Class of 2027 First Year MFA Exhibition

March 29 – April 12, 2026
Curated by Erica DiBenedetto

Exhibition Information
The Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program presents the Class of 2027 First Year MFA Exhibition in collaboration with the Miriam and Ira D. 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.

Participating Artists

Sound Artists

Leo Gevisser
Gaia Heichal
Ben Shirken

Visual Artists

Venue
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street
New York, NY 10027
(enter on 125th Street, west of Broadway)

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).