aru apaza, Amy Chase, Yuna Cho, Ian Faden, Mar Figueroa, Kimberly R. Heard, Inkpa Mani, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Hazal Özgür, Vernando Reuben, Kiki Serna, Sok Song, Leyla Tonak, Yuwei Tu, Alixe Turner, Faye Wei Wei, and Wenqing Zhai
James Fuentes is pleased to announce Somehow Desire: Yale School of Art, Painting and Printmaking MFA Thesis Exhibition 2026. A restaging of the thesis exhibition held in New Haven this past Winter, Somehow Desire brings together newer works by some of the program’s graduates alongside works created during their time at Yale. Somehow Desire represents the culmination of two years of formal and conceptual development of 17 emerging artists. Although the word “culmination” might suggest a sense of neat finality, one through line in the practices of this year’s graduates is an insistence on complexity. Whether engaging with the politics of national identity, the legacy of colonialism, or dissipating views of the self, the artists focus our attention on unfinished stories, obscured images, and meaning that resists resolution, pushing back against the viewer’s own desire to find something clearly delineated, an easily digestible message.
aru apaza, Amy Chase, Yuna Cho, Ian Faden, Mar Figueroa, Kimberly R. Heard, Inkpa Mani, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Hazal Özgür, Vernando Reuben, Kiki Serna, Sok Song, Leyla Tonak, Yuwei Tu, Alixe Turner, Faye Wei Wei, and Wenqing Zhai
James Fuentes is pleased to announce Somehow Desire: Yale School of Art, Painting and Printmaking MFA Thesis Exhibition 2026. A restaging of the thesis exhibition held in New Haven this past Winter, Somehow Desire brings together newer works by some of the program’s graduates alongside works created during their time at Yale. Somehow Desire represents the culmination of two years of formal and conceptual development of 17 emerging artists. Although the word “culmination” might suggest a sense of neat finality, one through line in the practices of this year’s graduates is an insistence on complexity. Whether engaging with the politics of national identity, the legacy of colonialism, or dissipating views of the self, the artists focus our attention on unfinished stories, obscured images, and meaning that resists resolution, pushing back against the viewer’s own desire to find something clearly delineated, an easily digestible message.
The artists achieve this balance of uncertainty by various means: conceptually-guided manipulation of paint on canvas, or the layered presentation and obfuscation of archival material, to take just two examples. Kimberly R. Heard embraces indeterminacy by creating paintings in which figures emerge belatedly and only after sustained attention from fields of color, stain, and erasure. Alixe Turner draws on archival materials, such as maps and bureaucratic documents. By layering and fragmenting these sources, she disrupts their function as bearers of information. Yale’s 2026 cohort propose ambiguity not as a lack of clarity, but as a generative condition, allowing perception, memory and knowledge to remain open to negotiation. Critic Scott Malbaurn observes that the artists’ practices “…operate through gaps, migrations, coded languages, and material memory—revealing that what has been erased, fragmented, or left unfinished is precisely where meaning persists.”
The exhibition was initiated and facilitated by Magnus Resch, Yale School of Management, who connected the participating artists with James Fuentes Gallery as part of his ongoing effort to support the next generation of artists and create professional opportunities for his students.