The School of Visual Arts presents “Wrong House Project,” an exhibition of over 300 drawings by students, faculty and more. Coordinated by BFA Visual & Critical Studies faculty member Peter Hristoff, with the assistance of second-year student Joey Gonnella, writer Kátia Bandeira de Mello-Gerlach and the support of department chair Tom Huhn, the exhibition will be on view from Tuesday, February 12, through Wednesday, March 13, at the Flatiron Project Space, 133/141 West 21st Street. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, February 13, from 6:00 to 8:00pm.

Each spring semester, the School of Visual Arts rewards its junior year Honors Program students with a trip to a foreign destination. In 2017, the program had the pleasure of accompanying the students to Lisbon, Portugal, where they were fortunate enough to be introduced to the acclaimed Portuguese philosopher and fiction writer Gonçalo M. Tavares. In his writing studio, Tavares engaged the Honors Program in a project he was working on: a treatise on the “wrong house.” He asked the group to quickly make drawings of what they imagined the “wrong house” to be, something that he was doing with his students at the university where he teaches. These drawings would be analyzed, commented on and used in his research for a new book. A lively conversation ensued, and the meeting with Gonçalo was one of the highlights of the trip.

The positive reaction of the students indicated that the scope of this project made it one that could easily be expanded to SVA's larger student body in New York. Tavares agreed; a form was created for the drawings to be made on, and a small sample of the work received is reproduced in the exhibition catalog. This exhibition, numbering over 300 pieces, is a collection, to date, of “wrong house” drawings by students, faculty and friends of the School of Visual Arts.

Exhibition

Wrong House Project

SVA Flatiron Project Space

Reception