Meet our incoming Art MFAs!
We are pleased to announce the University of Minnesota's incoming MFA Class of 2027: six outstanding artists who bring a range of skills and interests to our Department this semester. Please join us in welcoming them to the University of Minnesota and Regis Center for Art, and in the meantime, enjoy a peek into each of their practices:
Anissa Cavazos (she/they)
Anissa Cavazos is an artist from the Rio Grande Valley, a culturally rich region of South Texas. Currently, she explores the interplay of family bonds amidst trauma and healing through printmaking and sculptures. She draws inspiration from her natural surroundings to capture the essence of the landscape and the flora and fauna that call it home. Occupying this scenery are beings who are symbolic representations of Mexican and Tejano culture, incorporating regional iconography, vegetation, and animals. Anissa’s artwork is marked by their attention to detail, their vivid colors, and their powerful emotional resonance.
Healing that we do not disclose but cultivate in private, manfiests as disembodied forms intertwined in the landscapes. Hidden in plain sight, the figures grow naturally within their shared environments; discovering how to coexist. Sculptures serve as a tangible embodiment of the interlaced concepts and practices inherent in frontera folklore. By drawing inspiration from the resilience and cultural narratives of Chicana artists like Carmen Lomas Garza and Gloria Anzaldúa, she seeks to contribute to a more inclusive representation of artistic voices. In doing so, her artwork becomes a vessel of the unspoken whispers of healing and cultural interconnectedness to find a voice, resonating with observers long after the figures have been unveiled.
Instagram: @anissa.cavazos
Isabela Escalona (she/her)
Isabela Escalona is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer, living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her portraiture and films blend anthropological practices with tableau—exploring a lifelong obsession with people-watching and the surreal mundanities of contemporary life. She is a part of a studio collective in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she screens films and other arts events. Along with her artistic practices, Isabela is the Senior Associate Editor of Workday Magazine, where she reports on labor struggle in the Midwest. She received her B.A. from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can often find her walking around a lake.
Website: isabela-escalona.com
Instagram: @isabela.escalona
Maeve Jackson (she/her)
Maeve Jackson is a Midwest based artist with a nomadic sensibility. As she travels, her making-space shifts based where she resides. Jackson is resistant to being limited to any single medium though she prefers working with the platforms of video, photography, and site specific installations. Jackson earned her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts with a minor in Video from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2014. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in Milwaukee, as well as Brooklyn, NY; Greensboro College, NC; Chicago, IL, Barcelona, Spain, and southern Austria. She has been featured in exhibitions at John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI); and locally at (the once) Dean Jensen Gallery, VAR Gallery, and Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel; with solo exhibitions at The Alice Wilds and Lawrence University's Wriston Art Galleries. She has attended the artist-in-residence programs: Hotel Pupik (2016 & 2019), in southern Austria; Cow House Studios Open Residency Program (2019) in Wexford, Ireland; and Time and Space residency at Peninsula School of Art in Door County, WI. Her film, "the beautiful", screened across the USA after its 2017 premiere. Jackson is currently working on her next film, a non-traditional documentary about her family's farmland.
Website: www.maevejackson.com
Instagram: @_maeve_the_wave_
Maria Oostra (she/her)
I regard my painting as a register of an experienced metaphysics, a flow of wonder, curiosity, and multiplicity, expressed by colors, brushstrokes and movement within and onto canvas, a canvas that becomes a resting space for familiar forms and shapes.I place to dwell.
I am interested in discovering different ways of knowing and making, coming from a deeply connected and embodied experience. I aspire to produce work from a place of love and reconnection embracing flow, ambiguity and multiplicity found within the oscillating realities that I experience in my running.
My Dutch cultural heritage is the driving force behind my research, as it ties to a problematic colonial past (V.O.C). I wish to explore how this heritage is woven into my painting, drawings and production of textile objects. I like to question anything, and everything, especially when things are presented as objective and beyond doubt. Through my practice, as a maker and performer, I am interrogating and exploring relations to different models of truth and their systems. I am intrigued by the political and social underpinnings of canon formation and their underlying premises of a particular metaphysics.
My current practice is an in depth research into the concept of Master Painting, linking it to notions of perfection and striving for continuous progress. The concept of ‘Master’ asks for explanation and contextualization. Most recently I have been finding inspiration in the idea of performance, and wonder about how painting might be seen through a performance/performing framework- Coming from a multidisciplinary view,I find new ways of thinking and making by incorporating my athletic practice of ultrarunning into my art, the two become one scene where I am the painter-performer.My ultrarunning unfolds as painting-thinking practice.
At this stage I am interested to discover what I take back into the studio after a 38 +hours running performance through diverse landscapes. I also ask myself what I leave behind, out in the landscape, if my thoughts and footsteps can be seen as physical entities, as little creatures, productions of the mind left to dwell beyond my head and imprint alone.
nouf saleh (she/her)
My name is nouf saleh. I was born and raised on the Sanaani mountains. I am also raised by the Mostarian river, and Midwestern lakes. I am being and creating on occupied Dakota and Anishinaabe land, aka Minneapolis, MN. I am an artist, photographer, cultural worker, organizer and art administrator.
My practice is a place for me to work through familial and societal expectations that is set for me of how a black woman from Sana’a is supposed to be or dream. And also, expectations of folks on the other side of the ocean of how a black woman from a third world country is supposed to be and dream.
In my most recent works, over the last three years, I speculate and research identity, time, collective memory, grief, familial relations, secrets, and absence. My practice is an incentive for my own healing and is a grieving and composting process. My work is a site for me to release myself of the expectations and personas I took on performing. My creative process(es) is how I get to remember myself and return to my purpose continuously. As I practice this for myself, I hope to also compel folks back to themselves and into their present. And with all this, I feel a duty to document my/our present(s).
Website: noufsaleh.com
Instagram: @noufananah
Isabella Sanchez (she/her)
Isabella Sanchez is a multiracial second-generation American artist. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she earned a BFA in Visual Art with a minor in Art History from the University of Kansas in 2023. Her artistic practice combines textiles, natural dye, and various printing techniques, focusing on themes of grief, family, and race. Her work combines these elements to produce compelling yet unsettling imagery of nature and human forms. Isabella Sanchez has had work featured at the St. Louis Art Museum, the University of Kansas Memorial Union Gallery, Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, and the Kansas City Artist Coalition. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA at the University of Minnesota.
Artist Statement:
One moment is all it takes to change everything. This idea is central to Isabella Sanchez's work. She focuses on themes of grief and how one moment can present itself in multitudes throughout our lives. When Isabella thinks of grief, she often associates that emotion with the worst events in her life, including the loss of her mother, the cultural loss she feels within herself, the loss of her body, or the deep losses her family has experienced across generations. Instead of turning away from these feelings, she dives deeper and explores through her work how this grief has changed her. Through prints and textiles, Isabella finds herself within the materials and understands the duality of loss. She has learned that grief is more than just pain — it is transformative and resilient. By creating beautiful yet destructive images, she hopes to capture this feeling. Isabella has learned to heal herself through creating and wants to share her transformation experience with others by building visual journeys.
Instagram: @bb.izzys
