The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Provisional City, an exhibition that explores the fluidity of the contemporary city featuring painting, sculpture, installation, and video by eight Hunter MFA alumni.

Cities come and go. They are built, rebuilt, torn down, and built again, leaving behind odd remnants of objects and buildings. Provisional City offers a glimpse of a city in flux with a collection of artwork bristling with materiality, texture, and saturated color, simultaneously grounding the objects in the present moment, and hinting at the city’s past lives. Like the inhabitants of urban spaces, the objects of Provisional City are self-consciously ephemeral; they exist in this world while they can with the knowledge that someday they may be replaced.

Provisional City is presented alongside Know-How for a New Era, an exhibition of medieval objects that describe the rise of the city in pre-Renaissance Europe. A place of commerce, geographic exploration, scientific inquiry, and conspicuous consumption, the medieval city was alive with marvelous objects, the product of inventive thinking built atop centuries-old structures and ideas. Similarly, the objects of Provisional City are tied to the past. The exhibit offers complex narratives in the form of memory charms, shadows of architectural forms, and remnants of immutable physical objects. Provisional City is a temporary idea, a manufactured space of unstable objects that draw us in, blur our vision, and threaten to blink out of view.

Artists include Bill Abdale, James Acevedo, Alison Blickle, C’naan Hamburger, Peter Hoffmeister, Kristen Jensen, Opal Mae Ong, and Alexander Perrelli.

Curated by Nina Piper, graduate of the Hunter MA Art History program.