SMFA Highlights

Our SMFA community includes faculty, staff, students, and alumni who are accomplished working artists, scholars, researchers, and activists. Below is a running listing of some of their many recent exhibitions, awards, publications, and other notable accomplishments.

Professor of the Practice Neda Moridpour was awarded the prestigious Onassis ONX Fellowship, an international program supporting innovative artists working at the intersection of immersive media, social justice, and emerging technologies. This fellowship recognizes Moridpour’s groundbreaking work in community-engaged artistic research and her commitment to reimagining archives of resistance through XR and participatory storytelling.

Professor of the Practice Pamela Pecchio has new work in Horizontal Vertical at ArtBuilt inside the Brooklyn Army Terminal from November 22 through December 20, 2025. The reception is November 22 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Open hours with the artists are December 6 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., December 20 from 1p.m. to 4 p.m., and by appointment.

Part-Time Lecturer Matthew Hipps was awarded an Early Development grant through the LEF Foundation's 2025 Moving Image Fund. The grant will support his current documentary film project exploring the historic and contemporary overlap of queer public spaces and film exhibition sites as venues for queer world-building and transgressive expression in Greater Boston.

Dr. Emily Stoehrer, Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan, Senior Curator of Jewelry at the MFA, Boston have published a new book, Brilliance: Jewelry Art and Fashion. A copy will be available at the SMFA Library. The last chapter includes a conversion between Dr. Stoehrer and Professor of the Practice Kendall Reiss in which they discuss the importance of the MFA’s jewelry collection to students at SMFA. The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition on view now, Beyond Brilliance, Jewelry Highlights from the Collection. Dr. Stoehrer will gather cohorts of students from SMFA and other schools for a Jewelry Study Day at the MFA in February 2026 which will include a panel discuss with professionals artists in the area.

Professor of the Practice Jennifer Schmidt will give an artist lecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna in Bologna, Italy on Tuesday, November 4 at 11 a.m.

Part-Time Lecturer Mike Mandel and Professor of the Practice Chantal Zakari are showing their new work Accidental Evidence at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA from November 6 through November 30. The opening reception is Friday, November 7 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.. Their recently published book Accidental Evidence was reviewed in Lenscratch by Shawn Bush and in Collector Daily by Blake Andrews.

Professor of the Practice Qais Assali presents The Four Non-Western Aliens: Ikebana Visual Syntax through Data Visualization and Graphing — A MUSE Awarded Project — at the 2025 Connecticut Art Education Association Conference.

Director Kelly Reichardt, SMFA alumna, premiered her latest film The Mastermind, at Cannes.

Juyon Lee, MFA '22, will give a curator-artist talk "What's In Your Album?" at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York on Friday, October 24. Her two-person exhibition Through Fragility at Baxter St runs through November 12. Learn more about the exhibition in this video interview with Juyon Lee.

Works by Gail Barker, Tricia Rose Burt, Carol Greenwood, Kata Hull, Rhoda Rosenberg, Daniel Wills and Professor of the Practice Charles Goss, seven artists affiliated with SMFA, are included in the group show Postcards. During the pandemic, this group of friends sent one another postcard-sized artworks that reflected all that was going on in the world and in their minds and hearts. The opening reception is on Saturday, October 4 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester, MA. The show is on display through October 28.

Para Colón, un Para-monumento, a solo exhibition by Felipe Lopez, MFA '23, is on view now at Fundación Gilberto Alzate in Bogotá, Colombia. The exhibition is part of the cycle of exhibitions from the V Salón de Arte Joven award, a biennial award celebrating 10 artists under 35 years old.

Part-time Lecturer Constanza Alarcón Tennen has a solo exhibition at the NARS Foundation in New York entitled Sudamericana tiene memoria del aire, curated by Dr. Laurel V. McLaughlin. The show will run from October 10 through November 5, with an opening reception on October 17 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with contributors, Alarcón Tennen, McLaughlin, Jonathan González, Madeline Murphy Turner, and Paola Nava, and funded through a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant.