Pratt University’s director of exhibitions, Nick Battis, broke with tradition for this year’s show of alumni work, which opens tomorrow. Instead of recruiting a jury to choose the artists, he chose one well-known curator — the director of curatorial affairs at P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, Eugene Tsai — and gave her free reign. And instead of exhibiting a few works from a large number of artists, he sought a more focused exhibit.

“What I wanted to do was show something major from a smaller group of people,” Mr. Battis, who was promoted to his position in May after serving as an assistant director for five years, said.

The result is a show, “Four Artists,” without a theme, but with a clear point of departure: Pratt.

Ms. Tsai selected the artists from a list of about 30 names nominated by the university staff. All of the artists graduated with the last 11 years.

“These are artists I felt an affinity with,” Ms. Tsai said. “It was an opportunity for me to be completely subjective and indulge my own interests and taste.”

The artists represent the changing style of Pratt students over the years. Two of the artists, Fay Ku and Swoon are recent graduates, while Jean Shin and Rossana Martinez graduated in 1996.

Ms. Shin works often with clothing as sculptural material, which she cuts apart and reconfigures. She obtains the clothing by reaching out to communities that are associated with the exhibition space. At a MoMA show, she used uniforms and clothing donated by the staff. For the show at Pratt, she took clothing from 44 alumni and created a 35-foot-by-11-foot mural called “Reunion.”

“It is a mapping of the social community organized into sediments,” she said. “It represents a landscape as well as a body deconstructed, with the earliest alumni on the bottom and recent graduates from the class of 2010 at the top.”

Ms. Tsai said that three of the artists — Ms. Shin, Ms. Martinez, and Swoon — reflect her interest in installation art.

Swoon, a 2006 graduate, is one of the most publicly known artists in the group. Her human-scale paper cut-outs of figures from everyday life are pasted throughout the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn.

“I started the trajectory I am on while studying at Pratt,” Swoon said from Basel, Switzerland, where she is setting up an installation at the Deitch Projects booth in the Art Basel show. “What was just the tiniest seed while I was a student, or trails that I was following on a hunch, have become three parallel bodies of work: collective projects, street installations, and indoor environmental installations.”

In “Four Artists,” she is exhibiting a portrait and a part of a collaborative exhibition she did with two Pratt students, Polina Soloveichek and Allison Corrie.

Last week Swoon was in Venice researching a project that would include homemade boats, which is perhaps a sequel to a collective project she worked on last year, “Miss Rockaway Armada,” when 25 artists created homemade rafts and traveled down the Mississippi river.

Ms. Tsai, who had seen Swoon’s work on public spaces around the city, finds that the artist connects to ideas about exhibiting art from the 1960s. At that time, artists like Robert Smithson challenged the idea that art should be stable and safely ensconced in galleries.

“Some of her work is figurative and it’s made out on the street,” Ms. Tsai said. “Street art is working very much out of the framework of mainstream cultural institutions. I see her as influenced by a constellation of ideas that developed with Smithson and his contemporaries.”

Likewise, Ms. Martinez’s work, which emphasizes the process of creating the work and often includes the participation of the audience, defies the conventions of art. “She creates a space for conversation or interaction,” Ms. Tsai said.

Ms. Martinez, 37, is exhibiting two chairs connected by a worn copy of a book about the late Felix Gonzalez Torres, a Cuban artist who attended Pratt and whose work is being celebrated currently at the Venice Biennale.

She also has arranged ribbons that are tied around columns and an installation of 20 sets of rubber hands on a wall. Pairs are a frequent theme in her work because it represents the idea of a dialogue or collaboration between people.

“It takes me some time to come up with a concept,” she said. “I want the viewer to have a whole experience.”

Of the four artists, only Ms. Ku, 32, is represented by drawings on paper. Born in Taiwan and raised in Oklahoma and Texas, Ms. Ku has a complex relationship to identity. Her family tended to stay away from Chinese-American communities, but to her surprise, she discovered Chinese influences in her own work years later .

“In ways that you are not even aware, there are things that shape you, make you belong to a culture that you do not have,” she said.

Ms. Ku is exhibiting several drawings of strange figures in isolated space that are influenced by ancient history and the bedtime stories about the Chinese cultural revolution that her father told her. The images come from psychological landscapes and have similarities to the work of the obsessive artist Henry Darger.

One picture depicts women wearing only the whale-bone frames of hoop skirts raising little girls in baskets on large wooden poles. “The stories are becoming even more mysterious to me,” she said. “The relationships are getting more complicated.”

Tomorrow through July 28 and September 4 through 15 (144 W. 14th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-647-7778).