a committed faculty, they are engaged in more than 40 full-time bachelor’s and master’s degree programs and supported by a worldwide network of over 33,000 alumni who demonstrate the vital role artists and designers play in today’s society.
Beyond facts and figures, what is the spirit of this community? Through a cross-disciplinary curriculum of studio-based learning and rigorous study in the liberal arts, RISD students are encouraged to develop their own personal creative processes, but they are united by one guiding principle: in order to create, one must question. In cultivating expansive and elastic thinking, RISD seeks to activate a critical exchange that empowers artists, designers and scholars to generate and challenge the ideas that shape our world. RISD’s mission, at both the college and museum, is not only to educate students and the public in the creation and appreciation of works of art and design, but to transmit that knowledge and make global contributions. Visit risd.edu to learn more.
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