2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition features 8 artists

By Michael Chesnick. April 9, 2026

Continuing a tradition since 1970, the School of Art and the University of Arizona Museum of Art will host the 2026 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at UAMA and the school’s Joseph Gross Gallery.

Eight graduating MFA artists will present their work April 18 to May 16, with a public reception on May 14 from 5 to 7 p.m.:

Arshia Amin
Aubrey Behrens
Andrés Caballero
Molly Iris Etchberger
Alexis Joy Hagestad
Dylan Hawkinson
Maya Jackson
Matthew Kennedy

“Watching this cohort grow during their MFA studies has been a real privilege. Their dedication and creativity have inspired all of us,” said Professor Karen Zimmermann, School of Art interim director. “By working closely with faculty, they reached this important milestone. I’m excited to see their unique thesis exhibition and am truly proud of what they have accomplished.”

Here’s a look at the artists, including the title of their MFA work, gallery, bio and thesis statement (photos are courtesy of the artists):

Arshia Amin

“Wait, What?”
University of Arizona Museum of Art

Bio: Amin is an Iranian designer and visual artist whose practice explores the intersections of language, culture, and materiality. Through typography, interaction, and spatial design, his research integrates design methodologies with cultural narratives, identity, and memory, examining how design can become a vessel for cultural storytelling.

His design practice also extends into user experience and interface design. As a UX assistant for the University of Arizona Libraries, he has contributed to the redesign of library systems, focusing on accessibility, interface clarity, and the human-centered translation of data. Amin’s portfolio also includes brand identity systems, mobile application design, and institutional poster design, projects that combine formal sensitivity with conceptual depth. Currently based in the United States, Amin is pursuing his MFA in Visual Design at the University of Arizona.

Thesis statement: “Wait, What?” investigates how cultural meaning shifts between Persian and American contexts through interactive design and bilingual visual language. By translating everyday moments of cultural misunderstanding into participatory digital interactions and printed visual fragments, the project demonstrates how humor, confusion, and translation reveal the instability of meaning across cultures and invites viewers to experience what it feels like to navigate multiple cultural perspectives simultaneously.

Artist’s website: https://arshiaamin.com/
Instagram: @arshia.aminn

Aubrey Behrens

“Before We Could Name It”
University of Arizona Museum of Art

Bio: Behrens is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tucson. Their practice utilizes plant and animal imagery as a mirror for examining human experiences of loss and resilience. Rooted in ecological, historical, and regionally driven research, they draw parallels between environmental change and the forces that shape cultural identity and human connection. Their current work examines their own inherited relationship to Hawai’i complicated by distance and family separation.

They map the extinction of Native Hawaiian birds against the political erasure of Native Hawaiian culture, tracing the years in which species vanished alongside the legislation, evictions, and silences that defined those same moments for Hawaiian people. For Aubrey, the natural world is a site where personal and collective grief intersects, and the health of a place can be read through the fate of its most vulnerable inhabitants.

Thesis statement: Eight Hawaiian bird species have been declared extinct since my birth in 1993. Their disappearance parallels the growing dislocation of Native Hawaiians from the islands, environmental deterioration, and my own distance from my Hawaiian roots. This work examines the unraveling of ecological systems and its direct impact on cultural continuity.

I have inherited Hawaiian pride along with separation and fractured access to firsthand familial knowledge. Guided by the Hawaiian practice of kilo, an embodied form of attentive observation, “Before We Could Name It” asks viewers to slow down and witness both what has disappeared and what remains, making visible the connection between ecological loss, cultural displacement, and individual survival.

Instagram: @aubreybehrensart

Andrés Caballero

“In Place”
University of Arizona Museum of Art

Bio: Caballero’s work explores the often unseen infrastructures of control that target dissent and marginalized populations. Migration is central to his practice as both consequence and testimony, emerging from histories of extraction, pillaging, and fractured homes. Building on this approach, Caballero’s practice repurposes emerging technologies such as LiDAR, virtual reality, and creative coding, as counter-methodologies for communal resistance. Through photography, video, installation, and expanded media, he traces how life persists through fractured memory, yet remains constantly disrupted under the pretext of progress.

He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, the Mellon Fronteridades Graduate Fellowship, the Marcia Grand Centennial Award, and the Tinker Field Research Grant. His work has been exhibited in Mexico and the United States, including at the Tucson Museum of Art, the Nogales Art Museum, and the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía.

Thesis statement: A dining table remembers the traces of conversations, the pauses in between, the rituals of yesterday. What appears here is an echo, not a reconstruction. Fragments of domestic life surface through the cracks, voices and gestures loop through time. These memories refuse to stay still. They run in circles, shift, overlap, and obscure details, the way stories are told around the table. But there is a witness in the room: a silent, machinic gaze. Scanning and detecting as trained, it translates pulse into signal, bodies into points, and space into coordinates. It is capable of remembering everything, absolutely, and in entirely the wrong way. The smell of damp soil, the last chess game between a father and a son, the fading wisp of candle smoke, all exceed digitization, standing as a quiet rebellion against the datasphere. Layers of time coexist in space, and while everything is recorded, its weight slips through the signals.

Artist’s website: https://www.andrescaballero.me/
Instagram: @andcaballero_

Molly Iris Etchberger

“facade”
University of Arizona Museum of Art

Bio: Etchberger is an artist working across multiple mediums including drawing and installation. Emphasizing in printmaking, she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Utah State University.

Her work addresses themes of cross-generational communication and matriarchal systems.

Thesis statement: My research investigates intergenerational communication and the role of secrecy, considering its dual function as a protective mechanism and a barrier to knowledge. Central to this work is the concept of the ‘facade,’ realized as both an architectural exterior and a psychological construct. By exploring the perpetuation of generational trauma within matrilineal relationships, I acknowledge the home as the site in which connections are built. Within this space, I am examining how information is curated or withheld across female lineages.

Combining traditional craft practices with materials that reference domestic structures such as bedsheets, quilts, glass, metal, and wood, I recognize secret-keeping as a maternal role inherited through generations. I compare the restrained communication between myself and my surviving matriarchs with my own inaccessibility to a perfect family record. To illustrate this, I draw from my limited family archive consisting of makeshift reproductions of photographs that have been transmitted through text as well as conflicting oral histories. Translating these imperfect images into graphite drawings allows me to fabricate a relationship with my matriarchal ancestors, and contribute my own narrative to the unreliable family story.

Artist’s website: https://www.mollyirisprints.com/
Instagram: @mollyirisprints

Alexis Joy Hagestad

“burn map: 255 fires”
Gross Gallery

Bio: Hagestad is an interdisciplinary artist using lens-based media and multispecies collaboration. Raised in Missoula, Montana, she was profoundly shaped by the diverse landscape surrounding her.

Her research uncovers often-overlooked narratives of various species, exploring ecological and personal grief while investigating the interconnectedness of all living beings. Alexis holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

Thesis statement: “burn map: 255 fires” is a protective shelter inspired by my experiences as a wildland firefighter and lessons drawn from my ancestors. The shelter consists of images of charred bark, smoldered onto fabric. Using a low-intensity laser, I forge a personal map of 255 controlled burns. The structure protects from external elements, whether due to natural disasters, climate change, or personal narratives.

The lean-to shelter is handcrafted from burnt cotton interwoven with a mylar seedling-protection tarp, supported by a charred cedar base. The installation features a looping video and soundscape that examines the flora and fauna of the ecological communities of my home in Western Montana.

In burn map: 255 fires, I reflect on resilience in ecosystems and in ourselves. This mirrors our own collective struggles to shield against various elements, including generational trauma, which can be like a fire that is both destructive and regenerative. The more we suppress our grief, the more it insists on revealing itself. Fire is integral to our ecosystems, and we are woven into its fabric of existence.

Artist’s website: https://ajhagestad.com/
Instagram: @ajhagestad

Dylan Hawkinson

“Press, Surrender”
Gross Gallery

Bio: Hawkinson is an artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, working with and on paper. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and has a professional background in the performing arts, fashion, and publications. Hawkinson is currently the Graduate Gallery Manager at the University of Arizona, where he curated the group exhibition “Influx” at the Visual Arts Research Studio Project Space and co-curated “Future Tense for the Surface Design Association.”

Hawkinson is a recipient of the PaperWorks Scholarship and the Helen Gross Award and participated in the Penland School of Craft Higher Education Partner Program. He is currently serving as Costume Director for an upcoming production of “Cabaret” at the Santa Fe Playhouse.

Thesis statement: “Press, Surrender” imagines the dry cleaner as a site of garment recovery, where clothing moves through cycles of admission, treatment, and return. Using various papermaking and printmaking processes, personal items are subject to a mysterious yet effective system of care. Within this infrastructure, stains and damage are examined as subtle records of wear.

Through pressure and transfer, clothing leaves imprints of seams, folds, and bodily residue. These marks transform everyday garments into an archive of lived experience. Oxidized wine creates a purple tone that moves throughout the work. A substance that once carried the potential for life-derailing harm is redirected into a material for making, becoming an
act of reclamation.

My process balances preparation and surrender. Careful arrangement gives way to conditions that exceed complete control, allowing materials to reveal what intention alone cannot. In “Press, Surrender,” pressure functions both as a physical force and as a quiet reflection on placing trust in
a process larger than oneself, where relinquishing self-will becomes a way forward.

Instagram: @dylanhawkinson

Maya Jackson

“She Will Strike Like Lightning”
Gross Gallery

Bio: Born and raised in Richmond, VA, Jackson is an artist working primarily in photography, video and poetry. Her practice resists colonial narratives and visualizes liberation from an imposed realism that stems from systematic oppression. She holds a BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCUarts).

She is the recipient of an Anderson Ranch Arts Center 2026 Workshop Scholarship in Photography and New Media, and the 2025 University of Arizona College of Fine Arts Graduate Creative Achievement Award. Recent exhibitions include Death of the Atom (Pidgin Palace Arts, 2025), Border as Network (Pidgin Palace Arts, 2025), SOUTHWEST (Decode Gallery, 2024), Art Bridging Borders (The Ubuntu Project, 2024), and Stories Untold (Tucson Jewish Community Center, 2024).

Thesis statement: “She Will Strike Like Lightning” is a multimedia installation that explores land, language, and labor as crucial elements for redefining a personal place of belonging. Collage, video, and spoken word poetry capture the process of transforming fragments of self into a holistic body that communicates this journey across generations. My initial research stems from an interest in the ways that environment, image-making and vocal expression have evolved across the African diaspora, and what it means to speak for oneself after a history of being spoken for.

Themes of physical labor are present in the work, from the production of clay artifacts that are incorporated into collage and video, contemporary photographs that reference memory and place, and the mining of black literary and image based archives. Emotional labor appears through poetic sentiments that address race, womanhood, relationship to the land, and the desire to be a part of something bigger than the self. Words like “belonging” and “identity” carry a systematic history of racism and the need to assimilate into a colonized existence. “She Will Strike Like Lightning” focuses on coming to terms with what it means to belong, and embracing the privilege to simply be.

Artist’s website: www.mayajackson.art
Instagram: @mjacks1

Matthew Kennedy

“Sediment”
Gross Gallery

Bio: Born and raised in the small border town of Nogales, Arizona, Kennedy received his Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography from the U of A School of Art in 2016. Following a period of extensive world travel, as well as instructing English in Hong Kong, he returned to the School of Art to pursue his MFA.

His work is installation based, most commonly using discarded objects, as well as familial collections. Through the use of these materials, the artist frequently speaks to the overarching themes of identity, and location.

Thesis statement: “Sediment” traces my experience as a longtime caregiver living in the aftermath of immense loss, both expected and unexpected. I am now a caregiver with no one left to care for. The land that I know as home, developed by my grandfather and occupied for three generations, has long shaped my sense of self. Since the recent passing of my parents, the relationship toward this land has been shifting. I feel like a stranger in my home, untethered from what once felt certain.

Using soil from my family compound, I make bricks displaced from their usual function as shelter. The soil carries the residue of what came before, holding labor, memory and inheritance. Using my family’s most valued dinnerware set, I recast something fragile in concrete, attempting to preserve what cannot fully be held. This action simultaneously purports its own futility, and the concrete dishware creates markers of grief, memory, and estrangement. As I move through this new stage of life, the work becomes a way of reckoning with loss and reimagining what home can hold.

Instagram: @mateokennedy

The eight MFA artists’ work will be on view at the UAMA and Joseph Gross galleries Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free in both venues.