Montclair State University's first M.F.A. thesis exhibition will be held at White BoxÑThe Annex in New York City, May 8 through 26.

The exhibition, titled "5," includes sculpture, paintings, drawings, and installations by Montclair State's first graduating class of M.F.A students. Participating students are Peerayot Gwilliam, Joanne Lefrak, Christina Pi–eros, F. Paul Shields Jr. and Dmitri Wilkins. The exhibition is curated by David Levi Strauss, a visiting critic-in-residence at Montclair State.

"Five young artists in a White Box. What links them, aside from the exigencies of the occasionÑtheir graduation from a new M.F.A. programÑand the accidents of friendship? I'd argue it's drawing," Strauss wrote in the exhibition's catalog.

He went on to describe each artist's work: "Lefrak begins by drawing from nature, then burns out the negative spaces to form intricate templates that cast positive shadows. This process strips landscape down, as she says, to the essentials of Ôchaotic pattern and depth.'

"In his drawing installations, Wilkins pulls drawing out into three dimensions, employing an intimate illusionism of perspective to form a base for his conceptual and formal inquiries.

"In addition to vibrant color and surface layering, Pi–eros uses ballistic and other forms of mark-making on images to draw out the social and political contradictions of her native Colombia.

"Gwilliam also responds to the emergencies of cultural displacement, but in a sculptural idiom. His objects are characteristically activated by lines of forceÑwrapped and pointed.

"Shields' installations, for all their insistent narratives and memory theater, revolve, finally, around those funky filigree funnels, Ôdelicate constructions' that distill a quintessence."

A reception will be held Thursday, May 10, from 6 to 8 p.m. White BoxÑThe Annex is located at 601 West 26th St., 14th Floor, New York City. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.