For the first-time the School of Art goes virtual for its annual End of Year Show. The exhibition continues in the college’s time-honored tradition at endofyearshow2020.cooper.edu as a developing site and remains online for a year.

In many ways the 2020 End of Year Show mirrors School of Art undergraduate student exhibitions from decades past; the exhibition publicly positions more than 200 works from over 200 students across all four years, with selected works representing the entire 2019-2020 academic year. Yet, this was a year unlike any others due to the global pandemic that interrupted much of the Spring 2020 semester; students and professors pivoted toward online learning and the exploration of diversity of site-specificity as central to a studio-based program, all new experiences. And like the changing dynamic of how work was made, the virtual End of Year Show reflects what it means to be a digital representation documenting a year in flux.

Visitors to the virtual exhibition start with a live camera feed of Cooper’s landmark Foundation Building, the space where much of the school’s studios, classrooms, and shops are housed. The site navigates through the variety of work in multiple ways including student names; names of faculty; projects (exchange, senior projects, and fellowships are examples of projects that develop over the course of the full academic year); areas of study (i.e. painting, sculpture, photography, performance, graphic design, draft notations, and more); forum (an open space where chance and flux bring forward new conversations and encounters between works); studio; and Foundation (Foundation comprises a series of courses taken during the first year of study by art students. The year is intended to prepare students for all future areas of advanced study within the curriculum. It includes sustained focus and engagement with formal and conceptual exercises, where students develop and investigate the specifics of visual and spatial phenomena.). Works are tagged for multiple areas, reflecting on the interdisciplinarity central to the school’s ethos. Although the current crisis has necessitated an online mode for sharing and experiencing work, this site opens up a new model for future End of Year Shows, in partnership with a physical experience.  

The EOYS design team includes a cluster of students and faculty advisors:
Diego Herrera A'21 (lead designer)
Lucas Zeeberg A'22 (lead designer)
Richard Yurewitch A'22 (designer)
Caitlin Edwards A'23
Martia Thomas A'23
Amanda Blanca A'23
Erin Sparling, Adjunct Professor, School of Art
Alexander Tochilovsky, Associate Professor, School of Art
EOYS Faculty Advisory Committee