The Afterlife: 2026 MFA Graduates from the 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.
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
About the Tyler School of Art and Architecture
The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University is a leader in creative practice and scholarship that prepares artists, designers, architects, art historians and educators to shape culture and the built environment. Grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration and civic engagement, Tyler empowers students to make meaningful contributions to their communities and professions.
Tyler’s Center for Art and Creative Exchange, based at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), convenes a constellation of programs designed to advance artistic practice, research and exchange. The center is anchored by a studio fellowship for Tyler MFA alumni and a critic-in-residence program that supports critical dialogue and public programming. A forthcoming curatorial studies program will offer professional training with research access to PAFA’s galleries, collections and archives. Together, these initiatives foster generative exchange among artists, curators, scholars and public audiences, and contribute to Philadelphia's cultural vitality and creative identity.
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
The Afterlife is organized by Temple University's Tyler School of Art and Architecture
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