Visual Arts & Sound Art
March 29–April 12, 2026
615 West 129th Street (Enter W 125th Street, b/w Broadway & 12th Avenue)
Lenfest Center for the Arts
New York NY
The Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program presents the Class of 2027 First Year MFA Exhibition in collaboration with the Wallach Art Gallery at the Lenfest Center for the Arts. This exhibition encompasses work by the 31 artists who will complete their first year of the Visual Arts MFA Program in May 2027. Curated by Erica DiBenedetto. Gallery hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6pm.
Participating artists
Sound artists: Leo Gevisser, Gaia Heichal, and Ben Shirken. Visual artists: Hüseyin Abdik, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, Fatema Al Fardan, Amirah Albalawi, Bale Creek Allen, Jasem Alsanea, Ben Blaustein, Cherina Cheng, Minji Choi, Christopher Crary, Isaac Yuquan Duan, Jenna Inzetta, Natalie Jacobs, Elizabeth Kaiser, Ina Kim, Natalya K Laudi, Hanwei Li, Dayana Matasheva, Becky Moon, Neta Moses, Natalia Neuhaus, Mary Osunlana, A’ssia (Ashu) Rai, Gianfranco Reyes, Mei Seva, Mino Shih, Shaina Tabak, and Camila Villa Zertuche.
About the curator
Erica DiBenedetto is a curator and art historian specializing in art from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Her scholarship concerns the boundaries of art history as a discipline, often focusing on artworks that incorporate other fields of knowledge, such as anthropology and architecture. These subjects allow her to rethink metaphorical and spatial dividing lines of various kinds, from disciplinary structures to geographical borders. Informed by her academic training in Western modernism and her professional experience in global contemporary art, Erica’s current projects concentrate on artists from Africa, Europe, and the United States.
As a curatorial associate at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, she works on exhibitions related to Africa and the African Diaspora in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. She was previously a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the same department. At MoMA, she has been part of the curatorial teams for Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour (2024), Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023), Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound (2022), and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019).
