From alumni spotlights to interdisciplinary lectures and screenings, SVA’s many gallery and classroom spaces offer exhibitions and events across fine art, curation, photography, animation, politics, and culture.
Ran Xu, Illustration from Door, 2025, digital media, 10 x 16 inches. On view at “The Book Show.”
Ran Xu, Illustration from Door, 2025, digital media, 10 x 16 inches. On view at “The Book Show.”
Programming this month runs the gamut from a visiting alumnus animator who will perform songs off her new album to a major symposium on global curation in a tense political climate. An abundance of artist and author talks, screenings, and an array of exhibitions of photography, illustration, and more, round out November at SVA.
EXHIBITIONS
Through Saturday, December 6 | “Wavelengths” | SVA Chelsea Gallery
A juried survey of recent alumni work across the College, as selected by a panel of renowned alumni practitioners in their respective fields, presented by SVA Galleries. Spanning a range of materials and concepts, the work on view takes particular interest in process-based practices and the pursuit of joy in the face of adversity. From drawing to painting, sculpture to new and mixed media, the exhibition demonstrates the breadth and variety of SVA’s diverse alumni network.
Through Saturday, November 15 | “Picture Library 2025” | SVA Gramercy Gallery
BFA Photography and Video presents its annual exhibition, organized in collaboration with the SVA Library and featuring a selection of the class of 2025’s Senior Monographs alongside books from the College’s Library that have inspired their work. This special edition of the show surveys all prior iterations of Picture Library from 2018 to 2024, collectively showcasing previously exhibited Senior Monographs along with their inspiration books in an adjacent reading room.
An exhibition of work by more than 25 MFA Computer Arts faculty members and alumni, curated by the program’s Assistant Director for Innovation Technologies, Rochele Gloor, explores the human capacity to endure, adapt, innovate, and overcome adversity. Organized around four interconnected subthemes—nature, human, technology, and abstraction—the featured works encompass a range of media, including video, sound, print, installation, animation, interactivity, and augmented reality. Together, they invite audiences to reflect on the emotional and creative resilience that defines an evolving relationship between technology and humans.
Saturday, November 22 – Saturday, December 13 | “Act 1: Geraldine Scott III” | SVA Gramercy Gallery
MFA Illustration as Visual Essay presents “Act 1: Geraldine Scott III,” a solo exhibition of animation, ink, pencil, and airbrush works on paper by 2022 alumnus Lillian Ansell, curated by department chair Riccardo Vecchio. The work in “Act 1: Geraldine Scott III” comprises the first act of an illustrated play, building the world and inviting the audience into its landscape of edible clouds, powerful trees, open fields, castles, and sinking swamps, all fit for a fairytale.
Saturday, November 22 – Saturday, December 13 | “The Book Show” | SVA Gramercy Gallery An annual exhibition of original books—illustrated poetry, memoirs, social commentaries, graphic novels, children’s books, and essays—by 19 first-year MFA Illustration as Visual Essay students, curated by faculty member Anna Raff.
An installation view of the "Wavelengths" exhibition.
An image of the "Wavelengths" exhibition.
EVENTS
Tuesday, November 4, 9:00 – 10:00am | The Artists Roundtable: Naeem Mohaiemen (New York) | Online
MA Curatorial Practice presents a talk with Naeem Mohaiemen. Mohaiemen combines films, photography, drawings, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia and transnational collisions within families, borders, architecture, and uprisings.
Tuesday, November 4, 3:00 – 5:00pm | Anthony Cudahy | 133/141 W 21st Street, room 101C
MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Cudahy, part of the Talks lecture series. Cudahy’s first US museum solo show, “Spinneret,” opened at Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, in 2024, and was on view at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas through January 2025. In the fall of 2024, his solo show, “Like Night Needs Morning,” was on view at CAP Centre d'arte de Saint-Fons in Saint-Fons, France. In 2023, Cudahy’s first solo institutional exhibition, “Conversation,” opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Dole, France. Cudahy's parallel solo shows, “Fool’s gold” and “Fool’s errand,” were on view at Hales and GRIMM’s New York galleries in the fall of 2024.
MPS Digital Photography presents a talk with award-winning photographer and faculty member Stacy Renee Morrison, part of the i3: Images, Idea, Inspiration lecture series. Morrison often forgets what century it is, as she spends her time in the present creating visual biographies for women from the past. Morrison has exhibited her photographs nationally and internationally, including New York City, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Italy, Argentina, and Korea. Her photographs have been published in The Creative Independent, Harper’s Magazine, Dear Dave, Feature Shoot, and Photography Quarterly.
BFA Animation welcomes alumnus Rebecca Sugar (BFA 2009 Animation) to celebrate the release of their new album, Lonely Magic. This livestreamed event will feature screenings of three Lonely Magic music videos, followed by a panel discussion with Sugar and fellow alumni Chris Burns (BFA 2003 in Animation), Alex Myung (BFA 2009 in Animation), and Ian Jones-Quartey (BFA 2006 in Animation), and will conclude with an acoustic performance.
MA Curatorial Practice and Francesco Urbano Ragazzi host this multi-part symposium exploring art and curatorship amid the current political landscape. Introduced by Peter N. Miller, president of the American Academy in Rome, a panel of curators and artists is invited to respond to a series of interconnected questions. Art critic and curator Nikki Columbus will moderate the discussion.
SVA presents an artist career roundtable discussion held in conjunction with the group exhibition “Wavelengths,” featuring exhibiting artists Gabrielle Benak (BFA 2019 Fine Arts), Alex Cassetti (BFA 2016 Photography and Video), Vanessa Powers (BFA 2013 Fine Arts), and Carra Seals (MFA 2020 Fine Arts), moderated by faculty member Dr. Sohee Koo (MFA 2013 Fine Arts; BFA 2010 Fine Arts).
MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media features a presentation by conceptual artist Jillian McDonald, whose hybrid video works combine live action and generative AI to imagine uncanny worlds shaped by eco-horror and speculative fiction. McDonald will be in conversation with faculty member Natasha Chuk about the aesthetics and expressive power of the moving image in an era where cinema, AI, and ecological imagination converge. A Q&A with the audience will follow.
Wednesday, November 12, 2:00 – 4:00pm | Speaker Series: Nicola Twilley | Online
MFA Products of Design presents a talk with Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, June 2024), and co-host of Gastropod, a podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network in collaboration with Eater that explores food through the lenses of history and science. Twilley’s first book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, was co-authored with Geoff Manaugh and was named one of the best books of 2021 by Time Magazine, NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. Twilley is a frequent contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of Edible Geography.
A poster for Lillian Ansell’s “Act 1: Geraldine Scott III” exhibition.
A poster for Lillian Ansell’s “Act 1: Geraldine Scott III” exhibition.
November 13, 6:00 – 9:00pm | MFA Fine Arts Open Studios | 133 West 21st Street, 8th and 9th floors
Meet artists from around the world who are pursuing an MFA in Fine Arts through the department’s fall 2025 open studios event.
BFA Visual and Critical Studies and the SVA Honors Program presents a talk with Italian essayist, editor, translator, and award-winning poet Luigi Ballerini, exploring the context of real food beginning to be painted in Last Suppers in the second half of the 15th century, as a result of the liceity of pleasure, resurrected by Florentine humanists’ reading of classical texts (primarily Lucretius and Aristotle), which, in ever larger quantities and surprising varieties, remains a staple of that painterly subject throughout the 16th century. A hypothesis is formulated about da Vinci’s painting that transcends the painter’s minimalist gastronomic interests, as well as his incessant scientific curiosity.
Monday, November 17, 7:00 – 8:00pm | Visiting Artist Lecture: Mika Rottenberg | 335 West 16th Street BFA Fine Arts presents a lecture with Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg (BFA 2001 Fine Arts), whose rigorous practice combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world.
Each year, students in the MPS Branding program spend a semester developing original thesis projects that address the challenges and opportunities of branding in a rapidly evolving cultural landscape. The premiere offers a chance to see this work presented publicly for the first time. This year, students interrogated what it means for a brand to be accountable to its values. The 2025 thesis challenged them to examine the tension between principle and profit, and investigate how brands could stand by their convictions rather than bend to the pressures of stakeholders and short-term financial gains. The work explores not just the cost of compromise, but the opportunities that emerge when brands act with integrity.
MPS Digital Photography presents a talk with documentary and portrait photographer Nicky Quamina-Woo, part of its i3: Images, Ideas, Inspiration lecture series. Quamina-Woo is a Black and Native Hawaiian visual storyteller who divides her time between the African continent, Southeast Asia, and New York City, with a primary focus on stories related to healthcare, social justice, and the long shadows of trauma that often fall across marginalized communities. Her projects center on the complex realities that are precipitated by Western colonization, exploring how cultures survive in the wake of systemic rupture.
James Porto, still from digital fractal animation, Crawlspace, 2024. On view at “Technological Perseverance.”
James Porto, still from digital fractal animation, Crawlspace, 2024. On view at “Technological Perseverance.”