A few years ago, art historian and teacher Georgina Ruff noticed that her students around Oregon — she teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State, and Southern Oregon University — had a limited vision of artistic work “outside their own little bubble.”

Her response to that “siloing” was to create the nonprofit MFA:NW, which gathers work by recent MFA graduates from around the Pacific Northwest into a traveling exhibition that gets beyond the Portland bubble, landing in smaller communities around the state.

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The pilot year for this juried show features a variety of work by eight young artists with solid LGBTQ+ representation. It launched in Roseburg, then traveled north to Yamhill County, and now to Eastern Oregon. MFA:NW opened last week at the Pendleton Center for the Arts and runs through June 28. The exhibition will conclude later this summer in Astoria.

Ruff said the prospect of a show in Pendleton followed a chat with the center’s director, Roberta Lavadour. “I was talking to Roberta and I said, ‘You know, this is crazy, but what if I brought MFA work out here? Would you show it?” And she said, ‘Oh yeah, that would be fantastic, we would love to do that.’ So, I had the support.”

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MFA:NW describes its mission this way: “Our exhibitions provide opportunities for engagement between emerging artists and rural communities. Our goal is to nurture artistic talent and the diverse arts ecologies of the Northwest through free-to-the-public exhibitions, community engagement initiatives designed to enable an exchange of ideas, and peer networking.”

I visited the show earlier this spring during a run at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg. The artists represented are Tyler Stoll, an interdisciplinary artist from Portland; transmasc artist Daniel Sundberg; Sarah Elizabeth Barnett, painter originally from north Texas, now based in Pullman, Wash.; Erin Bodfish, a painter, florist and writer based in Central Oregon; Olivia DelGandio, Ansley Gwin, and Gili Rappaport, all of Portland, and Boise-based artist Alyse-Ambriel Hanna.

It’s a small but diverse collection of work: installations, poetry, painting, photography, sculpture, etc. The show is titled Subject, with the work exploring issues of gender, sexuality, and being in the world as a physical body. The theme was selected only after jurors Bean Gilsdorf, Mike Bray, Jaleesa Johnston, Kanani Miyamoto, and Heidi Schwegler saw the entries; the only criterion was the work had to come from new MFA graduates.

“I didn’t want somebody to not send in their work because they thought, ‘Gosh, it doesn’t really apply to the theme,’” Ruff said. “I thought it was better to take the temperature of what are the concerns of MFAs graduating right now, what are people making work about?”

What I found striking about the show was the high level of artistry and complexity of thought that clearly went into every piece. One wouldn’t think, taking it all in, that it’s “entry-level” or “student project” stuff. The level of talent exhibited by young artists right out of the collegiate gate is impressive.

Even within the category of painting, there’s a nice mix. Bodfish contributed abstract oils, some with encaustic, on both canvas and birchwood. Barnett’s oils offer a collage of images: Pneuma was created as part of her graduate thesis. The word is from the Greek meaning “spirit” or “life essence,” and the imagery, which includes a vintage World War II-era resuscitator, examines “contradictions within human life preservation and one’s confrontation with mortality.”

Sundberg’s oils compose a series titled A Queer Opulent Utopia, which “reclaims historic trans community and offers healing in a non-violent luxurious space owned by queer bodies.” Members of the artist’s community are shown in paintings that appear in the style of neoclassical Renaissance art, which is dominated by cisgender figures.

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Rappaport’s The Shape of What’s Left Behind is a series of seven bronze sculptures elegantly displayed on a table. Gwin’s poetry communes with a sprawling, large-scale sculpture on a wall. Stoll has the show’s only video installation: Danny Zuko Screen Tests, with two side-by-side videos “exploring divergent modes of embodying masculinity.” The clips feature a leather jacket-clad performer giving a “phallic” and a “flaccid” interpretation of the male lead role from the musical Grease. Hanna’s Makeup Scenes display looks at “the intersection of cosmetics and gender expectations.”

DelGandio has one of the largest pieces. A House in an Alternate Universe is an installation of a comfortingly domestic scene, the centerpiece of which is a small table with books about queer history and transgender issues — books they encountered as a college student. Perhaps best of all, there’s a collection of issues of Invert, their refreshingly analog project of a queer newspaper that’s distributed in the Portland area.

The Portland artist did a lot of research into queer history as a college student and wanted a way to render it aesthetically, a project “that takes shape as a newspaper and accompanying clothing line.”

“It’s about representation and history, and I want people to be aware of these histories that are so often lost,” DelGandio told me when I contacted them by phone. “Even if they don’t personally connect to them, just acknowledging this whole history and existence is really important to me. And especially for people who do connect with it, I made it as something I wish I would have come into contact with when I was a teenager and would have probably helped me a whole lot if I had.”