Exhibition

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “The Museum of Extraordinary Things,” an exhibition of work by 16 students in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program inspired by the book of the same title by Alice Hoffman. The exhibition is curated by faculty member and chair of BFA Illustration and BFA Cartooning Viktor Koen, and will be on view Friday, February 18th through Saturday, March 12th, at the SVA Gramercy Gallery.

Living up to its name, Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things is an imaginative mix of pivotal historical events from the psyche of New York during the first decades of the twentieth century, somehow managing to demystify the fantastical. Inspired by the novel’s powerful descriptions, the unique project concepts in this exhibition—including the development of gaming characters, comic book format adaptations, psychological portraits, series of posters for individual oddities, role playing game manuals, delicate collages, side-by-side juxtapositions of historical references and their contemporary counterparts and interactive website interpretations of the story—follow unexpected paths through deeply personal struggles and dramatic events where unlikely characters take the lead.

The exhibition focuses on the book’s first chapter, “World in a Globe,” a self-contained description of a bizarre “museum” on the water, set in Coney Island’s seaside resort era, somewhere between what used to be known as “Wunderkammer” (room of wonders, the precursor to natural history museums) and the once popular circus sideshows of human curiosities. This “museum” functions as the story’s center of gravity and provided a vivid location filled with characters haunted by their pasts for the exhibiting artists to draw from. New York City, both its splendor and its gritty underbelly, animated the search for visual clues from Neptune Avenue to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (also known as the Brown Building) in Greenwich Village or the Natural History Museum’s specimens collection.

Through the exploration of Hoffman’s rich text, the artists in this exhibition found ways to strengthen their visual voices and open the door to a haunted house, prompting us to venture down the corridors of this universe of oddities and leading us to realize what it means to be different, tortured and one-of-a-kind.

“The Museum of Extraordinary Things” features works by students from the class of 2023 including Junjun Chen, Maiyashu, Katy Freeman, Doce Guan, Helen Jee, Raven Jiang, Vyolet Jin, Joyce Ziyuan Jin, Tae Kim, Bayard Morse, Nicholas Nutting, Swayam Parekh, Yaoting Wang, Weston Wei, Lilith Wu and Xiaodi Zhou.

The SVA Gramercy Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 10:00am–6:00pm. In accordance with SVA COVID-19 protocols, in-person viewing is open to SVA students, faculty and staff. The public may visit by showing proof of full vaccination (including booster, if eligible) and photo ID. All visitors to the Gramercy Gallery must pre-register through an RSVP link no less than 48 hours prior to the selected event date and time. Proper masking is required.