Two Cranbrook Academy of Art graduates from Bloomfield Hills have been selected for one of the country's top showcases for emerging painters.

Alexandra Collins, who earned her MFA in painting in May 2026, and Shaina Kasztelan, who completed her MFA in 2024, are among 40 artists featured in New American Paintings Issue 183, the publication's annual MFA edition. The academy announced the selections on Thursday, July 23.

The pair were chosen through a juried process from a national pool of current MFA candidates and recent graduates, according to Cranbrook. New American Paintings, now in its fourth decade, says it reaches more than 10,000 collectors, curators, and art professionals. Cranbrook's announcement called the MFA Annual the most competitive of the publication's six yearly issues.

Collins is a Metro Detroit-based oil painter whose canvases layer organic and inorganic forms into dense networks of color and light. Currants and lilies recur in her still lifes, carrying themes of resilience and rebirth.

"I approach painting as a space of synthesis, where natural and man-made forms merge into layered systems of abundance, joy, and hope," Collins wrote in a statement included in the Cranbrook announcement.

Before Cranbrook, Collins earned her BFA from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design in 2024, where she received the Integrative Project Award for her painting thesis. At Cranbrook she held a merit scholarship. Her work was on loan to the Frank Lloyd Wright Smith Home in Bloomfield Hills from 2024 through June 2026, and she showed in the Michigan Fine Arts Competition at Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center earlier in 2026.

Kasztelan takes a different path. A Detroit native and former Thanksgiving Day Parade float builder, she works across painting, sculpture, collage, and installation, assembling what the academy describes as "psychedelic dreamscapes from kitsch commodities." The imagery draws on strip malls, fast-food franchises, and rows of identical houses from her Midwest upbringing.

Her work has appeared at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. She earned her BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2012 and joined Buffalo Prescott, a nonprofit art hub in Detroit founded by Samara Furlong, as part of its inaugural artist-in-residence cohort in 2024.

Kasztelan also painted a section of the Glass City River Wall in Toledo, Ohio, which The Art Newspaper has called the largest mural in the United States.

New American Paintings Issue 183 is available to read free at newamericanpaintings.com.