Meditations in an Emergency brings together 11 candidates of Cornell University’s M.F.A. program who, through their varied approaches, reveal individual notions of what art can be. Some give primacy to the materials employed while others are led by research-based methods, and still others play off the tension between subjectivity and authorship, content and form, or the power of the image and its ability and inability to convey meaning. The exhibition — whose title is borrowed from Frank O’Hara’s 1954 poem — aims to make tangible what O’Hara describes as “the ecstasy of bursting forth” — a sense of birth and renewal. By bringing together the individual work into one exhibition, each artist contributes to the dialogue about art and its making that extends beyond their immediate communities, into a larger conversation that is inherently international in reach and multigenerational in scope.

Organized and curated by Christopher Y. Lew, assistant curator of MoMA PS1.

Featured Artists

Robert Andrade, Piotr Chizinski, Amie Cunat, Gabrielle Jesiolowski, Gabriela Jimenez, Daren Kendall, Baseera Kahn, Ruth Oppenheim, Benjamin Rubloff, Fariden Sakhaeifar, Bernard Yenelouis