By Grant Terwilliger
The last SUNY Plattsburgh Senior BFA Exhibit allows for graduating BFA students to reflect on the work they have created throughout their time at Plattsburgh.
The BFA program no longer exists, making Noah Honsinger and Kayla Lester the last BFA students at SUNY Plattsburgh. The BFA final exhibit is on display in the Regina Shoolman Slatkin Art Collection Study Room in Myers Fine Arts Building. Honsinger and Lester collaborated with faculty and museum staff to create one of their first major exhibitions.
“Over the course of the year, students are expected to write a proposal and produce a body of work that investigates an idea or set of concerns that are meaningful to them,” Museum Director Tonya Cribb said.
After students put together a proposal and a body of work their work is critiqued by professors in the arts department. This process allows for the artists to receive feedback on their work and find what direction to go when putting together the finished exhibit.
“When they looked at my work they were generally just saying that they want to see more fantasy stuff, less of the concept art such as a character drawing with no background, or just generally less fully developed work,” Honsinger said.
Honsinger, from Troy, New York, has always been fascinated with the middle ages and mythology, both of which have directly influenced his artwork. He has had a passion for visual storytelling and has been drawing since middle school. He aspires to help young artists find their creativity through teaching high school art.
Honsinger seeks to make his illustrations more than fantastic and whimsical, and allow the landscape to tell the story.
“I want the characters to feel real, but above all I want people to become absorbed in the world I am creating,” Honsinger wrote in his artist statement.
Lester’s preferred medium is photography and graphic design and she focuses her BFA work on her Jamaican heritage and spaces that have been reclaimed by nature. She has had her work featured in the 2023 and the 2025 Frederic Remington College Student Juried Art Show and the 2025 Best of SUNY Art Exhibition.
Lester is from Elmont, New York and has had a passion for digital media ever since she took AP 2-D Design in high school and became a lead editor for her school yearbook. She has been involved in the student outdoor publication DoNorth since her freshman year and gained hands-on experience with design and visual layout for the magazine.
“Together, my photography and graphic design remind us of the beauty in what has been left behind and the enduring power of culture and music to connect us,” Lester wrote in her artist statement. “My creative work reflects a journey of rediscovery — capturing the forgotten through photography and celebrating vibrant culture through graphic design.”
Lester said she aims to evoke emotions in her work and invite viewers to reconnect with forgotten places through the use of light, focus and color in her photographs. The photographs represent spaces that once served a purpose in society and now are overlooked and abandoned.
“While some now remain in use today, their eventual abandonment seems inevitable,” Lester wrote.
