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For all of us at New American Paintings, it is like getting a private view into the future of painting. That is not to say that the future of painting is determined only by artists who choose to pursue a graduate degree. Attaining a Master of Fine Arts degree is ultimately a personal decision—one which artists make for a variety of reasons. There is, however, something about the crucible of the MFA—the multitude of ways that artists are challenged, both formally and critically—that generates a lot of interesting, forward-thinking work. Artists may be born and not made, but there is no doubt that MFA programs are now firmly entrenched within the art world’s meta-structure.

This year we received close to eight hundred applications from artists affiliated with more than ninety art schools. The ways in which faculty members and the historical legacy of various schools can influence their students’ practices is notable. After doing this for so many years, I have reached the point where oftentimes I can accurately guess the school that an applicant is affiliated with based on their work alone. This, of course, has much to do with each school’s vetting process and the specific criteria they look for when evaluating a potential graduate candidate. Some MFA programs—Yale, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and UCLA among them—produce artists whose work is underpinned with extraordinary conceptual rigor. Others, such as the New York Academy of Art, RISD, and Columbia University, produce artists who often forefront technical mastery in…

I ended 2022 by reviewing and selecting the work of MFA candidates and recent graduates for this issue of New American Paintings. What a pleasure it was to spend time with these artists’ work right as the year was winding down; it allowed me space for reflection exactly when I needed it most. Though students tend to bring out this contemplative mood in us no matter the case, painters in particular have a way of forcing us to slow down and take a look at a different pace.

The intricate methods and rich contexts that each artist presents here encourage further digging-in to fully grasp and understand the images better. Stylistic tendencies in portraiture and figurative painting stand out the most, which is no surprise given the current social and political conversations being had around identity. Pia Bakala’s paintings, for example, explore various themes of trans femininity through a performative lens, placing her characters front and center, staring directly at the viewer as if to confront limitations set by cultural preconceptions. In Quinn Antonio Briceño’s visually striking, patterned portraits of the working class, he celebrates Latinx identity by collaging found materials that connect his family’s history in Nicaragua to his lived experience in the United States.

Elsewhere, Santiago Galeas’s work blends portraiture with landscape and features queer Latine subjects to study the connections between identity and ecology. Stephanie Mei Huang meanwhile, challenges racialized and gendered constructions of Chinese American women by presenting them in ways that break assumptions and…