And Then: 2025 Thesis Exhibition
What happens when power falls? After a betrayal, a transformation, or the quiet unraveling of what was once familiar?
MFA Visual Narrative presents “And Then,” a thesis exhibition of story-driven installations and interactive work by the 2025 Class of MFA Visual Narrative, curated by artists and educators Olivia Li and Brooke Viegut.
The exhibition will be on view Wednesday, July 9, 2025, through Saturday, July 19, 2025, at the SVA Gramercy Gallery, 209 East 23rd Street, 1st floor, New York City.
“And Then” invites the viewer into a series of stories where power tilts, identities unravel, and transformation takes unexpected shape. Through sculpture, installations, digital works, narrative artifacts, and a library of published texts, MFAVN’s Class of 2025 brings these worlds to life, each one asking: what happens when the most trusted structures—families, governments, friendships, love, even sense of self—begin to fracture?
Set across dystopian kingdoms, supernatural towns, and the quiet corners of everyday life, these works explore themes of survival, betrayal, identity, and the search for connection. From a vampire learning to love again to a girl facing a shapeshifting monster in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, from a delivery-driving grim reaper to a cockroach chasing a doomed romance, each work draws audiences into a world where nothing is quite as it seems.
Whether framed through folklore, fantasy, queer romance, or satire, these pieces reflect each artist’s reckoning with power, love, loss, and who they become when everything falls apart. “And Then” is both a celebration of personal storytelling and a collective invitation to see what lies beneath the surface.
Highlights from the exhibition include:
Tough Bird by Lisa Cheong is a sharp, animated comedy about Nestor, an overlooked office pigeon who follows a toxic “birdfluencer’s” advice to stand out, only to discover that becoming “alpha” might just unravel everything.
Road Trip to the End of the World is a chaotic, heartfelt narrative game by Alex M. Lee about heartbreak, highway burgers, and crashing the wedding of the friend who broke your heart—closure not guaranteed.
Bryce Davidson’s Heaven’s End is a genre-bending sci-fi comic about a teenage girl unraveling a corporate conspiracy, discovering alien powers, and proving that defiance is what saves the world (and maybe the moon).
2025 exhibiting artists are Lisa Cheong, Bryce Davidson, Indra Fonseca Alfaro, Olivia Gehrke, Paris Jerome, Kuppy, Alex M. Lee, Haelee Lim, Sama Sayed, Mart Smooth, Kelli Prizner, Meng Yang, Yawen Zhang, and Roger Zheng.
The SVA Gramercy Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 10:00am–6:00pm.
