Features

This week’s edition of The Five includes SVA alumni and faculty members from Sundance to China, and even outer space! Painting, filmmaking, design, and AI technology come together for milestone scientific explorations and holiday gift guides.

1. The Sundance Institute has named its Fellows for the 2024 Edition of their Episodic Lab, and Nigerian writer, director, and actor Miriam Agwai (BFA 2010 Film and Video) is among them! With a focus on developing series, the Episodic Lab offers Fellows an opportunity to refine their story, pilot, and pitch through workshops, panels, writers’ rooms, screenings, and guidance from established showrunners, industry mentors, and executive producers. Agwai’s project Midnight Point is the story of a Nigerian immigrant working for an international crime division who loses her power to see others’ memories. “She will sacrifice everything to remain protected by the organization,” writes Deadline, “Even if it means betraying everyone closest to her.”

2. Art in America recently named Song Lu (MFA 2021 Photography, Video, and Related Media) an artist to watch in their New Talent 2024 series, showcasing projects including her 2018 photographic series “Still Life,” her “Snow Drawing” series, and her 2021 animated short Elephants Never Forget, both of which use photography and AI to evoke the uncanny. Lu’s experience at SVA during the pandemic shows up in her work in poignant ways, exuding “an intensified sense of loneliness and isolation that one so often finds in big cities.”

3. In its roundup of five standout small gallery shows to check out in November, Artsy includes Hangzhou, China-born artist Killion Huang’s (BFA 2022 Illustration) new solo exhibition at EDJI Gallery in Brussels, his second at the gallery following his debut in 2023. “Reflections” is a series of paintings that depict “moments of self-awareness and introspection” within “vulnerable snapshots of everyday life in domestic settings” rendered with Huang’s “gentle brushwork” and “tender touch.” Huang was also included in Artsy’s highlights of diverse standouts at this year’s ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, where his work was shown with Shanghai-based Nan Ke Gallery.

4. MPS Branding chair Debbie Millman has partnered with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on an exciting new artistic endeavor in conjunction with one of their latest projects, the Europa Clipper. Launched in October, the Clipper is headed for Jupiter’s moon Europa where it will explore whether or not it contains a hidden ocean that could support life, and thanks to Millman, it’s taking a special memento with it. On a flat, 7x11-inch piece of metal protecting some critical electronics of the space probe, she created a design of groovy-looking waveforms, “riff on the Big Bang, featuring the word emanating out in multiple languages [developed by a team of linguists] from a core that represents the ASL sign for water.” A lover of all things space-related, Millman tells Fast Company of the project, “We were all so excited about it. The common denominator was this thrill and joy of the potential of it all.”

5. The New York Times holiday gift guide is chock-full of fun goodies, including Winnie Au’s charming photo book Cone of Shame, featuring designs by Marie-Yan Morvan (BFA 2009 Graphic Design). In the book, Au “captures beagles and chow chows, corgis and terriers in deliriously Dada designs handcrafted by [Morvan] from pool noodles, silk flowers and other left-field materials.” Along with the book, there are so many things to explore, from cozy socks to kitchen supplies and delicious treats for everyone on the list.