Explore SVA’s July 2025 exhibitions and events, featuring graduate showcases in art, photography, and storytelling, plus talks by renowned artists and scholars.
Close Your Eyes and Let Go (detail), 2025, three-dimensional installation of digital photographs, dimensions variable. On view at “What Holds, What Breaks.”
Close Your Eyes and Let Go (detail), 2025, three-dimensional installation of digital photographs, dimensions variable. On view at “What Holds, What Breaks.”
What better way to beat the heat than in the cool climes of SVA’s galleries and studios this month? End-of-year showcases from graduates in art education, photography, digital and narrative art, and so much more will occupy spaces in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and talks by leading authors, artists, and educators offer the chance to hear from an array of international voices on wide-ranging topics like public art and philosophy.
EXHIBITIONS
Through Tuesday, July 1 | “sea change” | SVA Flatiron Gallery
An exhibition of artwork by 11 MA/MAT Art Education students from the class of 2025, curated by department chair Dr. Cathy Rosamond. The works in this show explore profound transformation, or metamorphosis, coupled with a significant shift in perspective.
A promotional poster from the MA/MAT Art Education “sea change” exhibition.
A promotional poster from the MA/MAT Art Education “sea change” exhibition.
Wednesday, July 2 – Tuesday, July 15 | “5” | SVA Chelsea Gallery
MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media presents an exhibition of photography, installations, and video pieces by five students in the program, organized by the department Director of Operations Randy West and faculty member Erin Davis. Noelle Théard, senior photo editor at The New Yorker, says of the work, “While varied in form and content, the projects pull strongly towards understanding cultural, generational, and familial relationships, and interpolating personal experiences to more universal understandings of each artist’s place in the world. In the current reordering of the globe and a dawning era of cultural isolationism, 2025 will likely be remembered as a rupture point delineating a before and after regarding artists’ freedom of expression. While they may not have imagined it as first-year students, the SVA MFA class of 2025 is a testament to American higher education’s excellence.”
MFA Art Practice and Art Cake present the 2025 thesis exhibition featuring work by Casey Correa, Natasha K. De Armas, Jacqueline Ehle Inglefield, Frank Rapant, Beckett Sky, and DW Zinsser. The themes of recollection, home, displacement, desire, and nostalgia, the unconscious thread through scale, material, emotion, and contrasts. Sculptural shrines and grotesque reliquaries explore queerness, spirituality, and harm reduction through intimate, devotional practices.
Wednesday, July 9 – Saturday, July 19 | “And Then” | SVA Gramercy Gallery
A thesis exhibition of story-driven installations and interactive work by the 2025 class of MFA Visual Narrative, curated by artists and educators Olivia Li (MFA 2021 Visual Narrative; BFA 2018 Visual and Critical Studies) and Brooke Viegut (MA 2022 Design Research, Writing and Criticism). Through sculpture, installations, digital works, narrative artifacts, and a library of published texts set across dystopian kingdoms, supernatural towns, and the quiet corners of everyday life, these works explore themes of survival, betrayal, identity, and the search for connection.
Thursday, July 10 – Wednesday, July 23 | “What Holds, What Breaks” | SVA Flatiron Gallery MFA Art Practice presents its second year exhibition featuring work by students Niki Brisnovali-Grillakis, Anna Gordy, Julie Jablonski, Meghan Jones, Emily Koch, Fan Lyu, Richard Montañez, Sarah Parker, Talia Steinman. Working through layering, piecing, making, marking, and unmaking, the artists investigate the tensile strength of forms under pressure. What endures? What crumbles, shatters, or snaps? And what emerges in the spaces between stability and collapse?
EVENTS
MFA Art Practice presents a conversation between artists Pepón Osorio and SVA faculty member Miguel Luciano, a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, social justice, and self-determination through painting, sculpture, and socially engaged public art projects. Osorio is known for his provocative, large-scale, multimedia installations that merge conceptual art and community dynamics. His visual language, explosive and elegant, challenges traditional art canons with richly textured monumental assemblages that travel far beyond accepted notions of beauty and aesthetics.
Celebrate the MFA Visual Narrative class of 2025 with a showcase of student work. Drop by for one or more of the event blocks below to see how the students’ creative journeys have culminated in accomplished works. Can’t make it to New York? The artist presentations, screenings, and graduation ceremony will be live-streamed.
The MFA Visual Narrative open studios show represents the culmination of the program’s intensive summer semester. Meet the program’s first and second-year students in their studio spaces, where they will showcase the work that they’ve created this summer. Visit the accompanying RisoLAB Print Slam and shop for new art by our students and the RisoLAB community. Mingle with the community and enjoy a complimentary refreshment. This event is open to the public, and registration is required.
MFA Art Practice presents a conversation between former MFA Art Writing Chair David Levi Strauss and Australian-born Michael Taussig, author and professor emeritus of anthropology at Columbia University. Taussig and Strauss have co-edited two books together: To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution (2016) and The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (2020), and are two of the three surviving members of what Taussig once called “The Shawangunk School of Art and Philosophy, Anarchy and Mysticism.”
Wednesday, July 30, 6:00 – 9:00pm | MFA Art Practice Open Studios | 335 West 16th Street, 5th floor
MFA Art Practice presents an open studios event—see new work from the low-residency, interdisciplinary program.