The Afterlife exhibition is on view at Fisher Brooks Gallery in Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) August 1 – September 14, 2026.

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’ work attends to what lingers. For this cohort, The Afterlife does not suggest an ending, but a continuation.

Fisher Brooks Gallery
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
18-128 N. Broad St. Philadelphia, PA 19102
Gallery hours: Thursday–Monday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Image: MNA (detail) by Nabeel Naveed, Oil and pigment on Muslin, 68” x 100”.
Photo credit: John Carlano