This September SVA is back with a full slate of exhibitions, talks and events that are not to be missed.

We may still be communing virtually, but we can improve our photography skills with BFA Photography and Video and SVA Continuing Education faculty member Joseph Sinnott (BFA 1988 Photography) and join lectures by MFA Photography, Video and Related Media and SVA Continuing Education faculty member Elinor Carucci and photographer Ilona Szwarc (BFA 2013 Photography).

In addition to this month's slew of virtual exhibitions in the SVA Galleries, we'll also be celebrating the work of some of our most prominent alumni in the film industry with the seventh annual After School Special: Work From Home Edition. More than 25 SVA alumni—now working as award-winning editors, directors, cinematographers and more—will share the ways they're staying creative amidst a global pandemic.

And it wouldn't be the start of a new SVA academic year without Art & Activism, the annual event dedicated to exploring the ways art can do good. This year's symposium will take place during Climate Week NYC and include panel discussions on upcycled materials, sustainability, animation and design.

Here are the highlights:

Virtual Exhibitions

Through Saturday, September 19 | MFA Visual Narrative Open Studios

The "open studios" exhibition represents the culmination of the intensive summer semester at SVA's MFA Visual Narrative program. This daring body of work by first- and second-year students explores how narrative paths can be created across the spectrum of genre and media. Through a broad range of new media techniques—from live-action video, to storyboards and visual mapping, to animation, game design and sequential art—these students share a common goal of exposing truth by giving it narrative motion.

Through Wednesday, September 30 | "Failed State"

A virtual exhibition of works by first year MFA Art Practice candidates, produced in class under the guidance of the program's summer 2020 digital artist-in-residence, Katya Grokhovsky. The exhibition explores the notion of the failing construct of the American dream and capitalist system overall. Prioritizing process and experimentation within a multitude of mediums, genres, visions and concepts of the home- and handmade, while analyzing the meaning of an artist-citizen today, "Failed State" initiates an open-ended discourse around the changing landscape of art- and exhibition-making and the future of our world at large, at this time of a major global crisis.

Tuesday, September 8 – Monday, September 28 | "Making the Way"

A juried exhibition of multidisciplinary works by SVA students, "Making the Way" features artists seeking lines of communication between outer landscapes and interior worlds. They find healing through art by observation and response. Exhibited works range from a film addressing the idea of self-acceptance through an animated dream journey, to a series of photographs capturing the effects of COVID-19 on hometown surroundings. A collection of drawings made to cheer up a friend experiencing a mental breakdown contrasts with abstract representations of loss and resilience. These works locate themselves within the present while preserving hope for the future, making a way forward from the shared experiences of loneliness and uncertainty.