Features

In this week’s edition of The Five, we shine a spotlight on the exceptional achievements of SVA’s community members, whose work is gaining attention across a wide range of media outlets. From major art awards to thought-provoking exhibitions, here’s a roundup of SVA’s latest news, including mentions in CBR, Marketplace, and Queens Gazette.

1. WBUR highlighted Sarah Sze (MFA 1997 Fine Arts) being named the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award, a $100,000 prize, designed to recognize and celebrate women artists. “It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” said Sze. The award will be followed by an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston next year, featuring Sze’s work alongside other female artists. Sze’s first solo exhibition in Asia debuted earlier this month at Gagosian, Hong Kong.

2. BFA Visual and Critical Studies faculty member Katie Cercone spoke with the Queens Gazette in an interview where she reflected on her experiences living in the borough, offered advice for artists, and shared the themes from her Gender Trouble course for their “Local Express” column. “I really try to encourage students to research and study things they are inspired by, rather than forcing a bunch of historical knowledge or facts down their throat and testing them later,” said Cercone. 

3. “I haven’t had this much fun drawing a project since Marvel Knights Daredevil (1998) #1,” said former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada (BFA 1984 Media Arts) about his upcoming collaboration with acclaimed writer Christopher Priest on Marvel Knights: The World to Come!, a new evolution of the Marvel Universe launching this June. The news, featured in industry news outlets including CBR, is generating excitement in the comics industry and comes on the heels of the launch of Quesada’s new publishing venture, Amazing Comics.

4. BFA Design faculty member and Pentagram partner Paula Scher shared her thoughts on artificial intelligence in a recent interview with Marketplace, citing how her firm worked with the federal government to create a website that translates detailed wonky reports into digestible summaries for the general public. “I’ve gotten through the notion that you can’t be scared of the technology. You’ve got to find out what it’s going to do,” she said.

5. MFA Fine Arts student Will Maddoxx reviewed “Hyper-meme,” a group show at Living Skin in Bushwick, for Two Coats of Paint. The exhibition features work by MFA 2021 Fine Arts alumni Xianglong Li and Tong Wang and explores meme culture, pop culture, and the oversaturation of digital imagery. “Tong Wang’s Frozen Spider, in particular, caught my painter’s eye. This strong, nicely conceived piece may be the only outlier in ‘Hyper-meme’ in that it deals more with material than image and seems to be in conversation with sculpture,” writes Maddoxx. “Of the group, Xianglong Li is the painter’s painter. The mix of symbols, characters, and flat images in his When you woke up after sleeping for 24 hours suggests a contemporary version of Holbein’s The Ambassadors.”