Synonymms

Sandra SK Amoabeng, Angela Bidak, Maura Torres Díaz, Alfred Dudley III, Em Gallagher, Jason Hirata, Andrew Kennedy, Kabi Raj Lama, Maisie Luo, Park McArthur, Justin Nalley, Nick Newlin, Adi Blaustein Rejtö, Anton Varga

Synonyms with an additional m presents artwork by twelve artists who are also Rutgers University’s 2024 Visual Arts MFA Graduate cohort. This capstone exhibition is an occasion to consider the artists’ disparate practices following two years of graduate study. While this study in a formal sense has ended, it continues through frequently collaborative and/or collective activities such as teaching, organizing, mentoring, and archiving facilitated by and for the show’s participating artists. Like the artists departing their graduate program, Synonymms’s organizers, Park McArthur and Jason Hirata, are leaving their current roles at Rutgers as well, and will present artwork also, bringing the total number of exhibiting artists to fourteen.

The artists in this exhibition are part of a greater half-century of Rutgers University arts education that prioritizes experimentation across artistic media and disciplines.

The exhibition was realized with the support of Art & Design Department faculty and staff as well as that of Westbeth Gallery’s Director Valérie Hallier and Gallery Coordinators. This iteration of the Rutgers in New York exhibition series returns, for a third time, to Westbeth–a complex of homes, artists’ studios, and arts organizations living at the intersection of West, Bethune, Washington, and Bank Streets.