The Afterlife: 2026 MFA Graduates from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Exhibition Info
Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building
Curated by
Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture

What survives us? What do we carry forward? What must be left behind? The works in The Afterlife inhabit the space between endings and beginnings. They move through memory, grief, humor, ritual, labor, ecology, and transformation, finding unexpected possibilities in discarded materials, familiar objects, personal histories, and imagined futures.

Across media and scale, these artists treat the present not as a fixed condition but as something provisional-made from remnants of what came before and continually reshaped by acts of making. Here, an afterlife is not a destination but a process: of rebuilding, remembering, refusing, and becoming.

Together, the exhibition offers twenty-seven artists' responses to a shared question: how might we imagine another world from the materials of this one? The work of each artist in the Tyler MFA Class of 2026 attends to what lingers: archival traces, inherited histories, ecological debris, domestic labor, bodily experience, family memory, discarded objects and gestures repeated into ritual. For this cohort, The Afterlife does not suggest an ending, but a continuation.

Free admission for Temple Students and Families.

A minimalist ink drawing on white paper depicts two figures emerging from spiral snail shells, reaching toward each other in a recreation of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam.

Rylie Kelley, We twist and tangle, carried by the dancing eddies of the tide pools, Shaped copperplate intaglio print with soft ground etching, aquatint, and viscosity roll. Blind embossment. 28” x 46”. Photo credit: John Carlano.

Participating Artists

  • Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson
  • Maximilian Art Boyce
  • Rich Brown
  • Jamie Cabreza
  • Mary Champagne
  • Judith Addison
  • Daniel Gottschalk
  • Will Grimm
  • Rachael Henson
  • Brianna Howard
  • Rylie Kelley
  • ev Leto
  • Weiwei Li
  • Jessalyn Mailoa
  • Joseph E. Malson
  • Zahra Momeni
  • Marta Murray
  • Nabeel Naveed
  • Marcè Nixon-Washington
  • Laura Sallade
  • Jess Santana
  • Lena Ruth Schwartz
  • Olivia Smith
  • Brandon Aquino Straus
  • Meredith Tenney-Free
  • Madison Tubbs
  • Ananda Voecks

 

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