A grinning head engulfed in flames, a girl tucked behind the Black Liberation flag, and an eruption of abstract color swallowing a figure on the precipice of a sharp drop all find their place on the walls of the Kota Alliance’s newest Harlem-focused art exhibit.

A block away from their tributary, faithful brushstrokes, steel casts, and gelatin prints echo the might and impact of the Hudson River. Together, they formulate an investigation into its history, present, and future.

As the 2024 presidential election draws near, political student groups on Columbia’s campus are reimagining how to get their peers involved.

Columbia can seem distant from some of New York City’s most reputed art institutions. Morningside campus is located a 30-minute bus ride from the Museum of Modern Art, a 40-minute bus ride from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a 40-minute train ride from the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The challenge of organizing a coherent exhibition with a group of artists all working within different perspectives and mediums seems nothing short of insurmountable. Yet, when doing so with the defined voices of the School of the Arts’ first-year visual arts students, this Sisyphean task becomes all the more achievable.

The never-ending conflict between young people coming to terms with adulthood and their older, more conservative parents is familiar in film, literature, and music. Add in a flare of color, a montage of an ’80s mom in a power suit, and Niousha Noor’s cover of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” however, and the story gets an exciting new twist in director and screenwriter Maryam Keshavarz’s “The Persian Version.”

“Oh, that’s…” a woman’s voice trailed off as she gazed at one face amid a wall of crystalline photographs. Her words seemed to be uttered partially for her young, pink-jacketed companion who stood to her right, transfixed by a different image, but mostly as a delicate test of her memory.

When staring down the barrel of what appears to be a dissected mythological creature that has no knowledge of humanity or God, one might feel sick. According to Hong Kong-based artist Angela Su, the creature staring back at you might feel the same.

The sound of drums and bass spilled into a crowd of excited voices floating throughout Caffeine Underground, a Bushwick coffee shop that also functions as a performance and exhibition space. Despite being greeted by the space’s lively ambiance, one is confronted with the exhibit’s central question: “What the fuck is wrong with you.”

In a photograph capturing a momentous friendship, two men stand facing opposite directions, clad in heavy clothes suitable for an Italian winter, looking at a series of frescoes depicting the life of Saint Anthony by Italian Renaissance painter Titian. These two men are Michelangelo Muraro, a native Venetian art historian, and David Rosand, CC ’59, GSAS ’65, former Meyer Schapiro professor of art history at Columbia.