Opening Celebration of 2026 NTX Graduate Student Program, 'In The Works'
Friday, February 13, 2026
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
161 Glass St. Dallas
Free Admission
On Friday, 13 February from 7.00 - 9.00 PM, join us for the celebration of In the Works, the second annual DC NTX Graduate Student Program exhibition opening February 13, 2026, curated by Anna Katz, Senior Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).
The annual initiative, launched in 2024, invites a cohort of North Texas Master of Fine Arts students in their final year of graduate work to exhibit at Dallas Contemporary after being selected by a visiting national curator. Initiated by Executive Director Lucia Simek, the program aims to advance the early careers of emerging artists schooled in the region by fostering healthy interactions and connections between students and renowned curators.
Applications for MFA artists were open from August through September 2025. From the pool of submissions, Katz created a short list and then conducted studio visits at the seven North Texas universities to select the final cohort of students for the exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. The second annual DC NTX Graduate Student Program cohort includes: Janay Bookhart, UNT; Marcy Davis, TCU; Alexandra Green, TWU; Christopher Nájera, TCU; Nadin Nassar, UNT; Freddy Ortega, TCU; Susan D. Seaborn, TWU; and Tina Vahed, UTD.
The resulting exhibition, In the Works, will feature work by eight artists studying in an array of North Texas MFA programs, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and photography, and provides insight into how emerging talents address aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns in their art today. Their approaches are varied and multifaceted: both direct and associative—whether obtrusively inserting one’s body in public space in live performance or experimenting with materials that recall viscera; fantastical and observational—whether conjuring cultural mythologies and ancient wisdoms or staring at the same point in the sky at the same time every day for months on end to record the color; documentary and critical—whether creating a photographic archive to preserve familial memory or deconstructing pernicious media representations of cultural “others.”
Learn more about the exhibition, the curator, and the DC NTX Grad Program here.