Graduation season is upon us, and with it many excellent student art shows. Among them, one senior stands out: Jillian Lisitano, who, at 70, is earning her master’s degree in studio art from Vermont State University in Johnson.

Lisitano, whose thesis show, “Souvenirs,” is on view through Saturday, May 17, is a nontraditional student in an unusual program. Since Goddard College closed last year and Montpelier’s Vermont College of Fine Arts moved its residencies to California, VTSU-Johnson is the only school where visual artists can pursue the degree on a Vermont campus.

The program has existed in some form since the 1990s, when then-Johnson State College students completed six residencies through the nearby Vermont Studio Center. Today’s program is considerably different, with about 25 on-campus and remote students.

Program director Mary Martin is particularly excited about this year’s addition of an interdisciplinary arts MFA. “We have a choreographer who’s getting into videography. We have somebody who does painting and piano music,” she said. “There was a need, because MFA programs have been closing — and especially interdisciplinary arts MFA programs.”

Lisitano is a painter, but she personifies a winding path through the arts. A supportive high school art teacher in Queens, N.Y., in the 1960s led her to enroll at the Art Students League in Manhattan in the early 1970s. She later got into fashion and modeling and became a makeup artist, with a stint living in Italy, she said. “Then I gave all that up to be a chef.”

After a long career cooking for private clients, including celebrities where she lived in Los Angeles, Lisitano moved to Vermont “because I wanted to live somewhere quieter,” she said, eventually landing in Johnson. In 2015, looking toward retirement, she went back to school at Johnson State for her BFA. She graduated remotely during the pandemic from what had then become Northern Vermont University and registered right away for the master’s program. “My fear was that if I take a breather, I may not go back.”

Lisitano is graduating from VTSU with a body of abstract paintings reflective of her multifaceted experience. In works such as “La Fantasia della Mia Summerland (the fantasy of my summerland),” she layers paint with drawing mediums to build up a dreamy palimpsest of a surface. Its terra-cotta, yellow and gray palette is reminiscent of Italy. Her lines suggest incomplete memories of figures, buildings, landscapes. At 5 by 8 feet, the painting recalls a fresco.

In a five-part series called “Gocce di pioggia e riflessi de fiori (raindrops and reflections of flowers),” Lisitano takes an allover approach, dripping paint in rondelles that look like roses against a hazy blue sky. Her most recent series, “Maps,” is 11 12-inch-square works in which looping lines travel from one canvas to another. Between them, flat shapes in a limited palette of greens, golds and red seem to delineate territories. These works, Lisitano said, were some of her most challenging, as they were made after a recent move from Johnson to the Upper Valley; she has less studio space there so is working smaller. Each work seems like a revision, a map of a place where territory is constantly shifting.

The show encompasses not only nostalgia for faraway places and memories but also the ones Lisitano has made in Johnson. She stressed how supportive all of her professors and peers have been and how she never felt out of place at VTSU. “I know I’m 70, but I don’t feel it,” she said. “I feel like I’m still growing up.”