The Painting Center presents Final Project 2026. This exhibition showcases the work of six artists who have recently completed the Certificate Program at the Art Students League of New York.

For more than 150 years, the Art Students League has been home to generations of students and instructors, including Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Ai Weiwei. The Certificate Program continues this remarkable legacy, offering students either a two-year or four-year course of intensive study that allows them to take advantage of the League's renowned atelier system, with concentrations in Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Comics and Narrative Art, and Mixed Media.

Featured this year are Richie Chen, Lily Lu, Francis Nguyen, Fabian Pearl, Akiko Takai, and Xiya Wang. Representing a range of media, formats, techniques, and practices, their work addresses themes of cultural memory, identity, embodiment, abstraction, and materiality.