2026 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
manuela paz
JANUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 28, 2026
Drawing from a subconscious, autobiographical well, my photographic and sculptural practice navigates my restless search for identity, caught between ethnicities, untethered from any singular cultural anchor. This inbetweenness manifests as a persistent tension: a sense of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once.
From this condition of in-betweenness, I work through personal narratives rooted in childhood memory, intimacy, and moments of early formation that continue to reverberate through my practice. Many works originate from encounters with objects charged by lived experience, objects that blur the boundary between personal relic and cultural artifact. My jeweled depiction of Queen Joséphine’s crown, for example, is inseparable from a childhood memory of visiting my mother at Van Cleef & Arpels, where the original crown was once held in their collection. As a child, sales associates placed the crown on my head, collapsing fantasy and embodiment into a formative moment that continues to inform my relationship to adornment, power, and belonging.
Similarly, my repeated attempts to cast my silver baby rattle in plaster, resulting in a display of failed molds, function as both process and narrative. These fragments register loss, care, and the impossibility of perfect preservation, transforming an object of infancy into a meditation on memory’s fragility. Failure becomes visible, accumulated, and on display, mirroring the way personal histories are continuously reshaped through repetition and erosion.
My practice is also deeply invested in the language of museum display and institutional framing. This interest surfaces explicitly in my photographs of objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, where acts of looking, categorizing, and staging become part of the work itself. Across both photography and sculpture, I experiment with varied modes of display, pedestals, vitrines, groupings, and dispersals, treating each installation as a speculative exhibition that questions how meaning is assigned, preserved, and consumed.
Together, these works operate as emotional containers and archival gestures, holding autobiographical memory while mimicking the authority of institutional presentation. By positioning personal artifacts within systems of display traditionally reserved for cultural treasures, my work collapses private and public histories, allowing memory, fantasy, and material to coexist in a space where identity is not fixed, but continually assembled.
Manuela Paz received her BFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts (SVS) in 2003 and is a candidate for an MFA from the Maharishi International University (MIU) in 2026. Upon completing her undergraduate studies, Paz maintained a photographic practice exhibiting in group shows in and around New York. From 2005 to 2023 Paz built a career working for art fairs and nonprofits in New York, shaping meaningful experiences for today's leading arts patrons and collectors, while providing artists with a platform for exposure and growth. Concurrent to her career, her practice shifted from photography to curation, co-founding a gallery and exhibition space in 2015 in San Juan, Puerto Rico promoting Puerto Rican and Caribbean voices in an international context entitled EMBAJADA. In 2020, Paz turned her attention back to her photographic practice enrolling in an interdisciplinary MFA program at MIU to further cultivate an artistic practice. There she began a sculptural practice that now incorporates photography and installation. In 2026, Paz will participate in a thesis exhibition. Paz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.