The 2025 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, which runs through May 18, 2025, at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, features the work of the three Master of Fine Arts (MFA) candidates who are graduating this spring. These thesis exhibitions are the culmination of the three-year MFA program at Michigan State University, which allows students to push the existing limits of art while exploring their creative practice under the supervision of a faculty guidance committee.
The MFA candidates whose work is featured in this year’s Master of Fine Arts Exhibition include:
Each of these artists/scholars have worked with their committees to refine their research and artistic goals and to develop a unique project and written thesis. They have done extensive study in a medium or area of concentration, combined with coursework in the history of art and related fields, which helped situate their work within the broad field of contemporary art and design practices. The 2025 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition serves as evidence of their achievements and continuing artistic, scholarly, and professional promise.
This year’s exhibition will be celebrated with a public reception on Saturday, March 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Alan and Rebecca Ross Education Wing at the MSU Broad Art Museum, during which a short awards program will take place to announce the winners of the Selma and Stanley Hollander Fellowship for Graduate Study and the annual John and Susan Berding Family Foundation endowed Master of Fine Arts Prize. The invited guest juror this year is Jessica Hong, Chief Curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
The MFA candidates whose work is featured in the exhibition will offer public artist talks on Wednesday, April 16, from 6 to 8 p.m., also in the Alan and Rebecca Ross Education Wing at the MSU Broad Art Museum, during which the artists/scholars will discuss their work included in the exhibition. Following these talks will be a question-and-answer session.
The 2025 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in partnership with the MSU Department of Art, Art History, and Design and co-curated by Dr. Rachel Winter, MSU Broad Art Museum Assistant Curator, and Laine Lord, former Curatorial Research Assistant. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Graduate School at MSU and the John and Susan Berding Family Endowment.
The 2025 Critic-in-Residence is writer and critic Dan Cameron, who wrote the essays that are published in the exhibition catalog.
2025 MFA Candidates
Claire E. Heiney
Heiney works in sculpture, ceramics, and found textiles. For their thesis exhibition, they focused on the now lost prairie ecosystem of the Midwest, a region Heiney has always called home. The prairie was once the largest continuous ecosystem across North America but, as a result of settler colonization, this ecosystem is now the continent’s most endangered habitat. What remains today is almost entirely accidental, surviving between sites of development.
“In this work, the habitat of the prairie is reimagined, intersecting with the domestic space of the home. Building off the legacy and use of the diorama in the museum, this installation allows me to rethink and challenge what environments are worthy of our attention,” Heiney said. “Utilizing plants sourced from my own backyard, I am able to blend elements of past, present, and my hopes for the future. This new landscape allows me to explore how the meaning of home can extend beyond our dwelling place to encompass the totality of our environment.”
“My time in the graduate program at MSU has been such a blessing. I will forever cherish the opportunity to work on my artwork with the support of such an amazing community behind me.”
Claire E. Heiney
Heiney has a BFA with a focus in History of Art and Visual Culture from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. After graduating from MSU with an MFA, Heiney would like to stay in Michigan and continue to teach and make art.
“My time in the graduate program at MSU has been such a blessing,” Heiney said. “I will forever cherish the opportunity to work on my artwork with the support of such an amazing community behind me.”
Morgan Reneé Hill
Born and raised in Baltimore, Hill is fascinated by physical activities spontaneously expressed in their culture such as dance and unique handshakes. These activities are the foundation of creating bonds and forming communities.
“My perspective as a Black individual elicits an ‘Othering’ from society,” Hill said. “Despite the environments we have been displaced to, we are determined to group together, generating fellowship and safe spaces; rendering visible which is often unseen.”
Through abstraction and collaboration, Hill incorporates social practices in creative process, highlighting rituals of Black experiences. For their thesis exhibition, Hill accumulated moments of interaction months at a time, the natural oils from the body, hands and feet, built up on blank Yupo paper. Black ink was then applied, resisting the oily touches, rendering the invisible marks. The vast range of values that develop in each composition symbolizes the notion that blackness is not a monolith.
“As I teeter as conductor and conduit of the process, the community becomes the co-author and brush marks of the finished piece. Like following the leader in Liturgical dance movements, I respond to the marks the community has made through a reflection of my own experiences and being a participant in their conversations,” Hill said. “With my intersectional identity formed from the many communities that raised me, I continue to inform the work in a multidimensional way. Contradictions of invisibility and visibility, Black sensibility, and linguistics of Ebonics have been the connecting threads to my practice. Most importantly, I advocate for the right to opacity; accepting that everything that makes us human cannot be understood completely. These concepts become a continuous development of a personalized codex using abstract language.”
“My experience in the MFA program at Michigan State University has been an overflow of opportunities, big and small, that strengthened my artist career.”
Morgan Reneé Hill
Hill has a BFA from Towson University in Towson, Maryland. After graduating from MSU with an MFA, they plan to relocate to Chicago to immerse themselves in the art community there and to continue impacting future generations of artists.
“My experience in the MFA program at Michigan State University has been an overflow of opportunities, big and small, that strengthened my artist career,” Hill said. “My goal when I first moved here was to find and build a community of my own. I can surely say that it was achieved!”
Megan Weaver
Weaver is interested in unspoken connections and the ways in which art can create pathways that lead to understanding, acceptance, and shared experience. She uses her work as a form of storytelling with her work exploring themes of womanhood, personal identity, and lived experience. As an MFA candidate, she utilized metal, ceramics, and mixed media to express a form of auto-theory, or personal storytelling to advocate for change.
“I often draw from my upbringing in the conservative South, reflecting on themes of memory, gender roles, and societal expectations,” Weaver said. “My life narratives are printed and then used as material in the work; specifically, a massive pile of paper casted pots and pans, representing how we are bound to predetermined molds of life. My thesis cornerstone piece is a life-sized, aluminum self-portrait seated on a kitchen table, embodying the tensions and introspections of my past.”
Weaver has a BFA from Arkansas State University. After graduating from MSU with an MFA. She would like to continue teaching at a college or university.
“The MFA program is fully funded, supportive, and offers the opportunity to teach. Our department faulty have been phenomenal in offering constructive criticism, understanding, and career building.”
Megan Weaver
“My experience as a Spartan has been wonderful,” Weaver said. “The MFA program is fully funded, supportive, and offers the opportunity to teach. Our department faulty have been phenomenal in offering constructive criticism, understanding, and career building. I’d like to give a shout out to my committee: Lara Shipley, Paul Kotula, Jon Frey, Blake Williams, and Teresa Dunn. I hope that the relationships I made here last a lifetime.”
By Kim Popiolek
