MFA Thesis art exhibition: sammi eady
2026-03-31 12:30 - 2026-04-04 17:00 (America/New_York) | Greensboro Project Space, 111 E February 1 Pl, Greensboro, NC 27406, USA
Mind’s Eye

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Sammi Eady

Exhibition: March 31 – April 4, 2026

Reception: Saturday, April 4th, 6-8p

Mind’s Eye is an exhibition revealing the contention between how the mind and the body remember a space.

From childhood homes, first jobs, and card games, landmarks from my past are mapped through ongoing perception rather than fixed recordings. Relying on mind palaces and other mnemonic devices, both somatic and psychological approaches of visualization result in mixed perspective landscapes. Vulnerable fabrics bunch with memory. Artifacts extracted from these mappings indulge in their permeability.

Mind’s Eye is a metaphysical world in which memory is re-imbued into the blueprints of its infrastructures, embracing the distortion of perception that happens during repeated recollection.

More About Sammi

In my practice, I navigate themes of memory and embodiment through fiber art. Stemming from an urgency to recite and document domestic interiors current and past, I rely on transmissive recollection to reconstruct these sites under both trusting and skeptical guises. My work harnesses formal qualities of color, perspective, and light to pinpoint intersections between mental exaggeration and lost accuracies. Through this process, I question the viability of collective experiences, counteract future states of disembodiment, and retreat into past states of being.

Born in Lakeland, Florida, I attended the University of Florida in 2024 before moving to Greensboro, North Carolina to pursue an MFA in studio art at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Learn more about Sammi: IG @scr4mmi

MFA Thesis Art Exhibition: sofia aguilar
2026-04-07 12:00 - 2026-04-11 17:00
Nepantla

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Sofia Aguilar

Exhibition: April 7 – 11, 2026

Reception: Friday, April 10th, 6-8p

An exploration of living between cultures, Nepantla weaves together memory, myth, and lived experience to make the in-between visible.

Nepantla takes its name from a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between,” a space of transition and becoming that reflects my experience as a second-generation Mexican American navigating cultures, languages, and geographies. Raised within oral traditions and stories from my grandparents, I first understood Mexico as something carried inside the home; later travels to Mexico and an artist residency in the Netherlands expanded that understanding, deepening my awareness of hybridity and adaptation. Through printmaking, painting, and paper weaving, I build a vibrant visual language rooted in heritage and layered iconography, with woven works acting as metaphors for cultural transmission—interlaced, frayed, and resilient. Recurring figures such as the Tecuan from traditional dance and my skeletal cowgirl, inspired by Mexica cosmology, inhabit contemporary settings, collapsing temporal boundaries so that ancestral histories and present realities coexist, woven together in an ongoing search for belonging.

More About Sofia

Sofia Aguilar is a Mexican-American artist working in printmaking, painting, and paper weaving. As a second-generation Mexican American raised among two older generations, she explores what it means to carry a homeland within a home. Her vibrant compositions draw from Mexica iconography, folklore, and contemporary culture, blending carved lines, layered textures, and woven forms to celebrate cultural memory, duality, and bicultural identity.

Learn more about Sofia: www.dvyf1y.com | IG: @dvyf1y

MFA Thesis Art exhibition: inga manticas
2026-04-14 12:00 - 2026-04-18 17:00
Love would feel like this

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Inga Manticas

April 14 -18, 2026

Reception: Friday, April 17th, 6-8p

If I had one wish …

Love would feel like this consists of drawings and sculptures that grew up together in my studio. It’s a forest, a river of new substances, a procession of characters with disputed and shifting identities, material marriages, corkboards of a conspiracy theorist, and whatever else might be attracted to this place.

I am trying to communicate with beings whose spirits and material forms are very different from my own. Beings who we can feel but cannot see or name, who exist two places at once, who have hundreds of identities, who are the opposites of themselves, who contain all the rest of us. What practices and processes can put me in touch with plants, land spirits, gods, animals, hills, rivers, gems, gnomes, ghosts, past or lost selves, the numinous and ineffable?

I wonder what I can say to them and what I can give them, and I try to hear their responses. I wonder, how can I love them? How can I feel their love back? How can I feed or house them? Should I?

How can I speak about them to others? Should I?

Some more questions that made this show:

While I’m making an object, am I taking commands from a spirit who wants to inhabit it?

Or, when I make an object (a body), does a spirit arrive to inhabit it, choosing it based on its material and spatial characteristics?

Or, does the material create its own spirit?

What kinds of drawing practices can reveal what is invisible in the space around us?

What languages do I have access to, by way of my interaction with the material world?

How can I eliminate the distinction between a body and a place, a body and a landform?

What spiritual work happens in the forest, and what spiritual work happens in the studio?

How many new bodies can I make for myself?

More About Inga

Inga Manticas is a visual artist from northern California, now living between North Carolina and New York. Their studio practice joins drawing, frottage, found object assemblage, metal and ceramic sculpture, and the development of new sculpture materials.

In their work, Manticas reaches towards connection with spiritual and other-than-human beings. Rooted in personal encounters with unknown presences in the landscape, their work luxuriates in the mysteries of how identity, consciousness, and power manifest in the material world. They draw inspiration from fairytales, environmental histories, animist cosmologies, and their own fantasies of alternative embodiment.

MFA Thesis art exhibition: victoria mercado-lues
2026-04-21 12:00 - 2026-04-25 17:00
Garden of Corporeal Fantasy

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Victoria Mercado-Lues

Exhibition: April 21 – 25, 2026

Reception: Friday, April 24th, 6-8p

Brightly saturated and fantastical, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy explores the meeting of nature and flesh in oil paintings and ceramics. With invented creatures and visceral biological imagery, the works reframe the gaze towards the bodily through a lens of wonder — a less punitive lens than the centuries-long and still recurring traditions of bodies as commodified, objectified, or sinful.

This exhibition addresses our discomfort surrounding the body by combining it with the godly imposing presence of the landscape, like waterfalls and billowing clouds. In this combination, the work is imbued with a devotional, almost sacred quality, borrowing visuals of the holy and filling it with the biological. The sticky, hairy, fleshy becomes something worth staring at with open fascination, the same way we are in awe of exotic plants, or deep-sea creatures, illuminating the sublime inherent in the corporeal.

By zooming in on the glistening, wet thresholds, the work blurs the boundary between interior and exterior anatomy. Tendrils and drips converge to give birth to strange life forms and new worlds that explore sensuality, womanhood, and the fantastic.

Documenting a coming of age, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy acknowledges the fullness of becoming a woman: the awareness of feeling both precious and strange, once intimately known, yet foreign to yourself. In creating these fantastical ecologies, the work insists on its own terms for beauty, redefined through tender curiosity.

More About Victoria

Victoria Mercado-Lues (b. 2003) is a Mexican-American artist whose oil paintings, ceramics, and collage conjure vivid ecologies of invented creatures and fantastical flesh. Her work merges the biological with the devotional, reframing the body as a site of wonder rather than shame.

Mercado-Lues received her BFA from the University of South Florida and her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she was awarded a residency through GROW in partnership with Creative Greensboro. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Carolyn M. Wilson Gallery, International Museum of Surgical Science, Proxy Design Gallery, and the Sechrest Gallery, among others.

Learn more at victoriamercadolues.wixsite.com/arts | IG: @victoriamercadolues

MFA Thesis Art exhibition: kathryn hood
2026-04-28 12:00 - 2026-05-02 17:00
Homebody

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Kathryn Hood

Exhibition: April 28 – May 2, 2026

Reception: Friday, May 1st, 6-8p

Homebody is an exhibition of collages and sculptures in which Kathryn Hood carves her perceptions of tense muscles into paper and upholstery foam. She embraces the body-mind connection, an essential tool for self-understanding, as she houses ungrounded avatars within handmade paper and muscular furnishings outside of formal traditions. Hood composes the interior feelings of ideas & emotions with the exterior feeling of tension. This duality of perception reflects the disparate nature of themes explored, such as femininity, domesticity, and the performance of identity.

Homebody is the residence of textured perceptions. This space is an act of resensitization.

More About Kathryn

Kathryn Hood (b. 1996) is a collagist, sculptor, and creative doer who carves tense muscles into paper and foam then furnishes them in acts of resensitization. She investigates the thresholds of perception & of living with/as a sense of self. Hood’s 3-dimensional work evolved from a fascination with her maternal grandmother’s porcelain dinnerware. Evaluating its character and its politics, she applies its label of domesticity to bodily sensations and identity performance. Hood lives and works in North Carolina.

Learn more www.kathryn-hood.com | IG: @kathrynhoodart
