ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Yessenia Gerace

@yessie.gerace

Yessenia Gerace is a multidisciplinary artist working with ceramics, concrete, and digital media to create autobiographical sculptures and installations. Her work is made through the lens of the Latine American diaspora, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and cultural hybridization. Gerace earned her MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art and Design and a BA in Studio Arts and Business Marketing, along with a Post-Baccalaureate in K–12 Art Education from Central Connecticut State University. Her work has been exhibited at Lighthouse ArtCenter (FL), Zand Head Gallery (ME), ArtSpace Gallery (CT), and Wesleyan Potters (CT). A recipient of the Hildreth Family Endowed Scholarship, she has been featured in The New Britain Herald, The Southington Observer, and West Hartford Press for her commitment to community, art, and education. Gerace is represented by Spectrum Gallery (Essex, CT) and is a  K-12 art educator residing in East Haddam, Connecticut.

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and digital media in the context of the Latine American diaspora. My work reclaims selfhood and resists Western frameworks through material hybridization and the evolving potential of language. With a feminist perspective, my practice is an act of care and refusal. I use text, clay, and concrete as a way to reconnect to the urban, suburban, and linguistic landscapes of my upbringing. Autobiographical narratives are the backdrop for sharing experiences of multiplicity and in-betweenness. These materials allow me to claim self and space while conceptually situating the work on liminal ground. By making artifacts of identity reclamation, I reimage cultural signifiers and symbols in order to create portraits, adornments, or paths of resilience. In doing so I offer the Latine diaspora an alternative representation, one of healing and opaque messages of resistance.



The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.