Katie Bell, Breaker, 2011 | Vinyl, acrylic, foam, rope and paper. Approx. 9 x 10 feet. Courtesy Mixed Greens, New York.

There have been countless MFA thesis shows around the country since May, but few have been as captivating or as relevant as that of the RISD Painting MFA 2011 grads on view at Mixed Greens in New York. (And even fewer are still on view through July.) Hailing from the Rhode Island School of Design, the show features work by Corydon Cowansage, Collin Hatton, Field Kallop, Nell Painter, Anna Plesset, Mike Schbreiber, Keith Allyn Spencer, and Katie Bell, who we recently saw in the annual New Insight show of promising MFA candidates, curated by Susanne Ghez for NEXT Chicago.

If the work by artists in Small Crowd is any indication of what's taking place in MFA painting programs across the country, the outlook is good. Abstraction is unsurprisingly favored over figuration here, and wielded by Hatton, Kallop, Spencer and others. Contemporary painters are frequently returning to ideas of the painting as object, an approach used by Bell and Plesset, and to brilliant effect.

More pics after the jump!  —Evan J. Garza, Editor-at-Large

Corydon Cowansage, Fence #5, 2011 | Oil on canvas, 80 x 108 inches. Courtesy Mixed Greens, New York.

Installation views, Small Crowd: RISD MFA Painting 2011, Mixed Greens, New York.
Small Crowd: RISD MFA Painting 2011 will be on view at Mixed Greens, New York, through July 8.