School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Outro: World-Building Within and Outside the Studio,” an exhibition of thesis projects by MFA Fine Arts students, curated by Herb Tam. The exhibition will be on view from Thursday, July 21, through Monday, August 15, at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor, New York City. 

In music, the outro is a way to end things, such as an album or a piece of music. It is a way for an artist to add cohesiveness to a body of work or simply a way to say goodbye to an attentive listener. 

“Outro: World Building Within and Outside the Studio,” an exhibition of new work by recent graduates of SVA’s MFA Fine Arts program, explores new possibilities for storytelling, representational politics, rendering the subconscious, discourses with abstraction and the grid, recoding pop cultural signifiers, and excavating spiritual and kinship customs. The works on view, selected by guest curator Herb Tam in collaboration with the artists, are the culmination of studio practices that engaged internal reckonings over process, form and intention. They are a final statement—an outro—to an intense two-year program.

The studio is a contradictory space. It holds the promise of freedom (of expression and from social norms that regulate behavior), while also silently demanding to be filled with art and activity. Going to the studio can feel both liberating and imprisoning, like being tied down to an office job in the service of art. These artists understand that to translate imagination, self-reflection, cultural memory and social critique into material form (in other words, to make contemporary art that also has personal stakes) they also have to look for ways out of the studio, beyond New York, beyond the limits of earthly imagination, towards the cosmos, or beyond the bounds of perception into the microscopic and unknowable. The artist’s project is a constant negotiation between private and public spaces—inside and outside, physical and virtual, proximate and distant—in testing the legibility of a work’s intention and what’s left unwritten.

“Outro” is organized into clusters of work that articulate thematic, formal, or esoteric connections among the artistic practices of Alex Angel, Ellen Carpenter, Woosik Choi, Yuan Fang, Kamiesha Garbadawala, Xayvier Haughton, Davina Hsu, Yirui Jia, Noel Joan, Daniel Wheedong Kim, Kostas Lales, Ailyn Lee, Kyu Ho Lee, Weina Li, Jinyi Liu, Monica Llorente, Tingleguts, Stephanie McGovern, Danielle Melen, Dylan Rose Rheingold, Paulina Mendoza Valdez, Zhishu Xie, Shun Xin, Suyi Xu, Se Young Yim and Zhao Zhang.

The SVA Chelsea Gallery is open Monday through Thursday, from 9:00am to 5:00pm, and closed on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The public may visit by showing proof of full vaccination (including booster, if eligible) and photo ID. Proper masking is required. It is fully accessible by wheelchair.