SVA Style - Spring 2025

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CE ES N S SVA Galleries and Theatre: Spring Thesis Shows

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(WAY TOO MUCH, YET NEVER ENOUGH)

STUFF

SVA LIBRARIES

Featuring the Not-in-the-Card-Catalog Shoe Collection of Librarian Zimra Panitz

“TheRe arE TwO tYpes OF LIBRARIANS,” says Director of SVA Libraries Caitlin Kilgallen. “The purgers and the hoarders.” Though Caitlin admits it might be hard to guess that those who throw things away work in this SVA department based on the helter-skelter state of the office space.

When you enter the Main Library, you are immediately greeted by stacks of carefully organized books and magazines, and Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch games behind the front desk. Continue past this area and the library opens to a bright, friendly space with rows of meticulously arranged shelves, lounge areas and worktables. But if you were to go behind the front desk, you would witness the operations necessary for maintaining this calm and inspiring sanctuary for scholarship and relaxation. Who doesn’t love to snoop in off-limits areas?

The Main Library’s offices meander around a labyrinthine zone with winding paths of bookcases, carts of books, and sometimes (read: often) precariously Pisan stacks of books on the floor and any other flattish surface.

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low the dust off your mental picture of libraries—this place is clearly constantly in flux, keeping up with the times and setting a dizzying pace for the future of creative practice: Books come and go, and there’s board games, comics, underground zines, textual engagements with the most pressing political issues of our day, other visual and literary resources, DVDs, and screenplays. And that list’s not even touching the vast digital resources of the library. Everything backstage is arranged in a tizzy as if the books and other

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materials might come alive and take flight.

Some might question Caitlin’s willingness to reveal the department’s underbelly, but any bibliophile who ventures back here recognizes heaven. Any artist seeking an edge, a way to cut deeper into their practice, will find the library offers the means to dig themselves all the way to the other side of their art and to a whole new perspective.

IF THE SHOE FITS Librarian Zimra Panitz (left) with Visual Arts Press editor Laura Valenza (right).

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YOU WILL NOT FIND cat-eyed glasses, bulky wool cardigans, plaid, or any bony shushing fingers. You will, however, find Zimra Panitz, head of technical services, an art librarian with an MLS degree specializing in art history. You can find Zimra in her office, which, although vertically spacious, is a bit horizontally challenged. That hasn’t stopped her from cramming every surface with stacks of books and DVDs. A coffee mug, with illustrations of shoes on it, teeters on the edge of a shelf. But what will really draw your eye are the fabulous combat boots on display just behind Zimra’s shoulder.

The boots are violet. They’re velvet. They’re platform. Zimra has a bit of a shoe problem— er, passion—and the boxes of her precious collection are sandwiched in alongside the evidence of her more literary proclivities.

Sometimes, Zimra orders shoes to come to work so her husband doesn’t know she got new ones—but he’s a sneakerhead, she explains, so he can’t really judge. How many shoes does she own? She won’t say, but she does keep a spreadsheet and mentions she could probably wear a new pair for every day of the academic year. Naturally, Zimra, like Caitlin, is a purger.

Caitlin might actually be as proud of Zimra’s work in technical services as she

CHAOS,

is of Zimra’s taste in footwear. When Caitlin approaches Zimra’s office, she says, “Your office is full of shoes.” Zimra replies: “I thought you were going to say something else!”

Zimra’s collection focuses on the brand Fluevog, which she began acquiring in high school and college around 1989 and 1990 for their whimsy and their major nineties following among all the goth girlies. Though Zimra describes the brand as “prohibitively expensive,” she has had luck procuring at least half of her shoes from secondhand sources, a responsible buying practice that perhaps mirrors the company’s own commitment to limiting environmental waste.

Zimra’s fascination with shoes began long before that when, as a child, she would play in her mother’s closet among her vast shoe collection. In fifth or sixth grade, she’d go to yard sales to find cheap high-heeled clogs, and then she’d hide them in her bag and slip into them once out of the house because she wasn’t allowed to wear heels yet.

Beginning in 1970 as Fox and Fluevog, then a decade later just Fluevog as John became the (ahem) sole proprietor, the company has since grown into a sort of art atelier itself, with museums creating exhibitions around the history of Fluevog designs. It also has a cult following among creative people who design their outfits around the shoes, one aspect

DID YOU NOTICE...

At the 2025 Grammys, Chappell Roan sported Fluevog boots custommade to accent her art-inspired Degas dress

by Gaultier!

of a strong online community connecting Fluevog fans, who appreciate the company’s social justice bent and “support for people of all shapes, sizes, and pronouns,” as Zimra explains. Plus, the Fluevog Artist Grant supports emerging talent in all media as a way of paying it forward to other “unique souls.”

Zimra’s admiration of Fluevog encouraged her own artistry, giving her a more personal perspective of her work as an art school librarian. She took a shoe-making class and actually made the shoes she walked down the aisle in (monogrammed with “A to Z” for her and her husband’s initials).

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ibrarians seem to exist in the American imagination in two forms, with little room for an in-between, let alone a beyond: the sexy fantasy or the dowdy stereotype. In the 1946 Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, protagonist George Bailey finds himself in an alternate universe where he’d never been born. When he begs to know what has become of his wife, his guardian angel is reluctant to tell him. “You’re not going to like it,” says the angel. Pressured, he gives in and declares that she’s become… a librarian.

Gasp! We then meet the beautiful Donna Reed, wearing glasses, looking prudish, timid, nervous. It’s this exemplary image of the librarian cliché that sets up the joke for half

a century later when, in 1999’s The Mummy, Rachel Weisz dreamily declares, “I … am a librarian!” How cute—the librarian thinks she’s going to be an adventurer fighting off an undead mummy? Well, why not?! And so, Caitlin encourages, celebrates, and spotlights her staff ’s other, creative interests, like shoe collecting in Zimra’s case. These are not your typical librarians, and that commonality across the department’s team is essential to the maintenance of a historical art institution such as SVA, as well as the insurance of SVA’s future centricity in every creative field in existence and to come.

SVA’s librarians fit the atmosphere: Just like you, they’re the creatives, the dreamers, the revolutionaries, the rock stars of the College. So with one impeccably clad foot in front of the other, librarians like Zimra are squashing clichés and marching to the beat of their own drums, ready to defend their bastion of critical thinking. Unlike the hushed spheres of research of the past, the folks at SVA Libraries can’t wait for you to come on in and, loudly, proudly, find your own rhythm with them.

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|check| |it|out!| Fluevog: 50 Years of Unique Souls

by JOHN FLUEVOG Call Number: TT 678.5.F58 2019 SVA Main Library

M IC HEL L E M A R A KA S HER R Y

JA MES AQUI LON E

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|play|a| |game!|

THISTL E W IS E

M AS H METHODICAL

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ARTSY-FARTSY

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Illustrations by T IA N QI C H E N (B FA 2 0 2 3 I L LUST RAT I ON ) 13

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SHeER ProXi M i t Y INCREDIBLE THE EXPOSURE OPPORTUNITIES OF SVA’S THESIS SHOWS

HangiNg A paiNting May seEm LIKE JUST HANGING A PAINTING, but a lot of planning goes into installing a thesis show at the School of Visual Arts. Think: Will the spotlight on a sculpture cast a glare on a canvas? Will the floodlight on a painting wash out the screen for a digital piece? How does a precarious work stand up and how do you spare it from getting knocked over?

What the heck do you do with something called projection mapping? Not to mention, how do you keep up with the best practices for showing rapidly advancing tech-based work? How do you make six projectors run in one space? Student artists, department staff, gallery preparators, curators—all come together to put on professional-caliber displays of graduating students’ opuses. The air buzzes with these questions, with so many people playing different and critical roles whipping around, and with the anticipation bouncing off the walls (while, hopefully, the art stays on the walls!). It is a lot of work with many challenges to overcome, but the end result is like opening night of a Broadway show—lots of energy celebrating what is arguably the crowning achievement of a student’s undergraduate career.

Luckily, SVA Galleries’ experienced staff is there to guide students through this process that connects their studio education to their future as professionals in their fields. While many departments at SVA can seem like their own paradisiacal islands, the Galleries team has the privilege of collaborating with almost every department at least once a year.

That means they forge long-term relationships with people across campus and learn the unique working methods of each group.

Some departments get super involved with the planning of their thesis shows. Some hire outside curators. Some want their students to do all the work and learn the process of installing themselves.

Regardless, Galleries Director Tyson Skross and his gifted team support the

exhibiting departments and their students by providing the tools and knowledge they need to put on professional-quality exhibitions that put their work in the best light possible.

The team provides students with tips on packing their pieces for transportation, mounting, framing, and displaying various types of artwork, how to set up complicated multimedia installations, how to paint walls correctly, and how to properly identify their works on an exhibition checklist. They even loan exhibition furnishings and tech equipment when necessary. The department is an extensive resource of knowledge about exhibition practices available to the whole College—students, staff, and faculty.

SVA Galleries span four different public-facing spaces from Gramercy Park to Chelsea, alongside some of the most competitive art galleries in the world.

Historically, SVA has shown major artists such as Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Tom Feelings, and Eva Hesse. Every spring, the Galleries host thesis shows for many departments, including BFA Photography and Video, BFA Illustration, and BFA Comics.

Visual Arts Press met with Exhibition Coordinator Evan Peltzman (BFA 2016 Fine Arts, MFA Fine Arts) to go behind the scenes of the thesis shows and to learn why these exhibitions present such special opportunities.

“Exhibiting your work is where life begins,” Evan says. It’s the public-facing part of the art-making process, and, in New York City, you never know who might pop into the gallery to check out student pieces. Evan has witnessed key players in the industry visit the Galleries, and he stresses that’s not “tooting our own horn—that’s just proximity.”

As a painter, an illustrator, and a woodworker himself, Evan has personal experience with the importance of showing work properly. “I was just as green, and I didn’t think I’d learn that much, and I did,” Evan says of his own experience as a student assistant in the Galleries before graduating and joining the friendly team full time. The Galleries gave him a critical perspective on his art practice, beyond what he gained in the studio. “Knowing how to present your work should be part of your vision,” he says.

“I don’t make a piece without thinking about how it’s going to be shown.”

Evan finds his work with the thesis shows to be “very educational,” and he encourages students to try to learn something from their peers and other departments’ shows as well.

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He believes that being exposed to other artists’ work provides a unique opportunity to get inspired to do your own work. But that doesn’t just mean looking to other people creating within your medium. “When you do work outside of your own,” Evan says, “you get to experience completely different approaches to installing work.”

During the thesis shows, Evan has witnessed awesome creativity: “There are always people trying to do something different that has never been done.” Once a student has been able to participate in putting up a show, they will begin to see the world differently, much like the initial click with art making itself—that project that helps a developing artist see through the lens of their chosen medium and to, therefore, create on a whole new level. Go to a museum, a gallery, an apartment with an impressive collection, and find yourself thinking not only about the art and the techniques but also about the installation. How was the work installed?

How is it arranged and lit? The display can say as much about the work as the work itself can, either shining a literal and metaphorical light on the work’s significance or inhibiting its ability to speak. “Art making is alive,” Evan says, and that means, like SVA students, art making is part of a community, existing in a shared space, rather than a vacuum. Don’t just get out and see what fellow students are making—think about it, too.

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PICTURE PERFECT

Above: “Can’t Read the Room” BFA Visual and Critical Studies exhibition installation.

Below: MFA Illustration as Visual Essay thesis exhibition. Opposite: MFA Illustration as Visual Essay thesis project exhibition installation in progress.

A USA R J OHNS ON

T HI ST L E WI S E

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STORE.”

“GET IN, ART LOVER.

R E G O INGTO WE’

THE

CAMPUS

ART IS . . a “Mean Girls” reference.

Art Is... Brat T-shirts.

Art Is... a “360” -degree view of new merch.

|campus| |store|

THIS PAGE:

Tote Bag

Marcos Chin Art Is! 2022 subway poster ChicoBag Vita tote.

OPPOSITE:

MA R C O S C H I N

TOTE BAg (SVA Subway Poster)

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Stuffed Toys

SVA Pigeon Plush, “Bruno” and “Charlie” Teddy Bears, and Sock Monkey.

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THE BEST WAY to stay on top of all the lights, camera, action at SVA Theatre is to read your SVA Today newsletters; there’s always something abuzz at the theatre, but not all of the super-exclusive events can be publicized on the website. We’ve created a little quiz so you know all the happenings to watch for if you want to avoid the FOMO.

GUIDE

BARBIE: THE MOVIE

VFX is Hot (Pink)!

Several members of Barbie’s visual effects team—all SVA grads— spoke after a screening of the film during the College’s annual alumni festival, After School Special.

BEST OF 2024

Ready to Launch After School Special features alumni luminaries discussing their work on major films, and also includes a “best of” screening of the top films created by graduating students. But that's far from our only event for SVA students and alumni. SVA Premieres is an annual screening of recent alumni thesis projects in Los Angeles.

SPIDER-MAN:

ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

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SVA H

S A SPECIAL THANKS!

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VIS UAL A RTS P RESS

Laura Valenza, Mark Maltais, Brian E. Smith, Jennifer Liang, Riley Hastings, Joanna Citrinbaum-Zerlin SVA LIBRARIES

Caitlin Kilgallen, Zimra Panitz SVA GA LLERIES

Tyson Skross, Evan Peltzman, Zoe Evans CA MP US STORE

Ian Stoner

SVA TH EATRE

E M OTOKI H I R A KUB O

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Adam Natale Tianqi Chen (illustrator)