Painting Alumnae Alexandra Collins and Shaina Kasztelan Featured in New American Paintings MFA Annual (Issue 183)
Two Painting alumnae are featured in New American Paintings Issue 183, the publication’s annual MFA edition. Alexandra Collins (MFA Painting 2026) and Shaina Kasztelan (MFA Painting 2024) are among 40 artists selected for this year’s issue — chosen through a juried process from a national pool of current MFA candidates and recent graduates.
Now in its fourth decade, New American Paintings is one of the most widely recognized platforms for emerging painters in the United States, with a readership of over ten thousand collectors, curators, and art world professionals. Inclusion in the MFA Annual is a peer-recognized distinction among the most competitive of the publication’s regional and national issues.
Alexandra Collins constructs dense perceptual spaces through oil painting, fusing organic and inorganic materials into layered networks of color and light. Recurring motifs — currants, lilies — carry symbolic weight, standing for resilience and rebirth, unfolding into vibrant, dream-like still lifes. “I approach painting as a space of synthesis,” Collins has written, “where natural and man-made forms merge into layered systems of abundance, joy, and hope.” Collins graduated from Cranbrook in May 2026 following a BFA from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design.
Shaina Kasztelan is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, collage, and installation. Her work creates psychedelic dreamscapes from kitsch commodities, materials drawn from the strip malls, fast-food franchises, and rows of identical houses of her Midwest upbringing, that shuffle between curated control and chaotic mess. Through humorous juxtapositions, Kasztelan’s work interrogates the simultaneous pleasure and disgust produced by the excessive consumption of manufactured goods and media under late capitalism. Her work has been exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. She is represented by Buffalo Prescott in Detroit.
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