October 9 - November 7, 2025
Exhibition Reception, October 16, 2025

“I have become comfortably numb.”

- Pink Floyd

“...I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

- Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World

After the Last Sky adopts the spirit of Peter Lamborn Wilson's Temporary Autonomous Zone, transforming the LeRoy Neiman Gallery into a living room to explore its potential as a space of convergence and critical engagement. Bringing together works by current Columbia MFA candidates, alumni, and guest artists in dialogue with works from the LeRoy Neiman Print Center’s collection, the exhibition reimagines the living room—a site traditionally associated with private leisure and comfort—as a space for gathering, dissent, discussion, and reflection. Here, familiar domestic forms are unsettled to question the commodification of culture, redirecting our attention toward the multiplicity of perspectives on the contemporary world offered by the works in the exhibition. Through this setting, the exhibition navigates tensions between consumption, desensitization, comfort, discomfort, urgency, and political agency. 

The exhibition features a library of selected texts and publications, banned books, Cold War and space-age memorabilia, a selection of records, and a program of readings, film screenings, and activations.