Spring is in the air, and in New York that means MFA exhibitions. Institutions like Columbia University, the New York Studio School, SVA (School of the Visual Arts,) The New York Academy, Queens College, Brooklyn College, Rutgers, The New School, SUNY Purchase, Pratt, and NYU all present shows of eager new talents.  Hunter College is an exception as they held their exhibition in December and January.

Dale Klein, who is receiving her MFA in painting from Rutgers in New Jersey, is not the traditional eager young beaver: she decided to pursue her BFA and MFA after a career in social work.  “Following a life-long passion, one class just led to another, and then I thought I might want to teach,” she said. Klein plans to continue her studio practice in Boston while her husband gets his graduate degree, but then hopes to move back to New York.  In addition to the thesis show for its graduating class at the campus gallery at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutger’s partnered with White Box Gallery on the Lower East Side of New York for a show called “Off the Map.” Klein is thrilled about the opportunity for New York exposure in a well-respected venue.

Here is a list of MFA shows this season.

March 24 – April 4
Queens College Department of Art MFA Exhibition at Dorsky Gallery
11-03 45th Ave, Long Island City, 718 937 6317. www.dorsky.org
April 1 – May 2
Off the Map: Rutgers MFA Graduates
White Box Gallery
329 Broome Street. 212 714 2347. www.whiteboxny.org

April 5 – April 30
MFA Graduation Exhibition Series
SUNY Purchase College School of the Arts
Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery in the Visual Arts Building
735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase NY, 914 251 6753. www.purchase.edu

April 6 – May 17
MFA Thesis Exhibition 2010
New York University Steinhardt School Department of Art and Art Professions
80 Washington Square East, 212 998 5747. www.steinhardt.nyu.edu

April 29 – May 2
MFA Design + Technology
Parsons The New School for Design
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street. www.newschool.edu

April 30 – May 15
Selections from Thesis Projects in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Department
School of the Visual Arts
601 West 26 Street, 15th Floor. 212 592 2145. www.schoolofvisualarts.edu

May 2 – May 23
Columbia University School of the Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Fisher Landau Center
38-37 30th Street. 718 937 0727. www.flcart.org

May 11 – May 23
2010 MFA Diploma Exhibition
New York Academy of Art
111 Franklin Street. 212 966 0300. www.nyaa.com

May 12 – May 26
MFA Thesis Exhibition
New York Studio School
8 West 8th Street. 212 673 6466. www.nyss.org

May 14 – 24
MFA Fine Arts at The Kitchen
Parsons The New School for Design
512 West 19th Street. 212 255 5793. www.thekitchen.org

May 14 – June 5
Pratt M.F.A. 2010
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street, 2nd floor. 212 647 7778

May 7 – June 7
Brooklyn College MFA Thesis Exhibition at Williamsburg Art and Historical Center
135 Broadway at Bedford. 718 486 7372. www.wahcenter.net

August 21 – September 11
MFA Photography
Parsons The New School for Design
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street. www.newschool.edu

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Sarah Rothenberg, Piano
Susan Narucki, Soprano
Brentano String Quartet: Mark Steinberg, violin; Serena Canin, violin; Misha Amory, viola; Nina Maria Lee, cello
Armitage Gone! Dance: Leonides D. Apron, Megumi Eda, William Isaac, Mei-Hua Wang

In 1911, Vasily Kandinsky first heard the music of Arnold Schoenberg, and after being inspired to write to him (“…today’s dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of tomorrow…”), Kandinsky then established Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of artists dedicated to spirituality and to finding connections between visual arts and music.  Taking her cue from this early 20th-century movement, pianist Sarah Rothenberg conceived The Blue Rider in Performance, combining works Kandinsky heard at the 1911 concert with a few others from the same time period.  In front of imagery from the artist’s work, projected on the stage’s back wall, the stage was transformed into a dramatic, tripartite screen—an ambitious beginning for Miller Theatre’s 21st season.  And the inaugural efforts of the theater’s new director, Melissa Smey, must have paid off since the place was sold-out: packed with patrons, Columbia University students, and eager tourists who had just seen the Guggenheim’s new Kandinsky exhibit that afternoon.

Opening with Schoenberg’s 1899 song Erwartung, Op. 2 (not to be confused with his 1909 monodrama for soprano and orchestra), ravishingly sung by Susan Narucki, Rothenberg followed this with a fine-grained reading of his Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11, delicately shaping the composer’s ascent to atonality.  Behind her, drawings based on Kandinsky’s sketches slowly took shape, his lines and colors quietly rising and falling.  With no applause (as requested), the program continued with Thomas de Hartmann’s Three Songs on Anna Akhmatova, two short piano gems by Arthur Lourié (Spleen and Autoportrait from 1912), and Webern’s Eingang (Entrance) and Ihr tratet zu dem Herde (You drew near the hearth…).

Before the break came two Berg songs, Dem Schmerz sein Recht (Giving Pain its Due) andWarm de Lüfte (Warm are the Breezes), with Ms. Narucki articulating each phrase with the deliberation of a jeweler.  And in a subtly alluring film noir note, her face gently dipped in and out of shadow with the words, “The one dies while the other lives: that makes the world so deeply beautiful.”  Ms. Rothenberg closed with one of Scriabin’s last works: the intensely chromatic Vers la flamme (Toward the flame).  As Rothenberg leaned into the keyboard, completely immersed in Scriabin’s mystical ecstasy, onscreen behind her small blips of light gradually multiplied, growing faster in the final frenzied measures, rushing toward the audience in a blur of speeding orbs before a blackout.

A recording began the second half: Schoenberg’s Herzgewächse, Op. 20, with soprano Lucy Shelton and Ms. Rothenberg on celeste, overlapping the Brentano String Quartet slowly walking onstage.  Already seated as the song ended, they plunged into a gripping account of the composer’s Second String Quartet, which begins tonally, leading to an atonal final movement, echoing Kandinsky’s own leap into the abstract.  In the opening pages, four members of Armitage Gone! Dance added a third component—a kinetic one—to a score that the Brentano musicians ate up as if they had lived with it for decades.  Ms. Narucki seemed a magnificently sensuous outsider, glowing in the final two movements.

Especially in the first half, the projections of light, color and form seemed well-judged, as if line drawings were being created on the spot.  I overheard one art history expert who found it one of the most successful aural/visual hybrids she had seen.  (Lighting and set design were credited to Marcus Doshi, with Sven Ortel on projection design).  Graphics of the second half made me think of lightning bolts etching themselves in slow motion—not a bad metaphor in Rothenberg’s evocative homage to one of the early 20th century’s most potent couplings of artist and composer.

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