FAQ & Resources for Students: NEXT in 2022

When is NEXT this year?

NEXT this year will be both an in-person and virtual, online experience.

 

Key Dates

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

• Students’ final bio and headshot due

Friday, February 18

• On-Site exhibiting students logistics, mock-up and agreement due

Monday, March 7

• Dance, Music, Theatre or other performance students virtual show requests due (whether you want your work featured on next.corcoran.gwu.edu

Monday, March 21 – Wednesday, May 4

• On-site installations
• NEXT Theatre, Dance and Music on-site performances

Monday, March 25

• On-site exhibiting students labels due

Friday, April 1st 

• Virtual Show, Exhibition Book & Graduating Package requests due
   

  Please see the 2021 website for examples of work.
  Note: Submission of additional content for select disciplines for the website (Interior Architecture + Exhibition Design) will be between April 20-29, 2022. Their content will launch late around May 6, 2022.

Thursday, April 28

• NEXT 180 from 5-6 p.m (Hammer Auditorium)
• NEXT Opening Night Reception from 6-9 p.m. (500 17th Street NW)

Sunday, May 15

• On-site Exhibition closes

Sunday, May 15 – Sunday May, 22

• Artwork Pick-Up from Galleries

 

The in-person exhibition, with work in the Flagg Building (500 17th Street NW) as well as throughout the Foggy Bottom campus, will be up from April 21 – May 15, 2022. The opening night party will be on Thursday, April 28, 2022, 6 pm - 9 pm in the atrium of the Flagg Building (500 17th Street NW).

Performances and symposia will also occur throughout the spring semester as part of NEXT. All graduating students are welcome to participate in the virtual NEXT website at next.corcoran.gwu.edu. Please be in touch with your thesis and capstone advisors, as well as your program heads, on how to participate.

The in-person exhibition, with work in the Flagg Building (500 17th Street NW) as well as throughout the Foggy Bottom campus, will be up until May 15, 2022. The website will be up for two years.

As of now, we hope the performances, exhibitions and celebration events will be open to the public, including all of your friends and family, but we will provide more guidance according to university policies closer to the opening night.

Read below for more details, including all the requirements for your submissions.

What is NEXT?

Over the last decade, NEXT has been held every spring as an end-of-year thesis and capstone show that gives D.C. the opportunity to see the latest in contemporary art and scholarship. Visitors get to see student work in the fields of studio arts, art history, interior architecture, design, dance, theatre, music, museum studies, and more. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented the Corcoran from hosting NEXT 2020 and 2021 in person, but many student artists still found creative ways to complete or rework their projects. In 2021, for the first time in its history, NEXT was a virtual experience, with a website and online performances and shows.

NEXT started in 2011 at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The school had thesis shows before but this was the first time it was branded as NEXT. When it first started, it included just a few degrees in studio arts. Now it is open to all disciplines at the school. Read more about the history of NEXT, and see past shows.

The branding for NEXT 2022 will be created by graphic design students in a year-long class called DesignLab. The NEXT team is also creating a graduation care package for students which will be mailed to you over the summer with a t-shirt, NEXT booklet and Corcoran artistic license.

Who are my contacts at NEXT?

Your thesis professor is working closely with this year’s exhibition coordinators. For other questions, please reach out to your advisor.

See the advisors.

When is the “opening”? Is there something going up in advance?

The full NEXT exhibition and shows will launch the evening of April 21, 2022 with a party one week later on Thursday, April 28, 2022, 6 pm - 9 pm in the atrium of the Flagg Building (500 17th Street NW). The website (next.corcoran.gwu.edu) will be live around April 21, 2022 as well. As of now, we hope the performances, exhibitions and celebration events will be open to the public, including all of your friends and family, but we will provide more guidance according to university policies closer to the opening night.

How can we promote our work in “NEXT”?

After the website launches, each student will have their own website page which you can use to promote your work. Before the website launches, you can share details about your work via postcards, social media, etc.

Check out this year's brand guide and theme here. This is designed by Corcoran's DesignLab class, graphic design juniors Alexandra Tan and Amanda Bohn, with Prof. Cory Bernat.

You can also access postcard templates and wordmarks that you are welcome to use in any way that follows the brand guidelines along with hashtags #NEXT22, #CorcLife and #OnlyAtGW

 

REQUIREMENTS

Below are the requirements for the images, videos, audio, and PDFs. Note: The only kinds of materials that we can host on the website are images, videos, sound files and PDFs, but we can link to your website to show more kinds of work.

Copyright Guidance

Performance, design and studio arts professors are working on copyright guidance for students. As a general rule of thumb, be very mindful when creating recorded work not to use copyrighted music or images from other artists without permission, as we cannot feature them on the NEXT website or social media. In-person performances have different guidelines. Ask your instructor for more information.

Video Guidance

Please send your file via the form above or emailed to the exhibition coordinator. If your video has a caption file, please include it. Videos without caption files will be sent to Rev to create them as it’s an accessibility requirement for our website. The videos will be put on Corcoran’s vimeo account, so we also ask you to submit titles and descriptions.

Videos should be 1080p H.264 compression, no less than 8/10mbps. We won’t have to worry about a max mbps because H.264 will naturally compress it to a proper max limit. Students should/need to know that QuickTime has a very easy [Export As –> 1080p] feature that is a one click compressor. It’s better than just about anything else out there - Media Encoder is not great!

Audio Guidance

Submit your audio files on the final submission form along with a caption file if you have one. The school will host these files on the Corcoran SoundCloud account. Stay tuned for more guidance.

Image Guidance

We ask that you submit your files as JPG with a MINIMUM resolution of 1920 x 1080. Ideally we’d prefer 3840 x 2160 px. These numbers can also be swapped to form portrait-oriented images (1080x1920 and 2160x3840). 72ppi. The file size doesn’t matter as much because JPG is already a compressed format.

PDF Guidance

PDFs should come in at under 50MB in file size so that users with slow internet or mobile devices can download them easily enough.

If you have a truly image-heavy PDF that is over 300MB, please try compressing it. Or provide a compressed <=50MB version AND the original 300MB version and we can have links to both (low resolution for mobile and slow users and a high resolution for regular users). Email these versions of the files to our exhibition coordinator.

PDFs must be accessible. The Corcoran will spend resources after students submit the work to make sure that people with disabilities can read the PDFs, but there are a few steps that you can take to prepare work to cut down on this expense and make sure your materials are accessible. The guidelines are in great detail here and here. A few toplines:

• Text should be searchable - if saving from a Word doc, you can save it in a certain way (outlined here).
• The fonts in an accessible PDF must contain enough information for Acrobat to correctly extract all of the characters to text for purposes other than displaying text on the screen.
• Use of text instead of images of text
• Use of color combinations that provides a sufficient degree of contrast (we understand some of your work is art and interpretation, but be mindful especially around text)

Are we able to update material after launch?

 

Any updates to your work or materials should be on your personal website. We want to honor the material that you submit at graduation as a snapshot in time and a moment in your artistic journey, so we aren’t able to accommodate any revisions to your work past the submission deadline.

Unless you have given us permission to share your work on social media or elsewhere, the Corcoran will not share your work outside of the website. No individual student work will be showcased by Corcoran or its partners outside of the context of the website without your permission. When you provide us with materials, we assume you have already secured full rights and clearances for those materials.