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.

Across media and scale, these artists treat the present not as a fixed condition but as something provisional—made from remnants of what came before and continually reshaped by acts of making. Here, an afterlife is not a destination but a process: of rebuilding, remembering, refusing and becoming.

Together, the exhibition offers twenty-seven artists' responses to a shared question: how might we imagine another world from the materials of this one? The work of each artist in the Tyler MFA Class of 2026 attends to what lingers: archival traces, inherited histories, ecological debris, domestic labor, bodily experience, family memory, discarded objects and gestures repeated into ritual. For this cohort, The afterlife does not suggest an ending, but a continuation.