Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial

Dates

• On View: January 16 – February 21, 2026
• Opening Reception: Friday, January 16, 5:00-7:00pm

About the exhibition

Juried by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Tufts University Art Galleries, Lines / Loopholes: Maine College of Art & Design 2026 Faculty Triennial presents the work of nineteen artists who teach across the College in Academic Studies, Animation & Game Art, Ceramics, Printmaking, Photography, Painting, Sculpture, Textile & Fashion Design, Woodworking & Furniture Design, and Master of Fine Arts (MFA). 

The selected works for the 2026 MECA&D faculty exhibition evoke questions about lines and loopholes, extant powers and improbable escapes. They beg the questions: What lines do we draw, or what are those that have been drawn for us in the proverbial and myriad “sand(s)” of contemporary life? Artificial boundaries and seemingly natural limits order visual systems, govern political regimes, orchestrate social interactions, and extend dominion over ecologies. The rationalizing logics of the Enlightenment persist in iterative taxonomies through the Information to Digital Ages. But what of the lines that bend cosmological time as channels? And how might we view an affective tether ushering two minds together? Should we suspect the borderlands that edge nation-states ever closer? And instead of a vertical line denoting hierarchies, could we feel the interconnectedness of living beings as a matter of an ever-expanding continuum?

Perhaps we should wish for loopholes… enveloping ourselves in quasi-legal evasions, or seeking narrow outlets from the tracks and grids. A loophole is a line after all—somehow curving upwards and back down again. In that loophole, a line reckons with infinity meeting itself, forming a void, a breath, an escape. The artists exhibiting in Lines / Loopholes circumnavigate the post-capitalist and nihilist realities of the everyday and still revel in the simultaneously utilitarian but ostentatious desire to create—connecting the dots from here to there to somewhere.

— Laurel V. McLaughlin

Exhibiting Artists: Elana Adler, Tabitha Barnard '16, Patricia Brace '06, Tracey Cockrell, Patrick Coughlin, Adam Fisher, John Gardiner '07, MFA '14, Dylan Hausthor '15, Adriane Herman, Laura Jourdan Palmer, Alysha Kupferer, Owen Marc Laurion, Honour Mack, Joshua Reiman, Andy Rosen, Benjamin Spalding MFA '17, sabine anja stxrm, Ling-Wen Tsai, Ryan Wight MFA '23

Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a curator, art historian, writer, and educator. Her work explores research-based sculpture, installation, new media, and social practice works activated by performance concerning formal liminalities, globalized migration, and ecological networks. McLaughlin is a Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from PSI, Calgary; to the UAAC, Montreal, Toronto, and London; the CAA, New York; and the ASAP, Hong Kong and New York, and published her work in such as Art Papers, ASAP/J, BOMB Magazine, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, women & performance, and te magazine, among others. She co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). Forthcoming writing from McLaughlin will be featured in the edited volumes Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama, 2025) and exhibition catalogs and readers Arnold J. Kemp: tender & haunted (No Place Press, 2026) Magical Thinking (Tufts University Art Galleries, 2026), and How do you throw a brick through the window... (Tufts University Art Galleries and John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2026). McLaughlin's scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Rupert, Acción Cultural Española, the Dutch Consulate of New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Terra Foundation, and the Teiger Foundation.

Events

In addition to curricular programs, Lines / Loopholes public offerings include:

• Public Opening Reception: Friday, January 16, 2026, 5:00-7:00 pm, ICA
  
• Visiting Curator Talk with Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD: Monday, February 2, 2026, 12:00-1:00 pm, Osher Hall, MECA&D Campus
  Laurel V. McLaughlin will share highlights from her curatorial practice, insights into her path of becoming a curator, and thoughts on the exhibition Lines / Loopholes.
  
• Faculty Panel Discussion #1: Friday, February 6, 2026, 3:00-4:30 pm, The ICA at MECA&D
  A selection of Lines / Loopholes exhibiting artists/faculty will discuss their work. Patricia Brace '06, Alysha Kupferer, Owen Marc Laurien, Honour Mack, Ling-Wen Tsai
  
• February First Friday Art Walk: Friday, February 6, 2026, 5:00-8:00 pm, The ICA at MECA&D
  
• Poetry Reading with Laura Jourdan Palmer: Thursday, February 12, 2026, 6:00-7:00 pm, The ICA at MECA&D
  Laura Jourdan Palmer (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Academic Studies at MECA&D) will read from moya moya, an artist book (made in collaboration with photographer Christian Sorensen Hansen) on view in Lines / Loopholes.
  
• Faculty Panel Discussion #2: Monday, February 16, 2026, 12:00-1:00 pm, Osher Hall, MECA&D Campus
  A selection of Lines / Loopholes exhibiting artists/faculty will discuss their work. Tracey Cockrell, Adam Fisher, Dylan Hausthor '15, Joshua Reiman, sabine anja stxrm

All programs are free and open to the public.

Gallery