Eleven Cornell graduate student artists are showing their individual approaches to what art can be, in a group exhibition in Brooklyn, N.Y.

"Meditations in an Emergency" is on display April 28 to May 7 at the Dumbo Arts Center, 111 Front St., Suite 212. An opening reception is April 30, 6-9 p.m.

The show, featuring all the MFA candidates in art at the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, has been organized by Christopher Y. Lew, assistant curator of the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 contemporary art center.

The featured artists are Robert Andrade, Piotr Chizinski, Amie Cunat, Gabrielle Jesiolowski, Gabriela Jimenez, Daren Kendall, Baseera Khan, Ruth Oppenheim, Benjamin Rubloff, Farideh Sakhaeifar and Bernie Yenelouis.

The exhibition suggests how to make art in a time of disruption and/or crisis, and reflects that the environment in which today's emerging artists create is one marked by distraction and preoccupation. The studio is a space to pause and think, a generative space positioned at a certain distance and remove from the world at large.

The various works highlight artists' approaches to materials, research-based methods and the tension between subjectivity and authorship, content and form, and the power of the image and its ability and inability to convey meaning.

With its title borrowed from Frank O'Hara's 1954 poem -- featured in a 2008 episode of "Mad Men" and itself alluding to John Donne's "Meditations on Emergent Occasions" -- the exhibition aims to make tangible what O'Hara describes as "the ecstasy of bursting forth" -- a sense of birth and renewal as the artists contribute to dialogues about art and its making. These dialogues extend beyond their immediate communities, into a larger conversation that is potentially international and multigenerational.

"Meditations in an Emergency" is accompanied by a printed catalog designed by the studio Project Projects, which has produced publications for the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the Guggenheim Museum, among many others. Dumbo Arts Center is open Wednesday-Sunday, noon-6 p.m. Information: http://aap.cornell.edu/art and http://dumboartscenter.org.