The School of Visual Arts MFA Show Is a Portrait of Our Zeitgeist
Joshua Evans’s “Fantasia” (2024) sums up how many of us are feeling right now. The figure is mid-metamorphosis — but doesn’t appear to have much of a choice or to be enjoying it that much. Despite his lack of fully-formed feet, and the uncertainty and gloom surrounding him, the figure trudges the path ahead. “He is trying to negotiate who he is going to be … but it’s not entirely clear yet,” Evans explained to Hyperallergic. “It’s happening regardless.” As many of us cope with the fallout of Trump’s second term, and its many unwelcome changes, “Fantasia” feels like a portrait of our zeitgeist.
The Roman poet Horace once advised that “when life’s path is steep, keep your mind even.” Of course, that’s easier said than done with the market collapsing, and the rule of law unraveling. The artists in this year’s School of Visual Arts Master of Fine Arts cohort are updating Horace’s old adage with fresh metaphors about navigating the treacherous and uncertain path. As we enter an uncertain future, these MFA artists offer timely reflections to try to chart the journey ahead.
In “Homesick Alien,” Ruoxi (Jarvis) Hua offers two uneven painted panels of New York’s East Village at night. The longer a viewer looks at the works, the more incongruous they become. On the left, the traffic signal post and its mast arm do not line up with the traffic sign on the right, which is also partially cropped. The longer one dwells on the work, the more misdirected one feels. As Hua explained, “I made the sign that way to stir things up … I wanted to give more ambiguity to the painting.”
Nathalie Marti’s sculpture “Starless” (2025) addresses the rising hostility towards marginalized people in the United States by incorporating the red, white, and blue of the American flag without any stars, alluding to the diminishing luster of the nation’s democratic ideals. In the sculpture, a young bird has fallen from the nest, while a red hand forbids it from returning. Meanwhile, a white hand is lifting the other birds in the nest high above. “It’s about the people who are left out,” Marti explained. She deftly portrays the invisible hand of the market, which inflicts so much harm to vulnerable people, as a faceless perpetrator.
Hyunjun Yang takes on another system of power and marginalization in his drawing “Stroke the Cock” (2024), in which a man is choked by his own penis. Yang approaches toxic masculinity from a more unorthodox corporeal angle, examining the unhealthy relationships men can have with their sexualities, families, and wider communities by satirizing the relationship that many men have with their own penises. In the drawing, Yang explained, “the penis has had enough because the man is addicted to masturbating,” critiquing the lack of self-control and respect for others that many mistake for freedom.
Isa Yixin Yang takes up this family definition of love in her searing work “The Equation of Love I” (2025), inviting each of us to think about the love we received in childhood and the paths it laid out for us. Yang’s parents methodically tracked every expense they incurred on child-rearing from ages four through 23. On the walls of the gallery, she frames the ledger of these expenses. Next to it, she hangs documentation for a house she purchased for her parents, and then a debt clearance certificate certifying that Yang no longer owes her parents, which they signed. As Yang explained in her artist statement, “in creating this work together, we built a new kind of love — one that no longer feels like a debt, but a clean slate.”
In the works at SVA’s 2025 MFA Thesis show, the path is sometimes direct; in others, it is more metaphorical, subtle, or even obscured. All of these artists, however, are responding in their own way to our uncertain times, with some offering possibilities for personally and collectively blazing a trail ahead.
Wondering Paths, the 2025 School of Visual Arts MFA Fine Arts Thesis exhibition, curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, is on view at the SVA Chelsea Gallery (601 West 26th Street, Floor 15, Chelsea, Manhattan) through May 6.
