Brown Arts Institute

Annual Student Exhibition

EXHIBITION
March 6–April 2, 2026
The Annual Student Exhibition is held in the spring semester of each year.

Breadcrumb

Annual Student Exhibition

EXHIBITION
March 6–April 2, 2026
The Annual Student Exhibition is held in the spring semester of each year.

46th Annual Student Exhibition

Juried by Tarik Bartel and Jinghong Chen
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5:30 – 7:30 PM

A cornerstone of the spring semester at the Brown Arts Institute, the Annual Student Exhibition is now in its 46th year. This juried showcase features a diverse array of artworks from currently enrolled Brown University students across all concentrations and degree levels.

This year’s exhibition is juried by community organizer and arts educator Tarik Bartel and visual artist Jinghong Chen. The collection highlights the creative risks and multidisciplinary talents of the student body, featuring works in a wide variety of media. From traditional forms to experimental installations, the exhibition offers a vibrant window into the contemporary artistic pulse of the campus community.

Awards

Artist List

About the 2026 Jurors

Tarik Bartel (they/them) is a community organizer and arts educator whose work is rooted in creating spaces for collective joy and imagination through photography, storytelling, and spoken word poetry. They have been photographing and exhibiting QTBIPOC stories in Providence & the Greater Boston area since 2015.

Jinghong Chen is a Chinese-born visual artist currently based in New York. Her work explores themes of memory, place, and belonging through the medium of cut paper. She reflects on the layered experiences of migration, drawing on the landscapes and traditions of both her hometown and her adopted home. Influenced by Chinese folk traditions, nature, and personal history, Chen’s intricate hand-cut designs incorporate motifs from religious and cultural imagery. These elements are woven with natural forms, as well as narratives from local history. Her work often examines the tension between connection and distance—both spiritual and physical—that arises from displacement and assimilation. Through cutting and layering paper, Chen creates pieces that bridge past and present, offering a meditative exploration of identity and shared experiences of migration. Her work invites viewers to reflect on how we rebuild our relationships with land, family, and home. Chen graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration. Her work has been exhibited in Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. She was a 2021 Contemporary Art Department Fellow at the RISD Museum, a finalist for an MTA Art & Design public art project, and a 2023 resident at the Peter Bullough Foundation.

In the News

March 10, 2026 The Brown Daily Herald

46th Annual Student Exhibition highlights diverse range of student artwork

Spanning multiple floors of the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, the 46th Annual Student Exhibition showcases a variety of artworks, ranging from sculptures to mixed mediums. Last Friday, the Brown Arts Institute welcomed community members to the gallery’s opening reception.

March 11, 2025 The Brown Daily Herald

45th Annual Student Exhibition showcases bold, experimental works in Granoff Center

For the exhibition, on display until April 6, the jurors selected works that challenge convention and invite deeper engagement.

Highlights

Explore the Granoff with Visual Arts concentrator and 2nd place winner of the 45th Annual Juried Exhibition, Lauren Ward '27!

Past Exhibitions

Revisit the 45th Annual Student Exhibition

Juried by Abdu Mongo Ali (GS) and Falaks Vasa (MFA ’23) the winning artworks took material and/or conceptual risks: "These works also tended to be the ones that read as the most authentic expressions of the artists, and I was so humbled to see so many works that were pushing boundaries and taking those risks unapologetically.” – Falaks Vasa⁠

@BAIBrownU

45th Annual Student Exhibition

The Annual Student Exhibition is held in the spring semester of each year. This year, the exhibition will be on view from March 6–April 6 throughout the Granoff Center building. Join us for the opening reception on March 6 from 6–8 pm!

This year's exhibition is juried by Abdu Mongo Ali and Falaks Vasa.

Abdu Mongo Ali is a musician, poet, cultural organizer and multidisciplinary artist who works with sound, video, digital language arts and performance. Ali sees their work as poetic inquiries of identity and often interrogates binary ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Ali has exhibited performances and work at MoMa PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, and The Kennedy Center. They have held residencies with Red Bull Music, Pioneer Works, Surf Point Foundation and was a visiting artist at the Brown Arts Institute. Ali was featured in Cultured Magazine's Young Artists 2019 list, awarded a 2023 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize and was a 2023 USA Fellow. Ali is currently a Literary Arts MFA Candidate at Brown University.

Falaks Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic.

Falaks’ lived practice currently takes the shapes of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by the Unnamed Zine Project and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, RI, with her wife, cat, and ball python.

Awards

44th Annual Student Exhibition

Awards

About the Jurors

Jessica Brown

Jessica Brown is a multidisciplinary multimedia spectacle generator, Afrofuturist mermaid cosmonaut explorer, community builder and creative connector creating disruptive and discursive work centered in social justice, diversity and equity. Known around town as Lady J, she’s a visual and performance artist, activist, designer, entertainer, musician, producer, party thrower and world builder—curated and unscripted. She operates through a lens of joy and justice in order to empower, uplift and encourage discourse across audiences. She is fierce and unapologetically Black.

In her work, she uses multiple mediums and mixes music, light, sound, props and pop culture images from her childhood—offering a heavy dose of nostalgia in order to connect with her audience. Her work amuses all of the senses and, as a means to educate and inform, offers layers of engagement in order to engage in ways that feel comfortable to the viewer.

An associate professor of industrial design at RISD, she uses a liberatory design framework, creating flexible environments that facilitate safe and inclusive space for all people to explore, investigate, reflect and discuss intersectional topics of race, class, gender, environment, politics and human rights through the lens of her own lived experience as a Black woman of African American heritage living and thriving in the US.

She is stationed in the Industrial Design department and also teaches in Graphic Design, offering courses in toy design, activism and social engagement. She serves on the college’s Board of Social Equity & Inclusion (SEI) and Community Engagement Steering Committee, to name a few of her community engagements. In her classes, she has a high level of expectation from her students—mainly that they be good community members and supportive of one another, critical thinkers who keenly observe/examine/question everything around them, risk takers willing to fail repeatedly, and empathic people who contribute greatly to the world.

Sháńdíín Brown

Sháńdíín Brown is a curator, creative and citizen of the Navajo Nation from Arizona. Joining the RISD Museum in 2021, she was the first Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art. She leads the museum’s America’s Research Initiative, a program supporting the study of Native North American museology, art and works of cultural heritage. While at the RISD Museum, she co-curated Being and Believing in the Natural World: Perspectives from the Ancient Mediterranean, Asia, and Indigenous North Americ (2022–23) and Take Care (2022–23). Brown’s newest exhibition, Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh (2023–24), explores the intersections of Diné apparel design, weaving and womanhood. She has co-taught in RISD’s Apparel Design department, where she is a recurring critic.

Brown’s research interests include multitemporal Native North American fashion and jewelry, global contemporary Indigenous art and Indigenous feminism and futurism. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned her BA in Anthropology and Native American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies. Previously she held positions at the Heard Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Penn Museum, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) and School for Advanced Research (SAR) Indian Arts Research Center (IARC). Her jewelry can be viewed on Instagram @T.Begay.Designs.

Annual Student Exhibition

Breadcrumb

Annual Student Exhibition

Juried by Tarik Bartel and Jinghong ChenGranoff Center for the Creative ArtsOpening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5:30 – 7:30 PM

46th Annual Student Exhibition highlights diverse range of student artwork

45th Annual Student Exhibition showcases bold, experimental works in Granoff Center

Revisit the 45th Annual Student Exhibition

Annual Student Exhibition

Juried by Tarik Bartel and Jinghong Chen
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5:30 – 7:30 PM