When hierarchy crumbles

Artists in MFA shows across Boston explore oneness with nature, not power over it

Hannah Stoll. Maze (C), 2025. Oil on panel, 62”x48”. All photos by Cate McQuaid except where otherwise noted.

I’m posting my usual Sunday essay today, because two of these MFA shows close on May 18, so if you want to go – go now. I’ll be back on Sunday with a smaller roundup of this week’s stories in the Globe.

Artists in Masters of Fine Arts programs have always had a way of showing us where the world is going and how our notions of our role in it are changing. This year, many local MFA grads make work that reflects how the binaries in humanity’s relationship to nature are giving way like a beachside house on stilts during a hurricane.

Last week I stopped by MFA thesis shows at Boston University (through May 18) Massachusetts College of Art and Design (through May 25), and School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (through May 18).

These are not cautionary artworks, chiding viewers to be better stewards of the earth. We’re not stewards in this worldview – we’re coequal with ferns, paramecia, and wildebeests. These artists embrace their place in the ecosystem; they elevate the brilliance of nonhuman things; they impart consciousness to all. This is in part stems from climate change; it also grows from the art world’s slow-growing focus on subjectivity. The more we tune into our own subjectivity and that of other beings and systems, the more we see how nutty and destructive capitalistic hegemony is.

What does it say that this creed is developing at the same time the U.S. government leans into reckless hierarchical power?