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Marissa Cote (Cornell University) is the recipient of a 2026 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Through weaving, quilting, clay, and assemblage, Marissa Cote materializes visions of queer utopia. By engaging sites of labor such as construction and the loom, she sculpts architectures of longing and belonging. Informed by the creation of inner and collective utopias, her sculptural visions of queer futurity mimic dwellings, built environments, and vanishing points. Cote’s practice materially and conceptually embodies her work and visions towards queerness. She presents the horizon as a site of hope, risk, and disappointment and as somewhere we might glimpse utopia. To Cote, constructing an inner queer utopia, outside of patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative borders, is the foundation on which to build queer futurity.

Cote earned a BFA in Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2018. She was recently a Fellow at Clark University’s Low Residency MFA program. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Moon Went with Her at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and I promise to stay in touch at the Distillery Gallery in Boston. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at Tilton Gallery (New York, NY), Machines with Magnets (Pawtucket, RI), Fort Point Community Arts Gallery (Boston, MA), and New Alliance Gallery (Somerville, MA). Her book Architecture of Longing is anticipated to be published in 2027.