“Short Story Long”: 2026 MFA Thesis Show

The UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts presents the 2026 thesis show of current MFA students, eight artists working with movement, mourning, time, excavation, play and the possibility of communication.

The works in “Short Story Long” explore what it feels like to live in a time and place that doesn’t make sense. Patient processes, communal experiments, camp and residue accumulate into new ways of wandering the ruins, wishing upon worrisome stars to tell us what it all means.

Opening reception: April 17, 5-8 p.m. at Gallery 400.

Michael Cunningham is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, traveler, chef, musician and educator. His works are meditations on the concept of home, both as a place of dwelling and a site of loss and longing. His sound-based sculptures and performances reveal the potential and aesthetic value of play through collaborative practices.

Claire Burke Dain is a Chicago-based painter born and raised in Chicago. In the past couple of years she has had solo and two-person exhibitions, including “Drifting Back to Dreamland” at Compound Yellow, “Fondage” at Purple Window and “Do You Love Me Now” at Rubberneck Gallery. She makes paintings that include planes, trains and automobiles.

Erin E. Lynch is an artist and filmmaker working with 16mm film, video, sound, installation and text. Drawing on film theory, psychoanalysis and camp, her work explores spectatorship, humor, and multispecies life through genre cinema’s formal slippages. She was named a 2025 Artist To Watch by Comfort Station.

Catherine Lyu is a multidisciplinary Chinese artist whose work explores languages as words, images and objects. She uses bodily knowledge like memory, sensory, emotion and thought process to guide her decisions in art making. Her works are attempts to treat language spatially, physically and bodily.

Elias Mendel is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist and educator who makes videos, sculptures, drawings, writings and performances. He is interested in the intersection between memory, roots and the abyss and examines legibility, language and diaspora. Mendel draws from a vast family history and archive.

Naeemeh Naeemaei is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores ecological grief, folklore and reconstructed memory. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and her work has been featured in essays and on the covers of Leonardo, Sonic Acts, Dark Matter, Animal Studies Journal, Banyan Review, Walker Reader and Orion.

Billy Tucker was born in Chicago and works in photography and film. A recent work explores the Eisenhower Expressway and how its site embodies displacement and warmth in its material lessons through observation, collaboration and curiosity.

Justyna Wąsik works across film, sound and practices of everyday life. She created the post-artistic festival “Polish Soundtrack” with Krzysztof Kaczmarek and Łukasz Jastrubczak. Her works were featured at Mess Festival in Sarajevo, Edinburgh Fringe, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Dream Factory in Ostrava. She is also the author of lyrics for “Boring Drug & cli-fi,” a sonic love story of Lake Michigan and the Baltic.