Sculpture Space NYC - Center for Ceramic Arts is delighted to present: Fault Lines featuring works by the 2026 MFA cohort at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.
Fault Lines - Alfred Ceramics MFA Graduates 2026
On View: February 6 - March 21, 2026.
Opening Reception: February 6 from 6-8PM.
Fault Lines presents new work by the 2026 MFA cohort at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. While these seven artists all work in clay, their practices move in divergent directions, spanning sculpture, vessels, narrative work, abstraction, and material experimentation. The plasticity of clay, its ability to shift, respond, resist, and hold onto what touches it, creates room for each artist to follow their intention while remaining in conversation with each other through a shared medium. Across this exhibition, clay becomes a place where different vocabularies sit next to one another: intuitive and precise, expressive and restrained, intimate and expansive. With material investigations that move fluidly across registers: from encounters rooted in everyday sensorial experience to more elusive, phenomenological states, ineffable and uncanny territories are encountered where meaning becomes unstable yet deeply felt. Together, the works reflect the wide reach of contemporary ceramic practice and the many ways a malleable material can become its own language when words no longer suffice. This exhibition features the work of Amanda Gentry, Marita Manson, Nathan Neufeld, Ish Rivera, Elizabeth Scott, Persis Wade and GH Wood, featuring 12 sculptures/2 from each of the artists, and 6-12 pieces of functional pottery).
About the artists and their work:
Amanda Gentry (b.1973, Long Beach, California) is a sculptor and painter. As a neurodiverse artist, she pares down visual stimuli, intent on revealing only what is essential. Gentry is a DCASE (Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events) grant recipient and has twice been awarded an IACA (Illinois Arts Council Agency) grant. Her work is in private collections worldwide and exhibited in galleries, academic institutions, and museums nationwide.
Statement: “My work is the manifestation of a search for visual language as it relates to the ineffable. Inspired by ideas put forth by the Transcendentalists, as well as the visual aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, I turn to simplification and the paring down of form as a way of amplifying the inner voice—both my own and that of the viewer. By using elemental geometry such as the circle, square (or four-sided form), and line, I draw on historical and cross-cultural symbolism that speaks to the Self, the physical world, and the longing for communion with that which lies beyond language”.
Marita Manson is a Canadian artist. She graduated with a BSc in Microbiology from UVic (2010), and has studied ceramics at Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, BC (2017), and the Reykjavik School of Visual Arts in Iceland (2018). Marita’s work has been featured in galleries and shows in Canada, the United States and South Korea, and has served as an artist in residence at the Medalta International Artists Residency in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
“Exploring domestic space through a psychological lens, my work aims to question our sense of comfort in the home, disturbing familiar objects to create vignettes that live in the uncanny domestic. Alluding to the mid-20th century, the objects I create are situated in a time when domestic life was opaque, and gender expectations were highly established and advertised in glossy magazine pages. Intricate, repetitious and traditionally female, I reference the historical world of ceramic surfacing, drawing a parallel to the expectation of maintaining a pleasant domestic appearance, as a means of shrouding reality or coping with underlying psychosis.
Presented in 2026, nearly a lifetime away from the era in reference, my work questions contemporary private, asking whether, in the age of mass sharing and apparent transparency, our interior lives are any more homely.”
Nathan Neufeld is an artist, designer, and educator, born in Asheville, NC, and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a major in Ceramics in 2015. During his time at KCAI, Nathan pioneered ways in which digital technologies intertwine with traditional processes. After graduating he was hired to lead KCAI’s new flagship Studios for Art and Technology. Nathan departed from KCAI in 2024 for the NYSCC at Alfred University as a MFA candidate.Nathan has exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts and The International Ceramics Center in Kecskemet, Hungary. He has created works for those such as the Kemper family, Manica Architecture, NCECA, the City of Riverside, and the Kansas City Art Institute. This includes an installation for The Monarch in Kansas City, which was featured in Architectural Digest as one of eight most stunning chandeliers in the world.“On the liminal, transitional, and thresholds between realities. In Event Horizon groupings of lights emulate a day cycle - shifting through dawn, daylight, twilight, and darkness. The installation transforms throughout this cycle. In darkness, higher dimensional entities recede and those of lower dimensions emerge. Around a singularity, a point of infinite mass, lies the event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape - or so we were told. It turns out, black holes are not wholly black. What enters a black hole, instead of being entirely lost, is decayed and “encoded” onto its event horizon in a lower form of energy-information-dimension. Reality distorts as it approaches the edge. As matter approaches the speed of light, time slows relativistically. But as it nears it, time becomes irrelevant. If a photon were to have perspective, the same instant it was emitted from the sun or from the big bang 13.8 billion years ago – it hits our retina. Even our beliefs distort at the edge; when the frontier moves to the limits of our understanding, we invoke that which is above understanding. How does reality exist when it is on the threshold of the "true" and imagined? What does it do to a human soul to be on the brink of believing?
Who are we in the transient luminance of dawn and twilight?”
Ish Rivera is a ceramic artist who was born and raised in Southern California. He is a first generation college student who received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach, 2023.
“My work is an interplay between material investigation and the notion of a vessel. I am always observing, questioning, and deconstructing phenomena from the daily “mundane.” A habitual nature that was rooted in my observational learning of my father. I re-examine, interrogate, and develop a more nuanced critical stance of everything I know that makes up my ceramic practice. I rebel against preconceived notions in order to build a deeper understanding grounded in my own experiences, research, and perspective. The potentiality of the vessel is greater than its aesthetic value. The possibility of a metaphor for the human experience...my experience. I deconstruct the formal line and dramatize the experience through experimental approaches–all rooted in my discerning nature.”
Elizabeth Scott (b. June 25, 1993) grew up in the Bay Area and earned her BFA in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach. She is a 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Working primarily with clay, fabric, and domestic materials, her practice explores how memory, intimacy, and loss are held in the body through figuration shaped by fragmentation, repair, and processes of collapse and care. “My work begins with the body as a site where memory, intimacy, and loss accumulate.
Working with clay, fabric, and domestic remnants, I create psychologically charged figures shaped through cycles of building, firing, breaking, and repair. Slip-saturated textiles burn away in the kiln, leaving fragile, fossilized surfaces that register touch, time, and absence. The work inhabits an emotional in-between. Tender yet resilient, broken yet whole, reflecting themes of care, longing, visibility, and persistence. Drawing from my own embodied experience while reaching toward something collective, the sculptures invite close looking while resisting full access, holding softness as a quiet form of strength.”
Persis Wade is a ceramic sculptural functional figurative object maker. After completing her BFA in ceramics at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021, she completed an emerging artist residency at the Northern Clay Center, a studio assistantship at Peters Valley Craft School, and apprenticeship at an adobe pistachio farm in New Mexico called Bitter Lakes.
She has had the honor of serving the role as educator and maker in numerous community studios across the midwest.
“Ground working through a tactile spiritual parable to encounter the Divine, the mystical forms in space are built at a colorful large scale to encourage restoration of the human person. Desiring the unseen to be tangible, legitimizes a physical pursuit of understanding faith (and lack of) with an active need to engage with the holy mystery of ministering spirits attending to us and the principalities at play. Rooted in Biblical practice, Persis Wade honors ritual by facilitating community practice and providing a place to imagine the majestic wonders of the universe humanity has forgotten.”
GH Wood (b.1998) graduated from St. Olaf College, MN, in the spring of 2021 with a BA in Chemistry and Studio Art. GH was a St. Olaf Emerging Artist Resident and remained in Northfield, MN, for the following year. Before his time at Alfred University, he attended IU Southeast, IN, as a post-baccalaureate in ceramic arts.
“As a Chinese American transracial adoptee, I navigate the life lived and the one imagined. I reconcile the dissonance by learning and engaging with my lost Chinese heritage. I investigate historic Chinese pottery forms and surfaces, seeking reference as reverence. This practice is both reconnection and exploration—balancing vessel and self, honoring tradition while allowing transformation. This journey reveals that understanding one’s birth culture is not a fixed destination, but a process with many pathways, each offering opportunities”
The Master of Fine Arts program in Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University, has a distinguished history as a center of ceramic innovation, research and education. In our state of the art facility, our funded 2-year program is embedded in an intensive learning community where teaching and mentorship meet research through critical making and rigorous critique. Experimental and encompassing curriculum represents all genres that reside in or move through various realms of ceramic practice. Consistently ranked number one by US News and World Report, the MFA degree in Ceramic Art prepares individuals for creative careers in the arts and culture.
Sculpture Space NYC - Center for Ceramic Arts is a non-profit 501(c)(3) dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art focusing on the research and exploration of three-dimensional work with an emphasis towards ceramics. SSNYC-CCA‘s mission is to stimulate creativity, new ideas and collaboration in ceramics-based investigations. Artists, designers and craftspeople of all backgrounds converge in this center to experiment, learn, make, reflect and grow artistically.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday: 2pm-8pm
Location: 47-21 35th Street, Long Island City NY 11101, near the 33rd Street/ Rawson Street stop on the 7 train.