Exhibits & Events

Save the date for a special evening on Thursday, September 10 celebrating the launch of new programming from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).

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.

Together, the exhibition offers 27 artists’ responses to a shared question: how might we imagine another world from the materials of this one? Each artist of the 2026 Tyler MFA graduating class attends to what lingers. For this community, The Afterlife does not suggest an ending, but a continuation.

Artists

• Judith Addison
• Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson
• Maximilian Art Boyce
• Rich Brown
• Jamie Cabreza
• Mary Champagne
• Daniel Gottschalk
• Will Grimm
• Rachael Henson
• Brianna Howard
• Rylie Kelley
• ev Leto
• Weiwei Li
• Jessalyn Mailoa
• Joseph 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

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay written by Leah Triplett, curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Fisher Brooks Gallery
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
128 Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19102

Gallery hours:
Thursday–Monday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Image: Flora After, (film still) by Brandon Aquino Straus, 2026