Why the Hunter MFA Show Stands Out as One of the Year’s Top Art Exhibitions
Title: Technology, Ecology, and Imagination: A Tour Through the 2025 Hunter College MFA Thesis Shows
In the bustling heart of Tribeca, the 2025 Hunter College MFA Thesis Exhibitions have unfolded in five compelling iterations at The 205 Hudson Gallery. Dismissing any assumption that this is “student work” to be judged on a curve, these showcases deliver bold, refined, and strikingly relevant contemporary art grounded in conceptual rigor, technical experimentation, and emotional resonance.
Running from early March through late May, the five-part exhibition series proves to be more than just a prelude to professional careers — it is a confident statement of artistic presence, with each cohort of artists contributing unique responses to the world around them.
A Curated Chaos: Look Both Ways and Beyond
The opening show, titled Look Both Ways, set the tone with works that embraced distorted perceptions and playful, surreal aesthetics. Meredith Bakke’s Doom Addict (2024), an oil painting featuring an otherworldly figure clutched by a grinning ghost, provides a cheeky but haunting take on digital addiction. Emily Wichtrich’s colorful installation — reminiscent of her time as a studio assistant at Madame Tussaud’s — conjured the garish wonder of a circus, complete with tactile, animated figurines.
Across the exhibitions, recurring motifs such as technology, ecological collapse, material memory, and cyberspatial alienation appear in deeply personal interpretations.
Technology and Its Ghosts
Several artists probe the double-edged sword of technological advancement. Rosalie G. Smith’s sculptural collages appear as if scavenged from a dystopian afterparty thrown by society’s elite. Aashish Gadani’s Top 10 Places to Escape EMF Radiation (2025) pairs digital dystopia with dark humor; spider-legged WiFi antennae entwined in latex stretch across a skeletal wooden frame. Similarly, E Rady’s textiles open a bureaucratic dialogue between computer and user, layered with bold red and blue prints — Kafka would feel right at home here.
Craig Jun Li’s installation emotionally anchors the third group show with a melancholic relic: a rose from a long-gone lover, preserved since 2022 and embedded in a dusty, laboratory-like assemblage. The mundane turns mythical in his eerie constructs.
Environmental Reckonings
The shadow of ecological anxiety hovers throughout the galleries. Vanessa Sandoval’s humorous yet sobering ceramic works — spheres and cubes formed into planetary surrogates — appear alongside slow-unfurling video flags marked with apocalyptic slogans. These works suggest planetary fatigue and call out performative sustainability.
Jani Zubkovs’s haunting photographs of truck stops capture the pulse of endangered Americana. Billboards demanding “PRAY FOR OUR WORLD” against the backdrop of rising fuel prices walk the line between kitsch spirituality and quiet emergency.
The Return of Material and Memory
Painting, though less dominant than installation or sculpture, stakes a powerful claim through several standouts. Bayan Kiwan channels the intimacy of friends sprawled over one another in pastel works that recall the quiet drama of Salman Toor. Anthony Torrano’s abstract works, texturally rich with oil stick, pastel, and even imprint materials such as mooncakes and public stamps, evoke a brutal poeticism drawn from lived urban environments. Anastasya Peña’s painterly precision — echoing Helen Frankenthaler — balances fluidity with control, while Xingyun Wang’s multi-material cyanotypes demand keen inspection, packed with sand, pumice, and pigment.
Otherworldly and Unclassifiable
Some artists transport viewers into dreamscapes that feel plucked out of alternate dimensions. Magdalen Pickering’s pastoral illusions shimmer with haunted ambiguity. A. T. Gregor dips us beneath the city into shadowy subway tunnels in paint form. Justin Muegge’s mixed-media collages strike a balance between serenity and tension with garden scenes caught between real and imagined spaces.
A strong presence of sculpture links object histories to conceptual investigation. Mark Ferraro’s hybrid furnishings blur function and form, while Sadaf Azadehfar’s ceramic fountains — with water spewing from the mouths of carved snakes — invite mythical reflection and spatial immersion. Shannon Pritchard’s voyeuristic plywood sculptures point to undeveloped domestic spaces, and Vaishu Ilankamban’s engineer-trained precision is evident in her clean-lined concrete and ceramic combinations.
Materiality as Message
In post-pandemic New York, these artists assert their presence not just with flashy technique but with authentic, grounded meditations on space, time, and material. Many sculptural works utilize humble, even raw materials like plywood, scrap leather, or concrete, transforming them into refined installations. This ethos of transformation permeates the entire exhibition: trash becomes technology, trauma becomes tapestry, fantasy becomes function.
Conclusion: A Cohort Prepared for the World
As these shows progress through March to May, culminating in “WORLD ANIMAL,” the fifth