“Front and Center” is an exhibition of new work by second-year MFA Fine Arts students. Curated by MA Curatorial Practice Deputy Chair Jovana Stokic, the exhibition is on view March 1 through 15 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor. (The gallery is closed Friday, March 7, for a staff holiday.) Admission is free and open to the public.

Participating artists include Julia Bahn, Lucy Brinckerhoff, Graciela Cassel, Youri Choi, Tiffany DiOrio, Leah Dixon, Anthony Donatelle, Byul Han, Alison Kuo, Lin Jiayue, Christopher Martino, Jennifer McDermott, Manuel Vazquez aka Mava and Jacob Williams.

Stokic explains: “This exhibition’s title links it to the first show of the second-year MFA Fine Arts students: ‘Home Front.’ Because the notion of the front here is devoid of any militaristic connotation, ‘Front and Center’ insists on a whole range of positions not necessarily related to mainstream art practice. ‘Front and Center’ as a purposely non-hieratical direction invokes idiomatically the most prominent position for all the works within the gallery space. At the same time, imagined as a grouping that is nominally front and center, the show erases any closures. There are no superior or inferior positions awaiting the different modes of presence in the gallery space of this show. Still, the exhibition’s separate works should not be treated as fulfilling one unified vision: the artists resolutely represent their own unique idiosyncratic fronts in varied practices that range from projected light to very palpable object making in the gallery space. In this way, the differences are not neutralized. Rather, their multiplicity is carefully calibrated.”

MFA Fine Arts at SVA reflects the diversity of New York’s many art worlds. Together, the faculty and students form a community of established and emerging artists from many backgrounds who work across disciplines and modes of practice. The department’s main goals are to provide a stimulating and supportive environment in which students can thrive and develop as artists, to foster rigorous critical engagement with contemporary art and other cultural forms and to produce an ongoing conversation through work as much as through words about what we make, how we make it and why.

Exhibition

Front and Center

SVA Chelsea Gallery

Reception