New York Academy of Art

Conversing with the Unnamed: Ali Banisadr

2012-01-30T13:53:00.003-05:00

Originally posted on Art-Rated on January 18, 2012. Click to view the original post.
By Jonathan Beer, Class of 2012

Ali Banisadr in the studio.

Since Expressionism artists have used painting to confront the interior world, wrestling to create with what German artist Willi Baumeister called “the self-engendered vision.” Like a prospector, an artist searches through layers of self-made bedrock and sediment, mining for a vein to follow. Many artists are enchanted by this parallel interior place, a zone where the fabric of reality is twisted and altered by the subconscious, intersected by memories and augmented by the imagination. It is a constantly shifting place, populated by things which have no name. There is no guidebook. A thorough investigation of the psychological is found in both abstract and representational work, from the disconcerting worlds of Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage to the imposing paintings of Milton Resnick and Mark Rothko. Somewhere between abstraction and figuration the psychological has re-emerged in the painterly fictions of Ali Banisadr.

Banisadr’s paintings have the allure of another world; their surface is inviting and mysterious, poised between the limits of understanding and the possibilities of the imagination. And they are clearly worlds; the shimmering marks coalesce as figures in landscapes, slipping between formed and formless, recalling the frenetic scenes of Breughel or Bosch. The paintings seem to transmit sound, as if each character was reciting his story at once. According to the artist, the key to opening up this other world lies in suspending his knowledge for as long as possible. In a recent visit to his studio he remarked that abstract painter Milton Resnick said “painting is about not knowing for as long as possible,” an idea that sustains his practice. We discussed how he enters this unknown:
“I always look for openings, the part of the painting that welcomes me, the part that calls me in. It could be anywhere, and I start from there. And then it becomes a dialogue. Narrative and composition become the dialogue – I put something here and then ask ‘how is it going to work with this thing over here?’ From there it just goes and goes. On a good day that’s how it is. You just start a conversation with the work and hope to disappear.”

Selection. Oil on Linen, 66 x 88 inches. 2011. (Courtesy of Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac ©)

At first glance the glimmering surface of his paintings might not reflect his subject matter, which he says, “is based on three things: the history of myself, the history of our century, and the history of art. These things aren’t going to change much.” Yet those layers of paint evoke the denseness of history and speak to the simultaneous unfolding of events we witness in our interconnected world. Through technique, Banisadr infuses these layers with poetry that communicates far beyond his ideas, allowing the audience to find their own fiction in the picture.
His best works push beyond simple aesthetic delight, moving into a zone where the imagery becomes flexible in its meaning, giving the painting an ability to say many things to more people. “I don’t make things that have names. I don’t make identifiable things – like here’s a tree or a rock or a car, I just don’t make things that way. The painting doesn’t communicate to me that way, because its paint. As paint, it’s telling me different things and those things are unnamed things. When you have a dream, there’s visual stuff going on in your subconscious you can’t really get a hold of – you can’t weigh it down and say what it is; you can’t.”
Similar to dreams or hallucinations, threads of subconscious stories that emerge in one painting are often found in others. “While one piece is ending or even mid-way through, I start to think about what I want the next piece to be like. As one piece becomes something and finishes, I find the things that I’ve learned from that painting that I want to apply to the next painting.” When viewed together his paintings become epic sagas – color and form spill from each canvas, innumerable stories running together, endlessly separating and reforming.

Rock the Casbah (2). Oil on Linen, 36x30 inches. 2011.
(Courtesy of Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac ©)

Today’s media driven culture issues an endless stream of shallow imagery, cementing a trend of instant visual gratification. Painting maintains an upward trajectory through the detritus, asking for focus and contemplation from its audience. Ali Banisadr’s pictures declare that painting is very much alive, and proves that there are still certain things only paint can do. His work reinforces the endurance of the painted image, each picture announcing that uniqueness and imagination still fuel the human mind. As long as artists remain curious, art will always be a perpetual act of opening up. We eagerly await the new worlds that will emerge in Banisadr’s work.

Ali Banisadr is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Europe.
http://www.ali-banisadr.com/

Quotes are taken from an interview with Ali Banisadr, Jon Beer and Lily Koto Olive at Ali Banisadr’s studio on December 10^th, 2011.

Inside The Studio.

2012-01-12T15:30:00.006-05:00

Originally posted by, Maria Teicher, MFA 2013

The experience of being an artist has always been more than producing work for me. It's truly about a connection to others. Art (both painting and photography) is how I bring these connections to life. I want to hear stories, why people do what they do and how they got to where they are.
A world I have always been very fascinated by is the artist in their working environment. In the past, I've studied musicians and sometimes other photographers but rarely the painter or sculptor. It's been a dream of mine to photograph these types of artists, with light interview involved, showing a new side of the art world at large. I've wanted to see and show where it all begins and my time at the New York Academy of Art has now brought a dream to life. Thanks to artist Guno Park, I will be a part of a video and still photography series exploring former NYAA students' studios. The first is complete and I'm honored to be a part of it.

Here's a bit about the experience: After a few subway rides and great conversation, Guno led me to the studio of former NYAA fellow Will Kurtz. Located in Queens, a gigantic building surrounded by mild traffic and barbed wire greeted us. We walked through floors of closed doored studios to Will's, an extremely large space shared with two other artists. Will's beautiful sculptures were there to greet us alongside him, as well as some great music playing in the background. A wall lined with windows and warm light (as well as an incredible view) wasn't what I expected. The space was wonderful but the experience was even better. As you can see in his video interview with Guno, Will is an extremely kind man and an amazingly dedicated artist. His path to nyaa and now to his upcoming show at Mike Weiss Gallery is as incredibly unique as he is driven and talented. His connection to human beings was something I shared and became even more inspired by.
After taking many still shots of Will and his work (all while listening to his story).. Guno and I left feeling quite a bit of pride in what we were venturing into with this new project. We both knew how well it went, without even beginning to edit the footage and photography we had gained.

Extremely proud and excited to have been invited along, I hope this series continues. It is literally a dream come true. Watch the video here and enjoy the photography as you grab a glimpse into the work and life of Will Kurtz.

http://vimeo.com/34577302

Come see his show "Extra Fucking Ordinary" at Mike Weiss Gallery. Opening reception is Thursday January 12th from 6-8pm.

[click on the first photograph to scroll through at actual size].

Stay tuned for more possible studio visits with the incredible artists coming out of the New York Academy of Art.

Deck the Walls 2011

2011-12-15T22:13:00.004-05:00

By Amanda Scuglia, MFA 2013

Deck the Walls is a holiday themed party thrown by The Academy every year. It's the perfect chance to purchase small artworks from students, staff, faculty and alumni for a great price! This is a chance to score some really unique holiday gifts, or to start/add to your art collection.

Buyers lined up at the door, anxiously awaiting access. When the doors opened, there was such an excitement and rush to see all the great work for sale. The walls were packed with nearly 350 pieces, but it didn't take long before they turned bare. All of this, while painters and sculptors worked live from models. AND, the event was sponsored Heineken, and featured an open bar!

As a first year student, it was my first time participating. I had so much fun, and I sold a piece! Here are some highlights from the evening.

An inside look: The Academy Open House Experience

2011-11-17T12:44:00.001-05:00

Our first Open House for 2012 MFA applicants is this Saturday, November 19th from 12-2pm. See Amanda Scuglia's (Class of 2013) blog post Clicking Heels for her application experience last spring!

Originally posted - Friday, March 25, 2011

Accepted and Approved: New York Academy of Art

Once I was accepted to both the New York Academy of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, I started planning my visits to the schools. First up was NYAA. I contacted the Admissions office to find out when I could tour the school. They told me about an upcoming open house for prospective students that I could attend. It was only 2 weeks away! I had to buy a very last minute, VERY expensive ticket to New York. You see, there aren't that many flights coming out of ol' Wichita, Kansas. Luckily, I had a friend who let me crash at her place. I also kept weekly correspondence with the admissions director who's been very prompt (and kind) with answering my questions/concerns. The open house presentation was extremely informative and very honest. I got to walk around and see the entire school including all the studios and the students' work! The work was incredible. I felt like it was the kind of work I wanted to make. The first year studios are not huge, but since the first year will be a "boot camp", it should suffice. My tour guide was super friendly and answered all of my hundreds of questions. We began discussing how I found out about the school in the first place.

I lived in New York for 4 years and had never heard of it before this year. Or perhaps I wasn't looking for it, since I only started to research schools when I knew for sure when I wanted to enroll. I already had my top ranked schools picked out, based on reputation. But when I visited one of them, it wasn't what I had expected. So I began researching other avenues, like the CAA Directory, a guide to all visual arts grad programs, which I found out about through my undergrad academic advisor/art professor. Then I started going through my bookmarked favorites, some contemporary artists' work that I had saved over the years. When their work stood out to me, I looked up their bios on their websites. I noticed a trend: a lot of them had attended the New York Academy of Art. Alyssa Monks, Caitlin Hurd, Christian Johnson, just to name a few. Here's where I became a stalker :) I found out that a professor from my college graduated from NYAA. I contacted her via phone and asked about her experience with the school. She had all positive things to say and told me that she actually chose NYAA over Yale. She gave me the name of an alumna who's currently enrolled at the school. I contacted her via facebook and interviewed her as well. At this point, I was dumbfounded about how I couldn't have known about this marvelous little place. I read about the history, which gave them even more brownie points. Andy Warhol was a co-founder. Um, hellllo. This must be the art school society's best kept secret.

I guess I'll find out... because I'll be attending this fall! No need to visit any more schools. I found mine. :D

EXPERIENCE at Today Art Museum. Beijing, China

2011-11-07T10:51:00.000-05:00

By Cori Beardsley, MFA 2011

We have experienced a mammoth amount of work here in China. It has been a struggle in trying to make sense of the art world here, to put it in concise terms, and define the trajectory of its fast growth and movements. Our conversation in the studio has circled around the core idea of art as Experience, and i have gathered that there is a real attention here on Experiencing Art. Through the design of the installation, space, timing of the narrative, and drama of the object, the gigantic warehouse spaces in Beijing are perfect for designing an experience for the audience.

Yesterday we visited the Today Art Museum. There were two solo shows by female sculptors Xian Jing and Li Wei. Xian Jing's show "Will things ever get better?" began with a huge 100 foot tall space presenting contorted knots of acrobats. They were composed on 30 foot tall welded pedestals, stacked on top of each other, or quietly poised and meditating before taking action. An ambitious feat of sculpture, these resin sculptures painted meticulously with acrylic were performing for us, smiling, waiting tensely for our applause.

This gallery was divided by a deep red velvet curtain which behind it held more fantastical works. Dramatically lit, life size painted animals like the "immortal one", a dopey elephant, big eyed horse, sheep, and a group of seals. Installed in a smaller space, you were at level with these animals, intimate and up close to the pathetic and hopelessness of their pose. There was a distance in their hollow gaze, unaffected by your presence. It simulated the detachment and exhaustion of animals at the zoo.

In another warehouse space at Today Art Museum was Li Wei's Solo show "Hero". Unaware about any of this artist's ovure, I walked into a long hall that led into a large open space. All I could see ahead of me were two kissing fire extinguishers and I thought to myself, "Please don't let that be the work of art." As I turned the corner there were 20 sculptures of Chinese girls and boys in dancing costumes, big glass eyes staring eagerly, nervously at me. A huge theater spotlight beamed on their stage frightened bodies. I felt bad for these little ones, knock-kneed, pleading internally not to be judged and awkward in their costumes that can't hide the anxiety of their budding adolescence. A gaggle of young persons walked in, giggled and pointed at the sculptures. Perfect.

Walking out, I was led into the spaces upstairs. First there was a flock of flared peacocks flirting with each other on astro-turf. But to my right was room with a beeping noise that persuaded my attention. I entered the glass door to find four beds with near death figures in a tangle of medical tubes and sensors on their bodies. It smells sick, stale, and sterile like a hospital. Blaring, insensitive florescent light floods the 15'x10' small space, leaving me to confront the bodies before me. Fluids are bubbling through tubes and regulators while I try to distinguish the life left in these forms. Flesh in complete repose, their naked bodies sprawled open in a tangle of bed linen don't reveal their sex until you follow the lines of their tubes and find penetrating catheters. I am repulsed and drawn in simultaneously. As I aim to photograph I stall; feeling at my core wrong about documenting these barely alive figures. Standing bedside between two of the figures my head darts back and forth between their glazed eye contact. Tubes billow out of their mouth and dismembered bodies; I am stunned between their utterly silent stare. A man comes in and begins pulling cords out of the machines, and the beeping of their life force goes quiet, their bubbling fluids cease. I look at him in shock, "What are you doing! Why are you pulling the plug!?" He smiles back at me; responding, "Hel-lo!" I notice another gallery attendant ready to lead me out because it is closing time.

Adrenaline pumping, I exit the gallery, beaming from the empathy I felt for the figures and the complete submersion I experienced. The powerful simulation in both rooms; an endearing anxiety with the costumed adolescences, and the transfixion on the bodies with their wavering mortality preserved by pumps and tubes.

Two theatrical sculptural experiences. Xian Jing's sculptures performing perfectly for her audience; and the hollow emotion in her beautiful animals bearing the same contradiction that one experiences at the zoo of looking at trapped majestic creatures. The simulation in the installations of Li Wei's life-cast figures conjured emotions from those scenes in our own lives and flooded the viewer with empathy.

See more pictures from the show below:

Introduction to Shanghai/Beijing Residency

2011-10-26T13:33:00.005-04:00

By Cori Beardsley, MFA 2011

Left to right: Wang Yi, MFA 2010, Mitchell Martinez, Class of 2012, Samuel Evensen, MFA 2008, Cori Beardsley, MFA 2011, Kiley Ames Klein, MFA 2011 Friend, Cao Yi, MFA 2011

NiHao Academy community! I wanted to introduce the CAFA, Shanghai University Residency program that Kiley Ames Klein, Samuel Evensen, Mitchell Martinez, and myself; Cori Beardsley have been on since August 20th. Wang Yi (alum Shanghai University-2008,NYAA 2010) and Cao Yi (Alumni of CAFA-2009, NYAA-2011) have been our generous, energetic tour guides, translators, and dear friends-welcoming us so warmly into China and explaining the culture, art and history along the way.

We started out in Shanghai, visiting cultural sights like Old and New City, museums, and important galleries. Staying at the University Hotel at Shanghai University, We met 15 students from Shanghai University and other Universities in China (graduate and undergraduate). We worked from the model, and on our own projects in the studio with them for 10 days. We also traveled and worked Plen air for two days to Xi Tang, a beautiful ancient water city. Back at the studio, Samuel Evenson led a great anatomy class one morning and we exchanged in discussions about our contemporary art worlds, working representationally, and what we strove for as artists. Wong Yi's took us to his studio and we were thrilled about his new work. He also took us to local markets and antique shops- insight about the history of China that gets submerged in the sea of modernization.The generosity and hospitality we received in our introduction to China was overwhelming, our big wide eyes were busy taking in all the new sights, people and culture.

And off we were on a FAST 5 hour train ride to Beijing. We are staying in an apartment that Cao Yi found for us that is a half a mile from school, and we have a terrific 1,000 sq. ft studio with a skylight in the Graduate Oil Painting Building. After we stopped jumping up and down in the studio we quickly got to work. Art supplies are very cheap and accessible, the spaces are BIG and the art is BIG. So our ambitions went soaring. Ren Rui and Janet Fong from the Public Education and Development Program at the Museum of CAFA are arranging a show for us of the work completed on this Residency in the Museum while the Biennial: Super Organism at the Museum is up. To be continued...

A Teachable Moment

2011-10-14T16:55:00.038-04:00

The painting “Inglorious Nocturne” by Holly Ann Sailors has provoked a strong reaction from many members of the Academy’s staff, faculty and student community.

To address the serious nature of these concerns, the Academy feels that it has a responsibility to its community to create a platform where all sides of this issue may be aired in a reasonable and respectful manner.

We have created this blog to encourage an open and honest dialog about freedom of expression and speech, the open exchange of ideas and the role that censorship plays in addressing provocative and controversial works in the arts.

- Peter Drake, Dean of Academic Affairs

________________________________________________________________________

While the faculty is not in total agreement about the success of “Inglorious Nocturne,” and hence of how offensive (if at all) it may be, we all applaud Holly’s ambition and courage in addressing such difficult subject matter. History painting, once the pinnacle of painting’s function, is now largely the territory of film and photography; contemporary art generally shies away from historical issues. Certainly racism is one of our history’s major quandaries: much of America’s early economic success is owed to unpaid labor, and some of the founders who gave such beautiful expression to notions of American independence were slave-owners.

The faculty also sees replacing the painting with one less inflammatory as counterproductive, partly because that would invoke censorship—even if the most salient examples in recent art history have involved public (government) monetary support, and The New York Academy is a private institution whose main function is to educate students. Most of all, avoiding these thorny issues would be missing the opportunity of a “teachable moment”. As a school that promotes excellence in formal execution in figurative art, we hope that the discussion that follows of how and why this image provokes thought and emotion, will encourages students to challenge themselves in terms of content. We invite your comments.

- Margaret McCann, Interim Faculty Chair
________________________________________________________________________

"Inglorious Nocturne "

oil on canvas  47"x 62"  2011

I understand that this artwork is creating controversy and discussion within the school community. I am very aware of the taboo nature of this imagery and realize the potential for it to be perceived as offensive. This is not my intention.

In no way am I trying to perpetuate the ideas of this hateful community. Instead, I want to unveil a never-ending trend of hate, prejudice and disillusion that is present in our culture. In all of my work at this time I am interested in fully capturing the viewer's attention through beauty and seductive coloring that then forces them to witness horrific subject matter. Overall, I wish to bring awareness to current social issues dealing with racism, hate, and injustice.

This painting is fueled by an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan that I had as a child. As a 7 year old, seeing this event was life-changing and revealed to me the simultaneous connection of beauty (in this case the fire, the costumes, the ritual) with abject horror (the brutal treatment and murder of minorities). The controversial figures depicted in my painting are ghostly cowards disintegrating into the darkness presented through a palette of attraction. I am continuing a southern Gothic tradition that uses art to explore social issues and sheds light on the cultural failures of the American South.

- Holly Ann Sailors , MFA 2012
_________________________________________________________________________
Examples of artwork dealing with controversial themes (some w/links):

Philip Guston: "Edge of Town" and "Bad Habits" (top) 1970

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit12-4-03.asp

("Philip Guston's Self-Doubt" by Donald Kuspit)

Chris Ofilli: "The Holy Virgin Mary" (link) 1996

Kara Walker

Kara Walker (link to article: "Representing Race")

unknown racist illustration

Peter Saul: "OJ"1996

Glenn Ligon: "Benefit" 2007

Manet: "Olympia"

John Currin: "The Women of Franklin Street"

Lisa Yiskavage: "Pie Face"

Gustave Courbet: "Dreamers"

John Currin: "The Bra Shop" 1996

Lisa Yuskavage: "Day"

Carroll Dunham: "(Hers) Night and Day"

Gustave Courbet: "Origin of the World" 1866

Robert Mapplethorpe: "Fisting" 1978

Carolee Schneemann: "Interior Scroll"

Eric Fischl: "Tumbling Woman"

Jerome Witkin: "Taken" (section)

Jerome Witkin: "Butcher's Helper: Buchenwald"

Nicola Verlato

Gerhardt Richter: "Uncle Rudy"

Truppe: "The Fuhrer"

Lanzinger: "The Standard Bearer"

John Heartfield

McDermott & McGough

_____________________________________________________________________________

Comments welcome, anonymously is OK, too.

Not to Miss

2011-09-12T09:13:00.036-04:00

A review by Maria Kozak, MFA 2011

Welcome back Everyone! School is in session and so is the fall season.

Tonight don't miss NYAA Senior Critic Vincent Desiderio's opening at Marlborough in Chelsea. This haunting new series of paintings explores the subtle, underlying context of the human experience through exquisite brushwork and a profound technical narrative.

Also opening in Chelsea, James Cohan is proud to present DANDAN, a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Tabaimo, who represented Japan in this year's Venice Biennale. Elaborate stage sets were built in the gallery to showcase her incredible hand drawn animations.

Uptown at Gagosian, go see NYAA Senior Critic and last year's Commencement speaker Jenny Saville's new show of life-size drawings and paintings exploring the renaissance theme of Madonna and child. Known for her lush, fleshy figures, this is Saville's first show in NY since 2003.

Afterwards head to the Lower East Side to Kleio Projects for a show curated by NYAA Alum Benjamin Martins and inspired by fellow alum Maud Taber-Thomas. Self Portrait As Monster Truck will feature a number talented Academy artists, past and present, with their interpretations of the title theme.

As for shows that have already opened don't miss the following;

Alex Katz at Gavin Brown. This is Katz's first show after leaving Pace Wildenstein for Gavin Brown. The show juxtaposes Katz's classic somber portraits with minimalist fields of flowers.

Do So Huh at Lehmann Maupin. Home Within Home is an array of installations and sculptural objects that all explore themes of cultural displacement. The centerpiece of the show is a scaled up apartment building 'dollhouse' where Suh lived in Rhode Island impaled with a model of his Korean home.

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman. A new series of Cave's meticulously covered figures in various vignettes exploring individualism, unity, fornication, memory, and the inheritance of personal identity.

Nicole Etienne at Sloan Fine Art. The NYAA Alum's show aptly titled A Movable Feast, features Etienne's glitter-filled, overexposed, multimedia interiors superimposed with lushly painted figures, flora, and fauna.

Pitch at RH Gallery in TriBeCa featuring South African artist Paul Edmonds. In this series of ethereal, abstract drawings Edmunds seeks to find a visual correspondence to music specifically in relation to pitch, tone, timbre and stereo.

The accompanying group show Melodymania, referencing a tune you can't get out of your head, includes NYAA Alum Panni Malekzadeh, Mickaline Thomas, Mathew Barney, Slater Bradley, and Bruce Nauman among others.

And last but not least, Stefanie Gutheil at Mike Weiss. Gutheil's paintings are vivid, large scale, maximalist combinations of characters, shapes, and patterns.

Quentin McCaffrey in Carrara, 3

2011-09-06T13:12:00.006-04:00

by Quentin McCaffrey, MFA 2011

After selecting a stone, a warm and pale white marble taking its name, "Statuario", from its historical use, I was given a place to work and all the tools and advice necessary to extract form from stone. Seeing that I was basically just scaling up an existing work and transferring it into a different material, the “formula” for achieving the sculpture was actually rather logical; however beginning was probably the most difficult part.

In Carrara, small chunks of marble like the one I was using are often dumpster worthy scraps. Still, I felt very precious at first about the material, and I was overly sensitive to its inability to forgive. I began working very cautiously, taking measurements, slowly carving away some stone, measuring, sawing off an unwanted corner, measuring again, etc. The bulky square of the original stone was diligent and did not want to submit to the saws, chisels and hammers.

This went on for almost the whole first week. The days were long and my inexperience and fears caused me to work slowly, as if the weight of the stone literally remained upon me like a burden. I became Sisyphus or Bunyan's Christian.

The evenings however, were spent as the Creator intended. Pizza, frutti di mare, pasta and wine were shared and enjoyed over stimulating conversation. We left our (or maybe just my) stiff, anglo-american rigidity behind and finally understood rest.

Once every few days, for an afternoon or the whole day if necessary, the relative closeness of Florence or Siena would beckon us to their treasures and we would escape the dust, trading it for Cathedrals and museums. Florence, swollen with sculptural ecstasy, revealed the potentials of stone, humbling all who bear witness. Michelangelo left us only grace and power, the weight relieved, even in his slaves still bound to the rock. The glory of the work overwhelms you at first with its size, subtlety and charisma. Eventually, your mind regains itself, the facts pour in and you are stupefied again. Without power tools, and restricted to daylight and fires, these heroes of old orchestrated the marble and it sang their symphonies as they squinted through the settling dust.

At some undefined moment, back in the studio, the stone eventually softened and its weight slipped away. The form I knew began to peek through and assure me that it was hiding in there, and I needed only to carve away the superfluous material and the sculpture would reveal itself. The corner turned, the curve rose exponentially, and it felt as if Sisyphus defied the gods and the stone tumbled over the pinnacle. It was at this point that carving became a joy and the lovely roundness of the forms started to teeter between stone and flesh.

It was the days following this moment that became the filet of the residency. Having a better grip on the direction of the work allowed me to see what else was going on around me. Watching and listening to the artisans in the studio (as I butchered their festive tongue) and the parallel experiences of my fellow students proved invaluable and became a classroom of its own. Steve's consistent encouragement and balance of instruction with allowance for personal discovery permitted confidence in the work while maintaining room for a sense of individual growth and exploration.

Quickly the days escaped and the time to leave approached. Shipping arrangements and final trips for the acquisition of coveted Italian tools were made as the hours slid by and were gulped down with the house wine at final meals together. Goodbyes were said, contacts exchanged, Facebook requests confirmed and we parted ways, some staying to work, others sightseeing; me, alone moving north-east to the Biennale in Venice. The trip, in its totality, was exquisite, as if composed by a master of temporal engineering. I would be hard pressed to find a more perfect follow-up to a work-filled semester than the balance of rest, exploration, work and study that was my June in Italy.

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Doris Buehler

2011-08-29T14:32:00.000-04:00

The Academy is pleased to share a new ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT series on our blog, to showcase what our graduates are doing. Here, Doris Buehler, MFA 2000.

What are you currently working on?
I was been preparing for a Single Show at the Gallery Bachlechner, in Zürich, June 18th -31st July 2011. I showed a collection of sculptures, paintings, mixed media and some animatronic pieces around the "belly button". I have also created a series of wax pieces called Burning Issues that highlight some of the concerns we as human beings have regarding our political and social environment.

I am moving away from the traditional forms that I have previously used and exploring a far more abstract state which I enjoy immensely. This allows me greater freedom in my communication; addressing the issues of today in a way that is more congruent with my feelings. The belly buttons, and the wax pieces, have allowed me to show a slightly more frivolous side, playful and exciting. However, the "belly button" is built around more serious messages. The "belly button” or the Umbilicus Urbis*

Our "Umbilicus Urbis" is the centre of our body, a central point of our spirit, where we make decisions - a gut feeling if you will. It reminds us our historical roots, and the ties to our ancestry are still clearly visible. The materials I have used all coincide with this theme. They generate an emotional environment, colored with humorous pieces, that brings the message home in a focused and confrontational way. The works are there to challenge, to be discussed and to open the debates that these ideas bring to the fore.

What was your most recent big thing?
I currently have a splendid show in a beautiful Park in the South of Switzerland. I also participated at a major event in Switzerland in 2009 where I showed a couple of life-size pieces called "in between" and "Gaia". I have also shown works in Germany, Israel and the USA.

Doris Buehler, in between, 2009, Lifesize, Acrystal Prima, Size of Glass 1m x 2m high

What do you find challenging about your work?
To set a goal of where I want to be with my art in 10 years from now. Since my art encompasses so many different materials and styles it is hard to decide with which I should precede. In the studio I find that the biggest challenges are to find the right materials and reliable suppliers, organising shipping, and organising other people to deliver on time and against promises! Finding time to do my PR, maintain my website, design invitations and plan events is also a challenge, there never seems enough hours in the day. I must get to do that project management workshop!

What do you find rewarding?
The paycheque is nice but much more rewarding is the joy to create, to develop an idea with the right material to attain the utmost expression of what is on my mind. Also I find it rewarding to catch people’s interest and make them curious.

What’s on the horizon for you?
Currently I have two private commissions in the pipeline that will keep me busy until the fall. I have been asked to show a big piece in New Orleans. I am however most excited to put aside some spare time to create a new body of work, a lot of which has been in the drawer for a while, and show it towards the end of the year.

Doris Buehler
http://www.dorisbuehler.li

*A special monument in the Forum Romanum, indicating the symbolic centre of the empire: the "Navel of the City of Rome" and representing the Mundus - a gate to the underworld. It was opened three times each year, and these days were particularly nefasti (fateful) as the evil spirits of the underworld could escape and interact with the living!

Carrara, 2

2011-08-29T11:11:00.006-04:00

by Quentin McCaffrey, MFA 2011

I decided that it would be best to arrive in Italy prepared to start carving immediately. I have been developing a series of simple beeswax heads that hang off the wall. It seemed fitting to make a plaster cast of one of these pieces that I had already become very familiar with, and then attempt to recreate it in stone. I hypothesized that learning the process of transferring the design in three dimensions would simultaneously allow me to see how a different material might shift the content of the work. It also seemed plain to me that the design would not carry perfectly into the new material but would become its own work distinct from the preliminary piece.

Although I much of my recent work has utilized wax, I really don't see myself as “the wax guy” as much as a materially sensitive artist. I would love to make shows based on the medium of the work. A show in bronze, clay, fabric, glass, resin, stone, wax, wood, etc. I really believe that the material is part of the language of the work, particularly in three dimensions, even though it needs to subject itself to the content and form and not become a novelty or a crutch. This is proved clearly by the Rodin sculptures that are glorious in cast bronze but fail when attempted in marble. The artist's hand is removed; the work is not the same or even good. The sculpture is somewhere else, maybe it stayed in the 20 minute sketch, but it never swelled into life when it met the firm solidity of stone. This was a situation I wanted to avoid. Doing the work myself, opposed to hiring an artisan to do all of it was a step in the right direction, but did not ensure success.

After arriving in Italy and enjoying a week gorging on Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Bernini and other sweet and savory treats in Rome, I rode the train north and slightly west along the intoxicating coast to Carrara-Avenza where Steve Shaheen, one of my sponsors and the sculptor who would be teaching me about stone, graciously picked me up, despite being 3 hours late (perhaps by Italian standards this was par for the course). From the first moment it was clear that Carrara was the optimal location for carving stone. The mountains, peering down on the towns cradled between their foothills and the turquoise sea, are full of marble. The quarries clamor up the mountainsides with zig-zag access roads and even burrow into the depths of the mountains, excavating the rocks in cool darkness. Along the coast area, cranes and hangar-like buildings appoint the numerous workshops where artists and artisans, devoted to the creamy marble and the forms that may emerge from it, toil in powdery dust.

I was to work in one such bottega for the next two weeks. Studio Corsanini, complete with its patriarch Luigi (freely doling out his acquired wisdom both in stone work and general life, and doubling as head-chef who prepared glorious lunches for all), Zen-master/Sculptor/Age-defier Itto Kuetani, and a colorful selection of hard working house artisans, was a brilliant place to see a wide variety of working methods and ideas in action in the realm of marble carving.

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Joan Benefiel & Jeremy Leichman

2011-08-19T10:35:00.000-04:00

The Academy is pleased to share a new ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT series on our blog to showcase what our graduates are doing. Here, Joan Benefiel & Jeremy Leichman, MFA 2007.

St. Ignatius Commission

What are you currently working on?

Jeremy Leichman and I met at the Academy and are both sculptors. We have our own sculpture studio business together, Figuration LLC. We're currently working on finishing up the bronze castings of a pair of our life-size bronze sculptures of St. Ignatius to be installed in October, commissioned by Fairfield University.

What was your most recent big thing?

We have a beautiful installation - the Fashion District Pilings Project - still on view through August 29th on Broadway between 36th-41st Streets on the pedestrian plazas of the NYC Fashion District. Our sculptures were even in The Wall Street Journal's Photos of the Week: July 11-15 (photo 9/20)!

What do you find challenging about your work?

It seems like there is no clear path to making a career out of this sculpture thing. You have to make it part of your practice to always be looking for the next job if you really want to make a living out of doing what you love and not be distracted by other things. And we've decided that this is the most important thing and the only way to truly do it full time, all the time.

What’s on the horizon for you?

I've been developing the river version of the installation in the Fashion District - the Hudson River Pilings Project - since 2009. The installation at Pier 42 in the Hudson River Park will be made of much larger scale versions of our sculptures on Broadway. Jeremy and I are also looking to expand our studio to a larger space soon, so that's very exciting!

Read an interview from Flavorpill with Joan Benefiel about the Hudson River Pilings Project

Joan Benefiel

figurationstudio.com
hudsonriverpilingsproject.com

Notes on Quentin McCaffrey’s Residency in Carrara

2011-08-17T12:44:00.006-04:00

by Stephen Shaheen, MFA 2005

Shaheen and McCaffrey in Italy

Over the decade since I finished my training as a sculptor in Italy, I have gone back as much as life permits. Part of my annual recharge in the bel paese has involved teaching. While completing my MFA at the New York Academy of Art, I was surprised by the number of colleagues who passionately studied the Western artistic tradition—heavily rooted in Italian history and culture—without having experienced the country firsthand. In 2005 I brought John Jacobsmeyer and a small group of painters and sculptors to the Senese countryside. The intent was to give participants the same intensive coupling of artistic practice and direct exposure to masterpieces which had informed my own experience.

Since then, I have brought several groups in various configurations. Even running workshops on a shoestring budget, I know that it is always a challenge for artists to afford travel in Europe—especially with today’s weak dollar. It has always been my goal to offer the experience to someone at no cost. That opportunity came this year, in the form of a joint scholarship with Ippolita Rostagno, whose generously covered the significant travel expenses. Growing up in Florence and undergoing rigorous artistic training that helped form her as the prodigious three-dimensional artist and designer who now runs an extremely successful business in her name, Ippolita did not hesitate to collaborate on this grant. Her smart and daring creativity is only matched by her unfaltering support of the arts.

Ippolita and I put the recipient’s selection in the hands of the Academy, and they delivered. Quentin McCaffrey arrived in Carrara not only prepared with a model of what he wanted to carve, but with a suitcase of inquisitiveness and diligence that surpassed his actual luggage. It is a rare pleasure to instruct someone so attentive, deliberate, and confident enough in his abilities to risk, yet receptive to new and challenging approaches. Quentin took on the dual contest of not only translating a conceptual model into stone, but simultaneously enlarging it 150%. This is unheard of for a first project in such a technically demanding medium. Arriving at the point where he was modeling the facial features, Quentin surpassed even my own tall expectations for what was possible in two short weeks interrupted by trips to Florence, Siena, and the cavernous quarries high above Carrara.

As the program coordinator and teacher, I can simply qualify his residency in Carrara as an astonishing success.

www.stephenshaheen.com

Carrara

2011-08-17T12:24:00.003-04:00

by Quentin McCaffrey, MFA 2011

In the weeks after the dizzying and malnourished/sleepless whirlwind that is the ascension towards the ever-exciting TriBeCa Ball, one by one e-mails revealing those students selected for the abundance of scholarships, residencies and fellowships trickle down from the committees and faculty meetings in the sky and all students hope to read their name as they anxiously scan the awaited lists. When the queue of those selected for the bulk of the residencies was released, smart phones blazed and thumbs quickly pulled down the lines of text.

Quietly, in between the longer lists of students going to Giverny, the St. Barth hopefuls and those given a summer studio in New York, there was a single name attached to an unanticipated residency: Carrara Residency: Quentin McCaffrey. “That's my name.” I thought (feeling like a ballerina picked to play the lead in the handsome but strict instructor's magnum opus), “What is the Carrara Residency?”

I scanned back through my memory and pieced together the snippets of information that might clue me in to the experience before me: Carrara. Italy. Marble. Stone. Stone carving in Italy. Liz Lemon's signature line from the popular NBC show 30 Rock came to the forefront of my mind, “I want to go to there.”

I had done a small amount of work in stone before and basically remember it being really...well...hard. Maybe that goes without saying with rocks, but after having worked in relatively soft materials for the last 3 years (clay and wax) I was a bit nervous. I really wanted to learn about the processes and the qualities of the material, but I also wanted to come away with a piece of art that I would be proud to show. I learned that I would have about two weeks to work in Carrara, and I earnestly hoped to make the most of the time that I would have around the people who made a living working with this material, fluidly shaping it with yet-to-be-discovered tools.

Quentin McCaffrey, Bushman, 2011, beeswax, paraffin wax, plaster, steel,
h: 8.5 x w: 6 x d: 7 in / h: 21.6 x w: 15.2 x d: 17.8 cm

Get Real

2011-08-03T02:19:00.000-04:00

Eric Fischl, a Senior Critic at the Academy, recommends this article. Eric is a Trustee and long-time champion of the school, and was recently honored at last year's annual Take Home a Nude. Eric's paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints have been the subject of numerous international solo and major group exhibitions as well as publications. He is the founder, president and lead curator behind America: Now and Here. Thanks for the recommendation, Eric!

Get Real: Can painting the world as it is go stale?
by Roger White

I appreciate a really good painting of a nude, some fruit, a judge, or a bridge, just as anybody does. I follow portrait competitions with enthusiasm and marvel at the inhuman discipline required to paint the creases in someone’s khakis in oil on canvas with a double-0 sable brush in an age when we don’t even print out our photographs anymore. Yet I must not be alone in my tendency to keep this interest private, because realist painting is grossly underrepresented in art criticism.

Josh Sonsini's Byron, 2009. Oil on canvas, 72x60 in.

Courtesy Robert Wedemeyer

How can this be? Although in the past 15 years we’ve seen an incredible resurgence in figurative painting — from the genre games of archstylists like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Kurt Kauper, to the Pop-inflected Expressionism of Dana Schutz and Jules de Balincourt, to the sociopolitical photo-painting of Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas — realism per se is still outside of, or perhaps beneath, the discussion of painting in most contemporary-art spheres. When Currin paints a Thanksgiving turkey, we don’t imagine that he’s addressing the same perceptual issues that occupy Philip Pearlstein, no matter how convincingly he renders the plucked, naked carcass. Realism in painting is permissible, provided it serves as the bedrock for more complicated pursuits.

This idea — that the problems of observation and representation occupy a lowly place on the scale of artistic concerns — has much to do with the structure of art education. Most training in the visual arts, regardless of whether the students end up earnest still-life painters or jet-setting curators, begins in the same place: drawing and painting from life. So as they progress through the ranks, trading foundational work for more ambitious projects, charcoal for digital video, this basic engagement with looking and making can remind them uncomfortably of their awkward school days. And in a classic ontogeny-phylogeny mix-up, they mistake their personal progress from basic drawing to critical issues with an evolutionary progression from the naïveté of empiricism to the sophistication of second-order critical reflections.

Gillian Carnegie's Thirteen, 2006. Oil on board.
29 1/2 x 23 in. Courtesy Gillian Carnegie and Andrea Rosen,
New York, and Cabinet Gallery, London

It doesn’t help that proponents of pure realism — painting from life and meaning it, without any of this postmodern guff — sometimes praise the practice only to bash contemporary art over the head with its virtues. Realism is humble, accessible, rigorous, humanist, they might say, while the rest of contemporary art is self-aggrandizing, obscurantist, flaccid, and soulless. James Panero, writing in The New Criterion in praise of the "classical realism" espoused by the New York artist and teacher Jacob Collins, positions the movement as a bastion of quality within "the ruinous state of contemporary art." Donald Kuspit, whose insightful readings of underknown painters like David Bierk and Robert Schwartz do much to further humanist art criticism, often descends to jeremiads on the weightlessness of most contemporary-art production coupled with ardent defenses of hard-to-like artists like kitschmeister Odd Nerdrum. Advocating for realist painting as a vital component of contemporary painting can feel like crossing into a parallel dimension of art history in which the rise of postmodernism is a tragedy of the first order but, paradoxically, one not only can but should paint like Thomas Eakins. Artists who work in the style but wish to participate in a broader cultural conversation face an identity crisis: How do they signal that they are realist painters but also contemporary artists? More important: Why should this distinction exist in the first place?

Ellen Altfest's Penis, 2006. Oil on canvas,
11x12 in. Courtesy Cary Whittier and

Ellen Altfest/White Cube, London

Lately we’ve seen some interesting attempts to fuse this most traditional of painterly ideas — looking at something and making a picture of it — with the critical concerns of contemporary art. In John Sonsini’s portraits of young Latino day laborers, the financial transaction between painter and model takes on an added political significance. Gillian Carnegie’s deadpan academic paintings of flowers, trees, and nudes exhibit such a degree of self-consciousness that they come off more like abstractions. Ellen Altfest brings a painstaking objectivity to loaded subjects, rendering penises, pumpkins, and tree trunks with the same aggressive yet detached attention. For these artists victory lies in making sure that the very different possible meanings of their works maintain a productive relationship, conceptual freight neither overshadowing nor disappearing beneath formal concerns.

Catherine Murphy's Hand Mirror, 2008. Oil/canvas, 46x54 1/2 in.

Courtesy Catherine Murphy and Knoedler & Company, New York

If we take a half step back, it becomes clear that realism in postwar American painting has always kept up this relationship with the avant-garde, waging similar critical battles within a different arena. Two artists in particular, Catherine Murphy and Rackstraw Downes, are exemplary of the productive marginality of observational painting. Both came of age in the 1960s, broke with abstract painting early on, and have been steadfastly pursuing practices that don’t quite make sense within the discussion of "pure" realist painting but also fall just outside the comfort zone of many contemporary-art participants.

Murphy has become the preeminent American painter of the close-up, scrutinizing an ever-growing catalogue of domestic objects and situations with a fierce and exacting eye. Pictures from her 2008 exhibition at Knoedler & Company gallery, in New York, depict Christmas lights framing a window at night, four cutout magazine pages pinned to a wall, a woman lying under a striped comforter, and a golden crucifix hanging between a woman’s breasts. In each case, the image is at once instantly recognizable and unexpectedly bizarre, as if the artist had first exhaustively imagined and then excluded every conventional way of depicting the scene and then proceeded with what was left. A series of small paintings executed in 2009 and 2010 show every knothole in the upstate New York house shared by Murphy and her husband, the sculptor Harry Roseman. One can easily imagine such a documentary project, with its dryly Conceptualist tone, resulting in a suite of photographs; realizing it through observational painting is an unexpected achievement.

In the way that the pioneering American observational painter Fairfield Porter viewed his surroundings through the work of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Murphy organizes paintings of everyday life within the resonant structures of postwar abstract art. Ad Reinhart-esque crosses, Jackson Pollock-like tangles, and Barnett Newman-ian zips abound, concretized as window frames, garden hoses, and the space between two sheets hung out to dry. But beyond this simply morphological relationship to nonobjective artworks, Murphy’s pictures suggest that even the most faithful representations can engender moments of abstract vision, when things "lose their names," as she puts it, and we glimpse the world afresh.

Catherine Murphy's Moiré Chair, 1991. Oil on canvas, 40 x 46 in.

Courtesy Catherine Murphy and Knoedler & Company, New York

For Murphy, the return to figuration in American art in the early 1960s was a reaction as much to the first rumblings of that decade’s revolutionary atmosphere as to the hegemony of abstract painting in the art world. So when artists began kicking around the idea that observational painting — by then as passé as Picasso — could be a viable alternative to abstraction, she felt that more was at stake than just one manner versus another. "I was idealistic. I believed I could achieve universal objectivity," she says, noting that the desire to achieve a styleless mode of representational painting — as methodically freed of art-historical preconceptions as abstract art had been under Clement Greenberg’s instruction — had an egalitarian intent. Realism could communicate the most advanced ideas of vanguard art in an idiom that reached more people than did high modernism’s sometimes hermetic discourse.

But first some housecleaning was necessary. Observational realism adopted the starkly reductive, ascetic mood of post-painterly abstraction and the phenomenological concerns of Minimalist sculpture. The result was a way of neatly registering the experience of sight and space while emptying the artwork of the hidebound humanist conventions of the style. Philip Pearlstein’s cold nudes, in which, the artist says in a 1972 statement, the human figure is "saved from its tormented agonized condition given it by Expressionistic artists," play out the formal dramas of abstract painting using academic life models as actors and the studio as a set. Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s interiors reduce the everyday sphere to geometric arrangements of planes and reflections stripped of any vestige of intimist charm.

Painting meticulously and only from life imposes on the artist a set of exacting conditions that precludes many possibilities. If you have to be there to paint something and it takes you a long time to paint it, then that thing has to sit still and not change very much over time. Murphy has gone to great and sometimes perverse lengths to finish paintings: freezing food items in between painting sessions over the course of months, propping up fallen trees with pulley systems, commissioning taxidermied wildlife. Elements of the close at hand also have to stand in for the faraway, and the meaning of an artwork must be generated from precisely this quotidian stuff. In the years since the stripped-down, formalist revival of figuration in the 1960s, Murphy has embraced a more full-bodied idea of content precisely through her adherence to the dictates of patient observation. As much as her paintings are concerned with breaking down the everyday into its abstract components, they also reassemble this world into ad hoc symbolic arrangements. "Hand Mirror," 2008, casts a stuffed bird reflected in the titular mirror, which is resting in someone’s lap, as the Holy Ghost in an oddly intimate Annunciation. Explaining the relationship between such heavy iconography and the apparent naturalism of her painterly universe, the artist says, "I would never set out to paint an Annunciation." However, what happens between the impulse to observe something without prejudice and the reemergence of the symbolic forms through which we process our world is precisely the phenomenon that Murphy explores.

Rackstraw Downes's Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The Bike Path, No. 1,
2009. Oil on canvas, 19 x 65 1/2 in.

Courtesy Rackstraw Downes and Betty Cunningham Gallery, New York

If Catherine Murphy is the painter of the macro lens, her close contemporary Rackstraw Downes is undoubtedly dedicated to the fish-eye. His signature works are extreme horizontal-format depictions of unlovely industrial sites in which traditional perspective is bent to replicate the painter’s constantly shifting sight lines. Downes participated in the same revival of figuration as did Murphy, jumping abruptly in the mid 1960s from geometric abstraction, pursued under the tutelage of Al Held, into a realist practice. Although his paintings present a landscape of unquestionable, solid physicality, the abstract undergirding of planes and lines is easy to see.

Like Murphy, Downes paints from life, never from a photograph. He sometimes documents the day-to-day struggles of his practice in journals. At a recent exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, in Connecticut, viewers could take in a cycle of paintings made under the West Side Highway in Manhattan along with the artist’s writings and a legion of preparatory drawings. Together these elements reveal the temporality of Downes’s work. The paintings show scenes of apparently seamless unity and coherence: Shadows fall crisply across fields of patchy grass, logical lighting conditions obtain across the long expanse of the canvas, and the ephemeral elements of the landscape — the parked cars, puddles of waste water, folded lengths of temporary construction fencing, even the occasional bicyclist or jogger — exist in a state of arrested flux. Yet Downes’s process is cumulative. He captures an image of a moment through months or years of arduous, repetitive construction. An excerpt from his journal cited in the exhibition catalogue details the days spent waiting for a red Mini Cooper to return to the scene so he could finish painting it.

Although Downes’s images bear a superficial resemblance to the congested photorealist cityscapes of Richard Estes, the two artists’ work couldn’t tell more divergent stories about our relationship to landscape. Estes’ scenes are built around and for the viewer, and the world is transformed into a play of reflections and vantage points. In contrast, Downes seems to choose a place from which to observe precisely because it’s unlikely that anyone would choose to stand there for a minute, much less for the months required to complete a painting. It is no coincidence that the sites Downes often portrays — waste-treatment plants, water-monitoring stations, the understructures of bridges — have to do with the unseen support systems for human habitation rather than the manicured environments in which we go about the business of our lives.

John Dubrow's World Trade Center, View of Manhattan, 1996. Oil on canvas, 90 x 96 in.

Courtesy John Dubrow and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York

Despite its sprawling, usually maligned pluralism, contemporary art is unified by its preoccupation with the emerging over the established, with new forms, new ways of being in the world. Because of this impulse, contemporary art gravitates toward the most salient emblems and loci of rapid change. In the West these have lately been found in the area of technology: the delirious possibilities of digital reproduction and distribution, the teeming multiverse of Internet life, the involutions of media culture. All this is to say that with respect to the drive to be contemporary, the realist painter can seem as ill equipped to participate in the discussion as a lyric poet at a programmers convention. What’s more, trends in contemporary art emerge, peak, and fall out of fashion, art stars are minted and discarded, in less time than it takes to finish a single laborious painting. There’s nothing less like watching the latest Pixar film, or rethinking immaterial labor while socially networking, than looking at realist art.

The strength of realist art is that, as all ambitious art used to do, it calls us out of our habits and asks us to entertain a different set of rules or ask a different set of questions, for art and for living. In this case, the counterfactual situation we’re being asked to imagine is nothing more or less than the experience of everyday life minus the signature experiences of the zeitgeist that contemporary art tries to reflect. Should realist painting then have a larger role in contemporary art? Well, why does it need one?

White, Roger, "Get Real." ARTINFO. February 12, 2011. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36967/get-real/?page=1, Copyright © 2011, Louise Blouin Media. All rights reserved.

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 6

2011-07-25T13:19:00.001-04:00

Continued from the last post:

The artists I met up with in New York are waiting tables teaching, un-employed, spending wee hours trying to get that last detail in before calling it a day. They’re showing work, and have formed a community in the city with a support system similar to what I experienced in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I find myself with a 9-5 making money and not living paycheck to paycheck, but man is the art suffering. Art is becoming that wife that is ignored and cheated on right now. I can explain it urban terms…I got a chick that makes me feel good but when I’m with her I’m broke cuz I’m always spending money and time on her…I got this other chick that when I’m with her she takes care of me and pays my bills. I feel better with the chick that makes me broke cuz emotionally that’s a real female, but I can’t support her like I want to….feel me? I constantly asked myself while driving back to the Sleepy Hollow town of Providence, “It’s nice to pay the bills on time and not live from check to check, but is it worth it if the art suffers in the process?” I can no longer spend 30 hours in the studio in any given week. I have to eat away at it a hour or two a day as long as my arm can properly hold the brush. Is this new experience of holding down an all day job delaying the gratification of the art making process of yester-academia-year?

To be continued…

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception

2011-07-22T12:06:00.003-04:00

A Review by Jon Beer, MFA 2012

Alÿs, Untitled from When Faith Moves Mountains

During the off-season of the Chelsea galleries in New York, art lovers from all parts come to the lineup of summer exhibitions at the big museums. This line up for this summer is nothing to scoff at – the Met boasts a Richard Serra Drawing Retrospective and Alexander McQueen exhibition that have museum-goers queuing up, while MoMA shows off Graphic Impulse, an impressive show of German Expressionism that has been a big hit. The hype from Graphic Impulse may have taken attention away from another gem currently on view there, an exhibition entitled Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception. (Museum of Modern Art, May 8 – August 1, 2011.) Alÿs is an internationally known artist and this two part show is a massive survey of his most important work made in the last two decades. I wasn’t as familiar with Francis Alÿs as I would’ve liked to be before the show, but after reading numerous reviews and seeing MoMA ads all over I was convinced to add it to my list of shows to be seen.

The title of the show couldn’t be more appropriate. Alÿs’s work is indeed deceptive, presenting itself with the aura of being serious and relevant in a deadpan fashion but leaving you with a measure of skepticism about its sincerity. It is a puzzling yet provocative experience of artistic semantics that not unlike an essay by Jean Baudrillard.

Alÿs, Cuentos Patrióticos

Hailing from Belgium originally, Alÿs came to Mexico City in the 80’s as an architect seeking work after 1985 earthquake. His choice to reside in Mexico clearly left an impression on him as a young artist and ideas of crisis, provocation, satire, and social constructs create the foundation he builds on. This survey is a mixture of drawings, small paintings, short films and projection installations done mostly after 1990. The first thing that caught my eye was his process – though he was trained as an architect Alÿs, thinks more like a conceptual video artist originally trained as an illustrator. All the preparatory work removed the magic of the content, never allowing the viewer to fully be swept up, but on the other hand it highlights the fundamentally constructed nature of our society. That said, there is no denying the elegance in some of his finished pieces.

Still from Alÿs' When Faith Moves Mountains

One such example is When Faith Moves Mountains, one of the central pieces in the show. It is a film documenting a performance in which Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers to move an enormous sand dune in the Peruvian desert by shoveling in unison. In the same breath he succeeds in showing us the futility and existential meaninglessness that accompanies grand undertakings while tempering it with the authentic determination of the volunteers realizing his vision. He underscores this theme in another piece where he pushes a block of ice through the hot streets of Mexico City until it is reduced into an ice cube. It seems we will never truly know his agenda.

Still from Alÿs' Re-enactments

In another film he carries a handgun through the streets of Mexico City, until he is eventually arrested. As you continue to watch, Alÿs repeats - or rather reenacts - the piece but with approval of the authorities. Is Alÿs selling out or is flaunting his role as artist? We are deceived again.

I suppose that on the deepest level his work could be about irony. Or maybe he’s trying to make fun of irony in a serious satirical way. He separates himself from other artists working with similar themes by not looking for Truth outright, but rather embodying the archetype of the Fool and exposing the world for what it is.

Pattern, Color, Texture - Observing the History

2011-07-21T13:52:00.001-04:00

The Academy sends four students to enjoy a two-month residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in the historic Spinnerei in Leipzig. Holly Ann Sailors, Aleah Chapin, Nicolas Holiber and Alexander Barton blog with us while they're on residency in Germany.

By Holly Ann Sailors (MFA 2012)

Its 3:50 am. I am thinking about painting. The birds are beginning to chirp, and the brilliant sun is peeking over the edges of gutters scaffolding, and bricks. I lay here, watching the warm violet light turn to cobalt blue. The sky gracefully transitions into a warm yellow stream of light exposing the texture of the giant oil stains on the 15-foot ceiling of my studio. The dark rich sienna abstraction converses with my artwork, layers of soot reminiscent of a landscape.

Oil Stained Ceiling

Metallic Chipping in Leipzig

German artist Gerhard Richter said that “Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”

Leipzig Canal Decomposition

Artistic Expression and remnants of Political destruction exist simultaneously here. Walls have been painted in a failed attempt to cover graffiti. Paintings are growing and curling their way out of concrete walls. Close examination exposes the cracks and layers of the human hand. The streets show a physical manifestation of political and artistic turmoil. Years of creative oppression and frustration can be seen in the doors, walls, and decomposed structures.

Even the incredulous viewer can be convinced by the history of this place by looking at the falling buildings. Vacant lots, wide streets, and vast expanses of empty buildings make the town feel heavy. The rusted iron fences are twisted in shapes that vibrate to your eyes. Metallic paint peeling, vines twisting, paint cracking, colors, lines, textures, and patterns have overlaid the towns.

Grafitti and Gum, Berlin Wall

From concert posters, to back alley graffiti, there is a visual synthesis. High contrast patterns, textures, and words live hand in hand with looming architecture. Layers of gum and graffiti cover the small section that’s left of the Berlin wall. The people have moved forward, covering the past with color and reiterating a new day. Whether a visitor like myself can fully understand or not, the rust, dust, and street art speak to the history and keep me inspired. The sun sets in a vast array of oranges and purples, bouncing off the broken windows of a factory. There is a sense of hope and aspiration. The underlying progression of this place has fueled energy for my painting. I am learning more and more about my personal history, my environment, and how it translates through in a brushstroke.

Rusted

A Colorful Roommate

2011-07-12T17:17:00.001-04:00

By Aleah Chapin (MFA 2012)

"Isn't it difficult to live in the same room with someone else for two months? There's no privacy!" This is the first thing most visitors say when they see the two small beds pushed against the back wall in the live/work space that I share with Holly. First of all, at least two NYC apartments could fit into this room and second, Holly and I get along quite well. As it turns out, the difficult roommate is also the very reason we are here: art. In every relationship there comes a point where you take the next step and move in together. This is where we are now; we are living with our canvases. There are some amazing things about it though. We can paint all night and then just walk a few steps and crash into bed. No need for the 45 minute commute home at midnight on a rattling and often very delayed L train. But it also has its difficulties. When you are around something 24 hours a day you start to become blind to it, no matter how much you love it or hate it. You start to question and over analyze every brush stroke and compositional decision, swinging back and forth on the very idea of what actually makes a good painting. This is when we pry the brushes from our hands and go explore Leipzig. But that big canvas covered in paint is a steady companion and is always there for us when we come home.

After about five weeks of intensive painting, squeezing every last drop of creative energy from my body, I think I'm finding something. I'm starting to see the connections in my work and I'm becoming clearer on the kind of art I want to make. I still have numerous doubts and questions, but being so close to the things I make for an extended period of time is clarifying where I want to go with my art. I may not be making anything worthwhile, but I'm realizing the most important part of this residency isn't creating perfect paintings, but the experience of delving so deeply into my work and coming out with a better understanding and trust in myself as an artist.

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 5

2011-07-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

Continued from the last post:

I visited the Academy and gave a talk about my experiences since graduating and that day was one of bitter sweetness. Finally the Academy has engaged an alumnus to come back and give a different tale. The journey-man’s tale that gets lost in the instant success stories that consist of fellows, and Chelsea shows. After the talk I met up with the people I spent 90% of two years of my life with, and it was too emotional. I left a show that evening because I couldn’t quite make sense of all that was going on in my body at the time. How does a kid from the projects, built Ford-tough, become soft jelly in such a trivial reunion? We shared experiences and left each other with smiles, half hugs, and a “see you later” wink. I also saw the artist who I admired the most at the Academy while getting on the train; Panni Malekzadeh. The day ended when I visited my favorite person of the Academy experience, Amber Sena. The day ended perfectly seeing her and Peter Mühlhäußer, another Academy artist, and the life of two married artists surviving after the Academy. The 3 hour drive home made me reflect on what kind of artist am I going to be in the future? Africa validated my being as an artist. New York asked me what kind of artist are you going to be? Married to another artist? Married to someone void of the art world? Single and surviving? Teaching and journeying through or the next great thing since Andy Warhol?

To be continued…

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Shin-Young An

2011-07-01T11:48:00.001-04:00

The Academy is pleased to share a new ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT series on our blog, to showcase what our graduates are doing. Here, Shin-Young An, MFA 2001.

What are you currently working on?

Joining Candles for Light, 24x24"
Oil on Prepared Newspaper, Mounted on Canvas

I am working on my Limbs series of paintings mostly as a full time artist. The main theme of my recent work is exploring the unfortunate reality of our present world. While reading the newspaper, articles began affecting me to the point that I realize I am a somewhat powerless artist and I wanted this to be reflected in my work. It has given me the opportunity to respond to social, political and environmental issues. I depict these reactions through the visual interaction of limbs and portraits painted against a backdrop of current news articles that have touched me.

What was your most recent big thing?
I received 2011 State Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship Grant and my new paintings have been participating in Art Fairs almost every month by the gallery that represents me, Patrajadas Contemporary Art. The next art fair I will be participating in is ArtHamptons July 7 - 19, 2011.

What do you find challenging about your work?
Juxtaposing ordinary, routine tasks against a backdrop of current news articles.

Shin-Young An at her exhibition at the Bergen PAC, NJ

What do you find rewarding?
When I receive viewers' reactions and responses through exhibitions where my work is shown, and I enjoy networking.

What’s on the horizon for you?
I am an ordinary person as an artist who faces the unfortunate reality of life and remains unconcerned with life. I think both are the greatest social evils in our present time. We can be aware of the coexistence of both disturbance and peace through my artwork.I’m not sure what I can do for the future in order to reduce feelings, of guilt, but I am sure that I learned a lot through my recent work process. Honesty is the key to new and creative artwork. Without self-reflection, I can not be a better artist. Without introspection of our selves, our society can not be better. I have a new series of work in my mind with the global issues for a positive impact on the future. I hope I have more time and passion to start it soon.

Shin-Young
www.an-shinyoung.weebly.com

Eating my Still Life: The Last Meal

2011-06-28T13:33:00.002-04:00

The Academy sends four students to enjoy a two-month residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in the historic Spinnerei in Leipzig during the summer. Holly Ann Sailors, Aleah Chapin, Nicolas Holiber and Alexander Barton blog with us while they're on residency in Germany.

By Nicolas Holiber (MFA 2012)

When I first starting working with animal flesh, in Catherine Howe’s Comp & Design II class, we had to write a thesis about the body of work we intended to make that semester. My ideas about working with butchered animal parts centered around my love for food; specifically the communal experience of a shared meal, and the metaphysical symbolism of eating meat. Research led to me to Sue Coe’s book, Dead Meat, in which Alexander Cockburn gives an introduction on “A Short Meat-Oriented History of the World from Eden to Mattole”. In his writing Mr. Cockburn describes eating as “a moral act inextricably bound to killing” and provides a philosophical understanding of meat-eating (told by his friend, Michael), which together made up the backbone of my thesis:

“Bullocks I'd slaughter after about two years. I don't lie to my animals. I tell them the only way I know, using English, that I'm going to slaughter them. I give them as much love and care as I can. Then, when they're slaughtered they will be part of my body, part of your body. You do the same in your garden.”

A big part of my thesis was also devoted to making a meal out of my still life, large enough to feed a group of people and conceptually what that meant in my work. However, that brought on a handful of obstacles concerning meat preservation and studio practice, leaving me with a frozen, half-rotten pair of lamb legs at the end of the semester. It was only until I traveled to Leipzig that my thesis came to full realization: painting, cooking, and eating my still life together with other artists and friends. Another resident here at LIA, Italian artist Lucia Lamberti had the idea of making pasta fagioli with the hocks I had bought. I couldn’t explain to her how excited and happy I was that she had this idea and before I knew it she was slow-cooking the pork and salting the water for pasta. It was an amazing feeling, having my idea come to fruition and the only way I could thank Lucia was by eating myself into a food coma.

Four hours on the stove...

... a Masterpiece!

During the spring semester I created six large-scale, mixed media paintings; meatscapes. It was my plan to continue with these meatscapes in Leipzig however, after many failed attempts at making the same imagery something was just not working. I spent the majority of the month frustrated about not being able to continue with this type of work; it was hard for me to end a series and process of art making that was so fulfilling for me, but I was forcing it since I arrived here. In hindsight, that meal should have been the conclusion for the meatscapes and in a way it was – nothing I made after that operated coherently.

Now, a day after returning from an extended stay in Berlin where I was able to see national collections and special exhibitions, I am completely refreshed. Revisiting the figure in combination with the animal-flesh-vocabulary I have developed over the year, I plan on making a new body of work that will lead into my Master Thesis.

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 4

2011-06-22T15:15:00.000-04:00

Continued from the last post:

Delayed gratification. This concept I find applies to a lot of the random happenings of ones life. I’m starting to realize that in a painting patience really pays off. I, the school trained artist, was built to create a painting in a week to turn in and talk about the following day. The same twenty minute breath used to describe a slide of a painting created before my time was awarded to paintings of my academic experience with the same care. I would think to myself, “Wow we spent twenty minutes talking about something I put together the night before, and I didn’t even think about it.” Bullshit. Today I find the painting process is slowing down drastically. Proper technique and color relationships to convey the message an artist wants to present to the viewer drastically slows down the process these days. I think before showing other people work, and in the event it doesn’t look like care and great thought went into the painting I pass it off as just a sketch. In the paintings I try to do now each stroke has to have a story or a part of the story. I think of it as writing a paper where each stroke is a line from the text so that if one were to isolate each brush stroke and put them next to each other to form a page they would be able to read my unique story. This delayed reaction will one day be helpful in marriage. As a man I am beginning to understand that many women enjoy the Eric experience when I have a “delayed reaction.” I have begun this mode of talking myself through a painting before I start painting. It cuts down the frustration. I will admit I haven’t been able to paint nearly as much as I would like to. There aren’t enough hours in the day. The children and young adults I teach during the day need to be fed education. I need to sleep. Women need to be smiled at and told day-changing comments such as “love those shoes” and “you have the most paint-able face; here’s my card, I’m an artist.” How do I balance this life? I haven’t. I have neither rhyme nor reason to the madness of trying to be an artist and hold a 9-5 job. I am not ashamed to admit this in hopes that someone will one day sit next to me, gently stroke my turpenoid-stained hands and calmly whisper, “Me too.”

To be continued…

Eating My Still Life

2011-06-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

By Nicolas Holiber (MFA 2012)

Haben Sie Schweinefüße?

“Do you have pigs feet?” was the first complete German sentence I learned while arriving in Leipzig. A little odd I admit, this question was essential in getting my studio practice up and running again after a two-week hiatus since the end of school. Slow to adjust to my new surroundings, the first few days here at the Spinneri were spent gathering art materials, muttering broken-German descriptions of much needed supplies, sprechen sie englisch?, and overcoming jet lag. I quickly realized something about Leipzig; it is nothing like New York City. Here the pace of life is slower, people are very polite and mostly everything besides a few pubs closes around 9pm. So while I lamented over the convenience of New York (I should really say the spoils of NY), I took refuge in the thought that soon enough I would have a couple of fresh ham hocks to make everything better.

Haben Sie Schweinefüße?

Entering my first German butcher shop, or Fleischerei as they are called, was everything I imagined it to be. Cured sausages hanging from the ceiling; enough wieners and wursts to make you dizzy, salamis, pâtés, head cheeses, cold cuts behind the glass, bacon, ground beef, things I had never even seen before! But wait… I looked around in a panic, where were the trotters?! Wasn’t this supposed to be the land of meat? I thought I’d be swimming in pig the moment I stepped inside. “Haben Sie Schweinefüße?” The kind woman behind the counter looked at me with an unassuming stare, “Nein.” Confused, I stepped outside, got back on my bike and went searching for another Fleischerei. I walked into the second store ignoring all of the alizarin eye candy hanging from the walls and went straight to the glass. Pork chop, pork shoulder, pork belly… no hoofs in sight. I asked in vain, Haben Sie Schweinefüße? And again I was denied. I left that place in a daze, wandering on my bicycle in an ungulate-deprived stupor, all hope nearly lost.

Haben Sie Schweinefüße?

I saw the third shop from across the street, a quiet corner store establishment with the specials written in chalk by the door. I decided to make this my final attempt and sauntered inside. The store was empty, I heard someone shuffling about in the back and before I could realize what I was looking at my hands were all over the glass, practically on my knees in euphoric relief. I had finally found what I was looking for, in a butcher shop not 10 minutes from my studio: access to all the hog feet I could ever want. Then I heard a voice, “Kann ich Ihnen helfen?” I smiled, “Haben Sie Schweinefüße?”

the Love of my life..

Soaking up the Studio

2011-06-21T21:43:00.007-04:00

By Aleah Chapin (MFA 2012)

In 2005 I stood at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA staring at a canvas by David Schnell. I remember feeling as if I could step one foot forward into the vast expanse of line, color and space. Now, 6 years later I'm sitting in a spacious industrial room with tall ceilings and large windows on the 3rd floor of an enormous brick building in Leipzig, Germany, where David Schnell has his studio. This room will be my home and studio for the next 7 weeks.

I'm one of 4 very lucky Academy students who will be spending the summer at LIA, an international artist residency. The program is located at the Spinnerei, an old cotton mill that has been converted into a thriving artist community with incredible live/work studios, galleries, a theater, cafe and an amazing art store. Leipzig is a beautiful city. Slightly crumbling at the edges, it is full of parks, lakes and gorgeous architecture.

There is so much history here and yet it has a feeling of freshness and infinite opportunity. Over the last week we've explored the city on wobbly bicycles, set up our studios, and excitedly, if also slightly nervously, confronted white canvases. Sometimes life throws you places you would never have imagined being in. I'm finding it fascinating to be exposed to such a different art scene than what I'm used to in NYC and I'm eager to see what I can learn from a style so different from mine. It's impossible not to be inspired in Leipzig and I'm looking forward to soaking up every bit of this incredible experience.

Grit and Mortar

2011-06-21T21:28:00.000-04:00

By Alexander Barton (MFA 2012)

Nic, Aleah, Holly and Alex in front of the Spinnerei

Acres of rescued brick mills at the Spinnerei supports a fertile artistic community and has informed the success of this cultural collective. Complete with artist ateliers, an art store, galleries, bars, a cafe, businesses, a theatre, resident artists, and from bikes to Porsches, the Spinnerei is a self-sufficient artistic epicenter. This niche of Leipzig thrives on and is influenced by its historical relics and charm. Stone, brick, tracks, broken windows, graffiti, and rubble is coupled with humble renovations to make for an inspiring artistic terrain. Like rings on a tree you can count back the years by the layers of chipped paint in our studios. What is the appeal of this grit to artists? It seems for me absurd to even create work in a clean, plastic, or naïve environment, one who embodies not history, weight, and failure and therefore, potential. Sacrificing comforts for creative faculties, I have been living in mills like these since 2002 and have been evicted three times. The buildings, this tactile character and this evidence of life harmonizes with my purpose. Like that of New York, the rugged physical architecture we climb and dwell in fuels our practices. The scars in the floors and stains to the ceiling offer a great dialogue to creative minds. In the courtyard of the Spinnerei, a massive clock on building #21 has stopped at 10:10. The ghosts of the Spinnerei answer back our efforts in tact. We create with interests of progression, potential and production, however; I hope this stopped clock keeps my time and the Spinnerei’s energy preserved at this 10:10 stage forever.

Bleib dir treu Leipzig!

Aleah

Alex

Holly

Nic

Plan, Work, Wonder - Spinning Memories

2011-06-21T21:12:00.002-04:00

By Holly Ann Sailors (MFA 2012)

Cliffside Cotton Mill, North Carolina

Four thousand five hundred and six miles away from Leipzig Germany there sits a sister town. A town that understands what it means to feel empty, abandoned, and overworked. This place once existed as a busting Mill town. Now the community looks back, nostalgic about the days of cotton spinning. I was raised in a Cotton Mill town in Cliffside North Carolina; and this place becomes reminiscent of home. Falling bricks, peeling paint, cracked cement, tufts of grass. Roots and earth pushing its way through cumbersome stone that once represented the livelihood of a town. I sit in a studio, a heavy expanse of brick, steel, and cement that contains my painting supplies and me. This place once filled hardworking Mill employees. I sit in this studio; brush in hand wondering “Does my labor of love compare to the unrelenting work of the cotton spinners? Am I filling a void in Leipzig?”

Loading cotton, Spinnerei, Leipzig Germany

During the 19th century, global demand for cotton had risen dramatically. Leipzig Germany and Cliffside North Carolina were busy spinning their way into the Second World War, clothing and employing communities with cotton, and putting food on tables across town. Generations pass, and times of war and cotton commerce soon fade. Towns sit, barely clinging to the economic culture they once had, moving forward to new ways of life.

Spinnerei workers, Leipzig Germany

The Century-old Cliffside Cotton mill closed its doors in 2003, leaving many of my own family members unemployed. In 1993 the Leipzig Spinnerei was sold. An age has ended. This giant Cotton Mill in Germany has been transformed and now exists as a Mecca of creative productivity for local and international artists. I have the pleasure of gracing this incredible space. Images of women toiling over their work linger in my mind as I push wet pigment onto cotton canvas. My studio fills with the passion and dedication of the past and present people who have called the Spinnerei home.

I shall plan and work and wonder,
When the days grow dark and somber,
As I slowly trudge the upgrade of the hills;
Oh, the good day that is coming,
I shall look so sweet and stunning

- Excerpt from Ida Watkins poem about her Cotton Mill Work; 1926

Crossing Borders With Cool Bags

2011-06-13T18:20:00.011-04:00

A Review by Michael Kagan, Jason Bereswill and Jane LaFarge Hamill (MFA 2005)

inside the Japanese Pavilion,

"TABAIMO: teleco-soup" by Artist Tabaimo

Day 3: Crossing Borders with Cool Bags

Our feet are sore, but the excitement hasn't worn off. The pebbled paths of the Giardini are still packed with the art crowd and the line for Mike Nelson's installation at the UK Pavilion is still 2 hours long. Thank god they're giving out free coffee.

Michael and Gordon outside the Serbian Pavilion

Part of the experience of attending the Biennale Previews is feeling the energy of the whole art world focused and hopeful in one beautiful place. The giant leafy trees in the Giardini hang over buildings as varied in design as the nations they represent and the work they house. Parading through the pebble paths; artists, dealers, collectors, press, and fans alike kick up dust from one installation to the next; socializing and debating as they go.

It's apparent after we visited the remainder of the pavilions that it's unavoidable to remove national politicals from ones' experience here. Simply by separating each country into their own pavilion, it sets up a microcosm of international borders. The only country that outstepped its' boundaries was the US; the obnoxious sound of Allora and Calzadilla's clanking military tank reaching far across the Giardini. Interesting comment. The strongest work in the context of the Biennale seems to be that which balances an expression of the individual artist and represention of their nation's culture.

The tote bags that each country gives out with their press packages are worn like flags. Each one is different in design and material and the most coveted bag was Turkey's. Jane lied, stole, and cheated her way into getting us all a couple. See Turkey's yellow tote and the UAE's below.

"swag"

Following the political theme of the day, we also ran into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - or should I say his bodyguards; who were big, and shut down every path in sight until he moved at least two pavilions away. (We thought the VIP might be Abramovich, who parked his mega yacht equipped with an escape sub right outside the entrance to the Giardini.)

Netanyahu's brigade parade

Besides the official Biennale events there are a few other shows going on around town. After leaving the Giardini for the day we headed into San Marco and ran into Julian Schnabel making a correction to the text of a gigantic painting/billboard in his purple pj's and red vans. This huge outdoor piece is a marker for a terrific survey of his work showing at the Museo Correr just inside the square.

Ciao for now -
Jane, Jason, and Michael

Schnabel

The Giardini Pavilions

2011-06-09T14:22:00.007-04:00

A Review by Jason Bereswill, Jane LaFarge Hamill and Michael Kagan (MFA 2005)

Lee Yonbaek

Day 2: The Giardini Pavilions

One of today's favorites was the visual decadence of the Korean Pavilion. The scale of the objects and vibrance of color were seductively polished, but subversively violent - shattering mirrors, flowered neon army fatigues, and one of the only representational paintings we saw- a giant photo-real painting of florescent fishing lures.

Outside the American Pavilion was perhaps the grandest perfromance of the year. Wearing Nike issued Olympic gear and a shirt emblazoned with 'USA', decathlete and superstar Olympic gold-medalist Dan O'Brien ran on a treadmill fixed on top of an upside down huuuge military tank. His movements powered the tread of the capsized war machine, and the mechanics were jarringly loud- overpowering the auditory space of the surrounding pavilions- demanding attention like a beacon. People came flocking.

Inside the pavilion the action continued with performances by US Olympic gymnasts and an installation of a working ATM connected to a church organ blasting random notes as you enter your PIN. Jane took out some of that holy money and onlookers covered their ears as her pin code piped the organ at a deafening pitch.

Hajnal Németh

The Hungarian Pavilion made an impact on everyone in our group. Hajnal Németh's installation 'Crash' is a study of car accidents in three parts. Most notably, a full-room experience engulfed in red light in which the viewer feels as though they've entered one of Warhol's red Crash paintings, complete with a wrecked automobile front and center. Also included are testimonies from accident survivors re-enacted by opera singers.

Gelatin, and the inspired Austrian

We went back to see Gelatin of course, and the kiln had heated up considerably from yesterday. The performance now included an inspired naked young Austrian man who brought a new meaning to the word "tree hugger"... his mouth spewed red wine as his tongue caressed one end of a log, while his torso pumped up and down making sweet/rough love to the other. We really hope he didn't get any splinters.

Kagan ran into a fabulously decked out Stacey Engman at the
Dasha Zhukova party at the Bauer and got hungry... for her hat.

We also can't fail to mention that our nightly bedtime was usually 4:30am, every night a different country, art magazine, and fashion house hosting parties. It was hard to keep track of it all and each other- cue joke about Kagan.

More to come, ciao from Venezia!
Jane, Michael, and Jason

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Julio Stanly Flores

2011-06-08T18:45:00.003-04:00

The Academy is pleased to share a new ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT series on our blog. We'll be spotlighting our alums to give you an idea about what it's like to be an Academy grad. Here, Julio Stanly Flores, MFA 2009.

Julio Stanly Flores, Red Buck

What are you currently working on?

I am working on a series of paintings that depict animals/humans and the potential for violence and destruction. The series at the moment is essentially life size studies of taxidermy animals.

I also started a Furniture restoration and home décor business in Bucks County, PA. During the spring semester I was the assistant Anatomy instructor for John Horn at New York Academy of Art, while also working as a ghost painter for an Artist in NY.

What was your most recent big thing?
Having figured out a new direction for my work is currently the biggest and most important thing for me.

What do you find challenging about your work?
Finding sources to paint from.

What do you find rewarding about what you do?
It's rewarding that somehow despite having multiple jobs I have found a way to keep art and painting integrated into my daily life. Having a dedicated studio in the house allows me to run in when I’m in the mood and having found the perfect balance to be in the mood has been paramount. I also have various jobs that satisfy every one of my needs I get to paint, design, build, teach, and illustrate.

Julio in his studio with studio-mate Kaiser

What’s on the horizon for you?

Now I'm working on setting up an organization in Guatemala with the purpose of bringing awareness to Autism through art and education, Central America has a serious problem with Autism due to a lack of information and unfortunately some atrocities are occurring to children.

Julio Stanly Flores MFA

jsfloresart.com

The Venice Biennale Previews

2011-06-07T13:39:00.023-04:00

A Review by Jane LaFarge Hamill, Jason Bereswill and Michael Kagan (MFA 2005)

Day 1: The Venice Biennale Previews

The Biennale is split into 3 different areas: the Arsenale, the Giardini, and some pavilions dispersed throughout the city. Today we went to the Arsenale. Much of the work at the Arsenale was installation-based or sculptural, interspersed with sporadic paintings, drawings and photography. It was difficult at times to understand where one work ended and the next began. But one standout highlight was certainly the art collective Gelatin, whose show took over a part of the garden with Brooklyn band Japanther. While a cross-dressed scruffy man with amazing thighs danced on a stripper pole on top of a pile of split wood, other members of the collective melted glass in a kiln and spread the molten liquid on the ground while serving prosecco to the crowd, garden party style. It was a nice break from the more serious and political considerations inside the pavilions.

And it was interesting that while tote bags with the slogan 'Free Ai Wei Wei' were being distributed outside the Biennale's gates, the Chinese Pavilion mere meters away was business as usual (our friend Gordon Austin, an NYAA supporter and traveling companion, added that it was "stinky business at that"), showing small traditional Chinese pots in a dank boiler room.

Kagan & Tuyman

Showing at the Giardini, artist Luc Tuymans took a picture with Michael Kagan...or was it the other way around... Jason Bereswill followed Thomas Demand around for a while... and we also spotted Rob Pruitt, Jonothan Horowitz, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Mike and Doug Starn, Tony Shafrazi, and Thomas Hirschorn checking out the exhibits.

Below are some photos of Urs Fischer's fantastic giant wax candle sculptures and a video clip from Christian Marclay's The Clock.

Arrivaderla,
Jane, Jason, and Michael

Urs Fischer

From Venice, with...

2011-05-31T22:50:00.006-04:00

A Review by Jane LaFarge Hamill, Michael Kagan and Jason Bereswill (MFA 2005)
(I'm typing on my phone standing on a bridge over a small canal where I've found decent wifi. Who knew?)

Italy speaks fluently in art and food, both to be consumed at risk of catching Stendhal's syndrome. And so, my trip this week to Venice is inspired 75% by the opening of the 54th Biennale and 25% by antipasti, primi piatti, pasta, secondi, and dolce.

"Just an intro to Venice, really."

I'm traveling with fellow alums Jason Bereswill and Michael Kagan and we will all be sending in reviews and photos for NYAA from the pavilions.

This year's Biennale is curated by Bice Curiger- art historian and co-founder of Parkett magazine, on the theme and titled ILLUMination. (word of the day: coruscating) There are 82 international artists showing from 89 nations, 32 of whom are under the age if 35. Countries of interest participating for the first time this year are Bahrain, Haiti, and Saudi Arabia. Artists I'm looking forward to seeing are Pipilotti Rist, the American pick; Puerto Rican based duo Allora and Calzadilla; and the big hitter Urs Fischer.

Venice was formed by exiles, pushed off the mainland by Huns and Goths in the 5th c. It has always been an open city, a haven, built on mud and water. In many ways Venice has no roots. It is an apt stage for an international Biennale of art, with artists from around the world reclaiming the islands for a spell, so that a refugee parade of people like us can come to marvel.

This should yield a good blog post or two! But if all art fails, we'll post photos of gelato. Please check back!

With love from Venice,

Jane, Michael, and Jason

The Task of Presentation

2011-05-25T08:31:00.003-04:00

Jacob Hicks (2012) created this interactive video piece, "The Many Faces of Jacob and His Art," as a component of a professional practice course taught by artist Sharon Louden. This video project was optimized through an end-of-term presentation in which the students explained their art before an audience of peers. He says, "In undergraduate school I took many experimental film courses through the fine art department, and was itching to play with the medium. I had such a great time with the project that I am now considering how to use it as a mode of expression connected to my thesis project for the Academy."

Jacob Hicks, Deposition 9: After Gerard David, oil on canvas

Jacob explains more about his artwork and the video, "The Many Faces of Jacob and His Art":

My work is self-portraiture. I repaint compositions of canonical Western works of art with the addition of self-portraits playing the various characters of the original painting. I claim celebrated masterpieces as theatre space. One of the most professional aims an artist can have is to understand objectively the nature of their art. With this understanding comes direction and clarity. In making this video, I asked myself a few questions - why do I make what I make, how is this work seen through other's eyes, whose art (in the scope of the present and the historical) does mine converse with? This process has solidified my confidence in my art tremendously.

Thanks for letting me share this with you,
Jacob

http://jacobhicks.yolasite.com/

Benjamin Martins' Commencement Address

2011-05-24T13:39:00.002-04:00

Mister President, members of the Faculty, Board of Trustees, distinguished guests, and those rapidly approaching alumni status,

I cannot begin to explain to you how my heart swells to look out at you all, and to think about how much we’ve grown, and fought, and gotten weirder together – so very much weirder. It is with great pride that I regard my contemporaries and consider the many struggles through which we have shed the unnecessary, in the process of finding ourselves. Comparing our works previous to the academy through what hangs in Wilkinson Hall now; one can draw a clear line between our previous lives and who we are today, as though our Academy experiences have been less a reinvention and more a refining, a finishing of our more accomplished selves.

I am honored to be with you on this occasion that is so important to this school, and to this city, and to art. It is with great optimism and growing hope that I look to the future of our community, and of our relationships to each other. As alumni we are part of a community, a granite foundation upon which the greatness of this Academy rests. It is a service to this schools power that the finest artists working today enter its doors on a regular basis. It is to this service that we must attempt to overcome our biggest enemy, and the only thing holding us back.

We must not succumb to artistic jealousies and envies, for even as we prop ourselves up, they will tear us apart. No artist is in direct competition with another, just as another’s successes do not undermine my own. But infighting and whispered cruelty only reinforces the hold outside forces have on us, and divide our strong community into a thousand self interested enclaves. Hiding opportunities and coveting some small crumb of success only serves to weaken ourselves. Knocking each other down guarantees we will never live up to our fullest potential, I have no doubt. For I believe we will only make it if we make it together, and alone, we have no chance. As artists we must sail against the currents of our time; and the currents of our time are filled with sharks, make no mistake about that. Together we are more powerful than anyone can imagine – and they will never see us coming. Together we are a movement of talented and wildly ambitious artists. We all get our opportunities. We cannot continue to tear each other down and expect to survive. We are all capable of greatness, and it behooves us to reinforce that greatness whenever possible, not belittle or divide it.

A wise man once told me that when he was a young artist, the art world was described to him thusly – that if you come across several crabs at the beach and dump them in a bucket, there’s no need to cover it, for every time a crab moves to make it’s escape, another will reach up and drag it back down. We are better than this, and we can do better than this. People need us, whether or not they know it, and if we can stay strong, we will never back down.

I am so impossibly excited for the future, and I want you guys to know, no matter how things shook out, I wouldn’t change a thing. And I don’t think you would either. I love you guys. Goodnight.

Benjamin Martins was chosen to be the Student Speaker for his class. We wanted to share his inspiring words, as he empowered us all by urging to strengthen our ties to each other. Well said, Ben!

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Brian Fencl

2011-05-23T18:00:00.010-04:00

The Academy is pleased to share a new ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT series on our blog. We'll be spotlighting our alums to give you an idea about what it's like to be an Academy grad, starting with Brian Fencl, MFA 2000.

What are you currently working on?

Brian Fencl, "Oh, Thank Heaven"
oil on canvas, 24x18 in.

At the moment I live in two worlds. I am in the professor/ administrator world and the world of my studio. Both are satisfying worlds to be in and most of my answers will reflect this reality. In the studio I am in the beginning stages of creating work for the 2012 West Liberty University faculty show. We show every year and the theme for the next show is "meat." In my faculty/ administrative duties I am working on expanding our programs and creating a downtown arts center in the city of Wheeling, WV. The center has the possibility of revitalizing the downtown area and solidifying the Universities place as the cultural leader in the Ohio Valley. It is a big idea and I am thrilled that I get the opportunity to help make it a reality.

What was your most recent big thing?
I had a solo show at West Virginia State University in Charleston, WV last November. I also really enjoyed the the alumni show and gathering last fall at the Academy. That was a revitalizing experience.

What do you find challenging about your work?
In the studio it is remaining consistent. In New York and at the Academy it is easy to get valuable feedback about the the work while it is in process. I don't have that luxury here in West Virginia.

What do you find rewarding?
My job is basically to show people how to make art, talk about art history, and make art myself. That is what I do all day and I do it with people that are enthusiastic and eager to learn and grow. I am also now in position as a Department Chair to expand the role of the arts at the University and in the community I live in. From 2008 to 2010 I was the Visual Arts master teacher for the West Virginia Governor's School for the Arts. The WV GSA works with students entering their junior year of high school. They spend three weeks with us immersed in the arts.

Brian, in the studios at West Liberty

Last summer I was able to bring John Wellington (NYAA '90) out to work with the GSA students. He really connected with the kids, dramatically improved their skills and was a great ambassador for the Academy. It's pretty cool that I have the ability to guide young artists and work with great people like John.

What’s on the horizon for you?
2011 marks the 6th annual Paint Ogelbay: Plein Air weekend. It is an event I founded and have been organizing with a couple of local arts organizations. Last year we had fifty artists participate and we are hoping to be able to grow the event. West Virginia is a beautiful place and in the near future I would like to organize with the Academy an opportunity for students and alumni to come to West Virginia and do some plein air work.

I also want to give a shout out to the West Liberty University Art site. I am always looking to get the word out about what a great place it is and hopefully find new supporters, artists for the gallery and workshop proposals.

Brian Fencl
Interim Chair Department of Journalism, Communication Studies & Visual Arts
Associate Professor of Art, West Liberty University

Commencement 2011 with Jenny Saville

2011-05-20T14:15:00.006-04:00

We are thrilled to announce that this year's commencement speaker will be renowned artist Jenny Saville. A Senior Critic at the Academy since 2006, Jenny has frequently imparted her insight to our students through dynamic Master Classes. We are honored to award her an Honorary Doctorate at this year's Commencement Ceremony and we congratulate the Class of 2011 as they emerge into the contemporary art world.

We have recorded the Commencement Ceremony so you may listen to her speech!

Congratulations to the Class of 2011!

UNCHARTED: the 2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition

2011-05-11T11:21:00.004-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present UNCHARTED, a group exhibition featuring original paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints by sixty talented emerging artists.

Immersed for two years in an intensive learning environment that combines rigorous skills and conceptual training, these MFA candidates are using a time-honored artistic language from which they are creating innumerable distinct dialects. The 2011 graduates of the New York Academy of Art reveal that they are sixty individuals striding sure-footed onto an entirely contemporary landscape.

A catalog will be available, featuring an essay by renowned art critic and Academy Senior Critic Donald Kuspit. The title for the exhibition was suggested by MFA candidate Emily Adams. (Emily is also a guest-writer on this blog! Use the SEARCH bar, left, to see her other posts about her thesis artwork. RSVP to our event on the Academy's page on facebook.)

The exhibition is free and open daily from Noon – 7pm, (closed May 20)
May 17 - May 27, 2011
Opening: Monday, May 16, 6 - 8 PM
http://www.nyaa.edu/

Ken Johnson, Visiting Critic

2011-05-02T14:13:00.010-04:00

Current student Aliene de Souza Howell (2011) shares her thoughts on a recent critic's visit to the Academy. The Academy's Career Development Workshop lunchtime lecture series, created through Elvin Freytes, Sharon Louden and Peter Drake, brings writers, critics, gallerists, alumni, artists and teachers to speak with students and alumni about various aspects of career development.

On the threshold of his new book, Are You Experienced?, New York Times Art Critic Ken Johnson recently delivered a Career Development Workshop and critiques at the Academy. I was impressed with the often autobiographical lecture he wrought with personal reflections questioning himself as a captive of capitalism, about pressure from directors and the "schadenfreude" of the New York art scene among artists and critics alike.

Johnson's book - Are You Experienced?

He spoke of the complete intersection of art and money that throttles the New York City art scene. This led him, a former Jungian Marxist, to turn inwardly and ask questions regarding the nature of his role as a critic. But with an MFA from SUNY Albany and a BA from Brown, Johnson knew the need for a voice from the perspective of a trained artist amidst the advent of theorists that had cropped up in the 80’s. He articulated with candor on the tug-o-war of desire to stand strong as an independent and for recognition as a competitive player among the biggest voices.

When reflecting on art that moved him, he perhaps tugged most at the hearts of the Academy audience. Johnson spoke of authenticity and wanting to see the self-discovery of the artist and the tangible qualities of the hand made. As a reviewer, he said he believed in a complete act of art criticism that addressed history, sensory qualities and the concept behind the piece. Speaking like an artist on creating, Johnson said that when he’s writing he “loves that thing that happens when feelings turns into words, true to how I actually experienced something.”

Fleshing out ideas on concept, he brought up the dialectal nature between the metaphoric and the metonymic in art. In their extremes, they are irrelevant with the metaphoric losing touch with reality and the metonymic becoming didactic and obvious. Both still need each other to exist, though. His artistic preferences leaned toward the metaphoric. This may be the subject of his next book, "Ground Control to Major Tom".

Newest print! 36" square on mulberry paper.

Professionally, he offered this: do NOT cold call critics, for better or for worse the “consensual reality” between the galleries/museums and critics still holds true and is the established venue for picking artists to review. He pointed out that because studio visits and the selecting artists to show are the job of the gallerist, reviews tend to be directed not only at the artist but also to the institution who selected them.

From his critique of my work in my studio, I was inspired by our conversation on archetypes, symbology and the uncanny. He insightfully suggested pushing aspects of the subject matter in my linocuts.

And don’t forget to check out Ken Johnson’s recommended reading: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and his most recent reviews on Joan Semmel, Julia Jaquette, and Anthony Caro.

Why I Love Deadlines

2011-04-26T14:48:00.000-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to share a note by Hilary Harkness. Regularly posting her "Notes from Studio Lockdown," Hilary blogs with us as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York City, on Thursday, May 5, 5-7pm.

Dear friends,

As I prepare for my May 5th show (please come! the opening is 5-7pm at the Mary Boone Gallery in midtown, at 745 Fifth Ave.), I find that everything non-essential has dropped from my life. I have always built my life around convenience, trying to live within feet of subway stops. For years I lived within three blocks of the 1,2,3,L, F,M,A,C,E,B & D so I could waste less time. I work at home as close to the kitchen as possible to save on footsteps. I don’t care about clothes as long as I look ok, and will buy a generic wardrobe for a season in an hour at one store. I tell hairdressers to just make me look normal. My life has been designed to eliminate distraction.

I am currently finishing a painting of the last night of the Yamato, a Japanese battleship that went on a suicide mission in 1945. The painting began in my head five years ago while listening to a Dolly Parton song of all things. I researched exact battleship plans and drew out the interior on a thin piece of paper. You can see a hundred feet deep into the ship, and I have all the rooms to scale, receding into space. In this painting I wanted to speculate about the different things people might do when faced with certain doom. I knew where to dig for historical details, and how to make the painting make sense. I built a filing system to deal with my thousands of pieces of information. I looked over my past successes and failures at painting to pick approaches to materials that work. I covered the ferrules of my brushes with tape so reflected light wouldn’t disrupt my vision. I made mini-palettes out of plastic lids and taped them to my painting and taped folded bounty paper towel to myself to wipe my brushes on so I wouldn’t distract myself with movement. My goal was to be smart about the process so all my efforts would directly make the painting more pleasurable for the viewer.

taping brushes to reduce glare

The truth is, the past year and a half of work on this painting has been a disaster, as always. I drew the plans small, then changed the shape of panel so I had to tape extra pieces of paper to the drawing. There were so many perspective guidelines, I couldn’t see what I was doing and had to color things in with markers to visualize the space.

muse as avatar

I redrew it on a clean piece of paper to the size of my new panel, then wadded up the drawing and carried it around town in my handbag while fretting about conflicting themes. Want to annoy your friends – pull out a 42” drawing at dinner! Want to annoy your non-artist girlfriend - insist she tries painting so she can see how hard it is (she made it look easy)! I have maybe a hundred ideas for sea creatures to add to the flooding bowels of the ship, but the deadline is in a week so my subconscious will have to pick the best five. Despite my best attempts to stick to the appointed story line, my real themes about domesticity have dominated, completely subverting or even sabotaging the painting from within.

cat as avatar, atop the sketch

I was smart about how I started the painting, streamlining my life and methods. But with a week to go until the art shipper arrives, I’m finding out what’s important: whatever comes out. 90% of my effort has been with playing with things and pushing things around and now I can only trust in the process, that my subconscious has been primed and I can make something effortlessly. It’s as though I’ve practiced making the painting, so when I paint it, I already know what I’m doing and it feels effortless – but not really in my control.

So what do I love about deadlines? My friends who believe in me and send their love and support to me as I sit diligently watching my painting unfold. I don’t even have to explain to them how I feel because we all go through this. I can’t be the artist I would like to be, but maybe this experience is what I signed up for when I devoted my life to painting.

Yours very truly,
Hilary Harkness

Cornscapes

2011-04-22T07:55:00.029-04:00

Ode to Nebraska, oil on canvas, 48x60in.

by Emily Adams (MFA 2011)
It’s the end of the semester and we’re seeing our MFA Thesis projects through to completion. To close up the posts on my thesis process throughout second year here at the Academy, I thought I’d share several of my most recent paintings, along with some interesting work that has been brought to my attention over the course of the past couple months. Exploring American farmland, aerial view, has been like picking up a rock to discover a whole other world underneath. With one of the simplest of subjects—the grid—I’ve found all kinds of problems to try to solve over the months. A straight grid speaks to an entirely different history of painting than one shifted into perspective, color and atmosphere follow different sets of rules when investigated from 30,000 feet in the air, and the surface of the painting itself has become a more significant subject when the image is so pared down. Most importantly to me, the grid as farmland, too, lends additional elements of narrative and symbolic suggestion that only representational painting can bring. Who would have thought soybeans and corn could offer so many aesthetic possibilities?

Crops (Night Raid), oil and alkyd on panel, 18x36in.

Ode to Kansas, oil and alkyd on canvas, 48x60in.

Carpet design by Florian Pucher

In the past couple of months, friends have sent along various sightings of crops popping up in several corners of art and design worlds. I wasn’t really looking to be in dialogue with a carpet designer, but this just confirms my suspicion that the grid is slowly making its way into our visual culture as a new, dominating form of landscape.

Also, if anyone can help me, I am still trying to track down the artist who made this piece spotted hanging at a gallery on 23rd St.

William Steiger's Aerial Survey #2 at Margaret Thatcher Projects
[Identified- Thanks to John Jacobsmeyer]

As I look forward to developing my own work after graduation, I’ll be thinking a lot more about the concept of 'cultivation' particularly in the context of the early American botanical and cultural history that I am related to. Culture, the word itself, has its Latin roots in tilling and agriculture, so exploring the 'cultivation' of a society in a new landscape by juxtaposing variations in the traditions of landscape and flower painting (considering flowers moved with people across seas to be hybridized and seeded in so-called 'virgin' soil) seems to me a good place to dig for now. Here are a couple of interesting grandparents of the melded genres:

Giovanni DiPaolo, St. John the Baptist Goes
Into the Wilderness, tempera on poplar, 1454

Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues,
Young Daughter of the Picts, circa 1585

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 3

2011-04-20T19:13:00.000-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present the next installment in this new series on our blog. Eric Telfort, a 2009 graduate of the New York Academy of Art, blogs with us about “keeping the brushes wet.” Eric will be speaking at the Academy as part of the Career Development Workshops on April 21, 1-2pm. Current Students and Alumni welcome to attend! Follow us as Eric writes about what it’s like to be a working artist.

Continued from the last post:

As an AmeriCorps supervisor, I tend to the children of a small community in Providence, RI. I eat trail mix and delicately prepared buffalo chicken sandwiches for lunch. I arrive home at 6:30pm and am tranquilized by the msg dinner that I often prepare. I wake up at 3am and the system starts all over again. As grim as this may sound there is hope. I am coming to grips in understanding that art is the liquid that makes my heart pump. As much as I love the kids I work with, not being able to paint makes me feel nothing. Wine has no taste without the art to accompany it. I have made serious sacrifices in the last month to win the custody battle of my art from my other life; the one that pays my bills. Gone are facebook, and the romances of 2010. They shall be missed, especially the ladies. My only romance at this point is the brush and the canvas, and on occasion the sculptor’s clay and Breyers vanilla ice cream. I am working on continuing the series I began during my 2nd year at the Academy. I like to make paintings reinterpreting my artistic childhood as an adult. What I find many times is so much of society’s issues were present in my own childhood and now reside in my paintings. I was too naïve then to pay attention to them and rightfully so. I was 6, and being 6 is not easy when you have a backyard full of junk to battle invisible aliens with. Even as an adult, I am not able to see these common threads until the piece is near completion. It is now 6:30am and the shower calls. For the first time, the thoughts that go through my mind between 3am now have found their way onto digital format – this blog. Either way, going forward the message I hear in my mind every morning is “the brushes can not dry.” Time for work.

To be continued…

Show us YOUR Studio - MFA OPEN STUDIOS 2011

2011-04-16T00:37:00.008-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to invite you to our annual MFA Open Studio event on Friday, April 29th from 5-9pm. On the heels of Tribeca Ball 2011, five floors and over seventy studios will be open to the public and will present an amazing array of artwork.

We're so excited about our third annual Open Studios at the Academy that we want to share some studio love with everyone!

Show us YOUR Studio for a chance to win a free Academy t-shirt. Any and every studio will do! Email charis@nyaa.edu a picture of your studio, or upload a photo and tag it to the New York Academy of Art's wall on facebook.

Your studio shot will be entered in a raffle to win a free Academy t-shirt. We'll collect the photos in an album on facebook (tag yourself, too!) and then we'll email the winner and announce it during Open Studios on April 29th!

NYAA MFA Open Studios 2011 - FRIDAY APRIL 29, 5-9pm

111 Franklin Street (btw West Broadway & Church Street)

Free and Open to the Public

Studio Shots: Cori Beardsley, Ramona Bradley, Nadene Grey Speer

2011-04-15T21:42:00.001-04:00

Cori Beardsley (Sculpture, Class of 2011):

"Dance, hysteria, play and the love of form inspire my recent sculpture. I strive to express wild release and the polarities of joy and pain that are at that raw edge of emotion."

Ramona Bradley (Painting, Class of 2012):

"I paint what I want to paint. I don't usually understand it. It's more of a visceral feeling that drives me, you know from the gut, and sometimes it gets a little slimy."

Nadene Grey Speer (Painting, Class of 2012):

"As an artist my rustic upbringing comes through in my disposition towards raw canvas, stretched gut, embroidery, landscapes, suspicion of the slick, faith in natural beauty, desire for a diverse audience, and a need to show and see the artist's hand."

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet, part 2

2011-04-14T17:50:00.000-04:00

Continued from the last post:

I imagine myself painting and discovering new paths and hidden alleys to “the piece” - the piece we all are chasing as artist. This piece is the piece that tells the world that you have it and have nothing left to offer. I feel as an artist I will always be chasing the truth on a 2-D plane. Like Juan De Pareja before me my dream is to create a truth that is unequivocal. I wake up at 3am paralyzed in bed thinking of the day ahead of me. I peer to my left and see a painting demo from the academy completed a year ago. I observe the subtle shifts of value, and the blind confidence in the brush work. I turn to my right and I see papers. Lots of paper. Loads of paper. Paper that has nothing to do with shifting tone, or creating the illusion of a lily pad floating on water that one does when painting a highlight on the eye.

I blink and the sun addresses me with a cold hello telling me I have to be at work in an hours’ time. Life beyond the Academy is not the fantastical world one imagined it would be after graduating. I mean, in looking back the Academy reminds me of Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr painting. There were amazingly beautiful women everywhere, and I was floating in a sea of artistic enchantment, and, without the pressure to work for money, and given the opportunity to keep my brushes wet. Wet with paint, not turpenoid as they have been for the last couple of months and counting. Gone are the days of being able to spend a day on an idea or carefully studying a head. Time is money now a days and I have neither. I wake up and proceed to my job as an AmeriCorps supervisor.

To be continued…

Studio Shots: Ian Healy, Guno Park and Elena Rodz

2011-04-08T16:41:00.010-04:00

Ian Healy (Painting, Class of 2011):
"I try to find ways to express pain and anguish in multiple depictions, primarily through animal forms, as people react differently to animals then humans. I try to see what can really evoke feelings of pain and emotion in people. In my work that incorporates human forms, I find the themes tend to be more personal."

Guno Park (Drawing, Class of 2011):

"I'm exploring my cognitive architecture as landscapes. Recalling childhood dreams and places I used to live, I'm using scratch boards as a medium to revisit an old past time and to reveal whats occupying my mind currently."

Elena Rodz (Painting, Class of 2011):
"My paintings are depictions of pure id creatures - running around the forest getting eaten by animals and making love in the moonlight."

Eric Telfort: Keeping the Brushes Wet

2011-04-06T10:39:00.000-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present a new series on our blog. Eric Telfort, a 2009 graduate of the New York Academy of Art, blogs with us about “keeping the brushes wet.” Eric is currently located in Rhode Island, but was able to experience a residency in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2010. Follow us as Eric writes about what it’s like to be a “working artist.”

Wiggle the big toe. I spent a greater part of my winter vacation sidelined by a turf toe injury that left me ever so helpless. Was it an excuse to not paint? One would answer no. However for me it was different. Being able to dance after finding an unequivocal stroke that cannot be interrupted by another on a canvas is what makes the experience that more exciting. While many find the pleasure in finishing a piece, I find pleasure in the simple contact of a wet brush onto the surface of an unfinished piece. I can recall many a time where painting left me violently sexual wanting to create the most unimaginable pleasures to my ex-girlfriend. In those moments I had to walk away from the work and retreat to Call of Duty on my Playstation 3 to calm me down a bit. Finishing or completing the piece leaves me tired for the most part. There’s an overwhelming feeling of relief and hope when the toe decides to cooperate with my neural senses and inches towards me. I’m gaining my life back... well, sort of. It has been 6 months since I came back from Africa and I have yet to infect a canvas with my artistic thoughts. I have a job. A 9am to 6pm job that drains my energy slowly throughout the day and throughout the day all I think about is art.

To be continued…

Eric Fischl - AMERICA: NOW AND HERE

2011-04-01T14:27:00.004-04:00

The Academy is honored and thrilled to share the news about Senior Critic Eric Fischl's exciting exhibition:

From AmericaNowAndHere.org:

"America: Now and Here began when the artist Eric Fischl invited a group of friends and peers, all leading visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers, to submit a work of art reflecting their points of view and hopes for America.

Fischl established a not-for-profit to share America: Now and Here with communities across the country through programs, media and a traveling multi-disciplinary exhibition and event.

America: Now and Here is positioned to launch a national dialogue about America through art, to spark local activities and fuel imaginations, and generate innovation from coast to coast.

Through this national creative experience America: Now and Here positions art as a catalyst for bringing people together to discuss important issues and big ideas relevant to what we hold dear: America.

This movement offers an unprecedented opportunity to the American public to engage with art, poetry, film, plays and music by more than 150 of our country’s celebrated artists.

Promoting creativity and innovation as the foundation of our society, America: Now and Here will invite participation through a cross-country tour, website and social media, public programs and youth engagement, publications and Artist Response."
Find out more from The New York Times.

Studio Shots: Aleah Chapin, Holly Ann Sailors and Richie Fine

2011-04-01T14:17:00.026-04:00

Aleah Chapin (Painting, Class of 2012):

"In this new work I want to be real and honest about the imperfect beauty of the human form. I want elegance and ugliness to co-exist so that the viewer questions which is which and it becomes both and neither simultaneously."

Holly Ann Sailors (Painting, Class of 2012):

"I am obsessed with pattern and the human figure. Tender, yet slightly macabre,
my artwork is beautifully haunted. By using vintage photography I am evoking memories of the past and creating a conversation with the present viewer."

Richie Fine (Painting, Class of 2012):

"My work strives to reflect the ridiculous nature of reality and in doing so attempts to bring laughter into the life of the viewer! Hope Y'all like it!"

Do you have your tickets yet?

2011-03-29T21:42:00.006-04:00

Don't miss the most exciting art party in Tribeca and one of the best "see and be (in the) scene" events in New York!

The Tribeca Ball - a spectacular night of artmaking, artwatching and artcelebrating - is held on all six floors of the Academy and helps to provide students with scholarships, studio space and a program of varied and intense studies. It's a wonderful and exciting way to be a supporter of one of the most unique schools in the country and we'd love you to come!

Do you have your ticket yet?

Artists' Talk: Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong

2011-03-27T10:52:00.005-04:00

Monday, March 28, 2011, 6:00pm

Yu Hong, Colorful World, 1992, 70x71 in., oil on canvas

Join us for a very special visit from preeminent Chinese artists Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong. They will present a lecture on their work with curator and translator Michelle Loh.

The husband and wife pair both teach at the Central Academy in Beijing and have shown their individual artworks across the globe, with a recent solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery in New York (Liu Xiaodong) and Guangdong Museum of Art (Yu Hong). Liu Xiaodong’s work is in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Shanghai Art Museum, China and SF MoMA. Yu Hong’s work is in public collections including the Ludwig Gallery, Germany; the Dong Yu Art Museum, China and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

Liu Xiaodong, Hot Bed No. 1 (+4 others; set of 5), 102x393 in., oil on canvas

Michelle Loh is a New York-based art consultant who specializes in organizing art fairs and group exhibitions. Michelle advises individual and institutional collectors about contemporary Asian art. Her most recent projects include FOCUS SHANGHAI: Two Contemporary Chinese video Artists at Thomas Erben Gallery, and Trans-Realism: Contemporary Art from China at Christie's. She was part of the founding team of the Asian Contemporary Art Fair, New York, 2007 and 2008, and the co-publisher of Art Asia Pacific from 2003 to 2005.

All lectures are free and open to the public - we'd love to see you there!
Click here for a complete schedule of recent Lectures

The Armory Show

2011-03-23T12:05:00.002-04:00

A Review by Jon Beer, MFA 2012
The 2011 Armory Contemporary Fair was an exciting and stimulating event in the face of today’s often uncertain art world. As an undergrad in NYC I had the chance to visit a handful of the other art fairs during Armory Week, but this was my first time visiting the Armory Fair. I and several of NYAA students decided to see Scope and the Armory Fairs together. Upon arriving at Pier 92 we were blown away by the sheer magnitude of it all. To access the Contemporary section you walk through part of the Modern fair and then descend from the catwalk. Booths extend as far as the eye can see, gallery after gallery laid out in front of you, it is daunting and exhilarating in the same moment.

Tony Oursler, Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Visiting the Armory Fairs provides a taste of the Art World. It offers an insight into the machine that we are all a part of. For some of us the experience was a little frightening, being in the belly of the beast. Others were repulsed at the prospect of having to become a part of that reality.

Student Nic Holiber looking at work by
Marc Sijan, Cuadro Fine Art Gallery

Despite the overwhelming commercial vibe of the fair, the work itself definitely had a positive impact. I left the fair having seen some work by artists I’ve been following on my own, and the opportunity to speak to dealers about the artist’s process and studio practice was very exciting. Dressing the part of the collector allowed for some interactions that I otherwise would not have been privy too – and showed me that the art world is not as out of reach as it seems. The surprise on the dealer’s part when they found out that I was in fact an artist and not a potential collector was amusing.

The majority of the artwork was not mind blowing; it was similar to what we’ve been seeing the past few months in galleries, and based on the high level of publicity the show receives I think our group expected to see some extremely profound work. That said, some of the work on view clearly stood out of the crowd. The critic’s pick – Los Carpinteros – two Cuban artists who create objects and installations that comment on contemporary culture in a playful and often humorous way.

Mucho Caliente, 2010, Madera, metal. 213 x 128 x 28 cm.
Colección Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres

Contemporary painting was represented strongly by Irish and Scottish Galleries – particularly by the Irish gallery Mother’s Tankstation. Their booth was dominated by Mairead O'Heocha’s evocative landscape paintings of her daily experience in semi-rural Ireland.

Van and House, Bray, Co.Wicklow, 2009, Oil/board, 39 x 50 cms

All in all, the experience showed us that the harder we work, and the better our work is, we actually have a chance of ‘making it,’ if the Armory Fair is a measure of making it. With our eyes on the horizon, I think it is safe to say that the art world eagerly awaits an equally exciting fair in the coming year.
-
Jon Beer
Artist - http://www.jonathanbeer.com/
Director, Blind Artists Society

LIVE FROM THE STUDIOS: Mary Harju

2011-03-22T08:40:00.001-04:00

Join Mary in her studio when we broadcast

LIVE FROM THE STUDIOS at the New York Academy of Art.

Watch & Chat LIVE Tues. 3/22/11 at 1pm EST

http://www.nyaa.edu/nyaa/studentlife/livefromthestudios.html

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Mary Harju is a graduate of both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a BFA in painting. She has shown in galleries in and around Philadelphia and was featured in the Artists' House Emerging Artists Exhibition in 2008. Currently she is living in New York City and completing an MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art.

Tune in for a rare glimpse of the artwork Mary creates as a 2nd year painting major. Spread the word - it's a great way for any prospective student to get an "inside view" of the Academy!

* Tweet questions:
http://www.twitter.com/NYAcademyOfArt (@NYAcademyOfArt)
* Facebook comments:
http://www.facebook.com/NewYorkAcademyOfArt

Bakasana, oil on canvas, 2011

Professional Development Summer Workshop

2011-03-21T14:26:00.003-04:00

Sharon Louden & Academy Alums

A very good professional practice is essential for artists, especially during this current time of economic uncertainty. This 5-day program is designed to provide the tools you need to successfully navigate the art world marketplace. Professional Practices instructor Sharon Louden will help lay out strategies that will help you maximize both selling and showing opportunities. In addition, at least one guest speaker will visit each day to give a different voice and point of view. Those speakers include a gallery dealer, museum curator, grant writer, critic and others. This intensive course is a fantastic opportunity to participate in a high-energy environment where you and your peers will absorb tremendous amount of information. This workshop will build a community and increase your network while acquiring important professional habits that will enable you to step forward and further your career!

$600 = Current MFA Students and Alumni*
$675 = Current Continuing Education Students
$750 = All Others - this workshop is open to all artists.
- *As a special bonus, registered Alumni who are not yet members of the Alumni Association will receive a year-long membership in the AANYAA.

Please contact John Cichowski at 212 966 0300 x968 or johnc@nyaa.edu to reserve your spot now.

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: JUNE 1, 2011

Studio Shots: Aliene de Souza Howell, Mitchell Martinez, Sean Hyland

2011-03-18T15:31:00.000-04:00

Aliene de Souza Howell (Painting, Class of 2011):

"I'm exploring ideas of social constructs and how we've

chosen to define ourselves as humans. I'm using animals in my work

to highlight the herd mentality within us and bring an element of humor."

Mitchell Martinez (Painting, Class of 2012):

"I'm using a combination of painting and sculpture

to create a whimsical symbolic landscape of the universal mind."

Sean Hyland (Painting, class of 2012):

"I love to explore bright colors in a semi-surrealist environment.

My paintings tend to exist in their own world...not quite too far from this one."

Six Things You Should Know About the Color Green

2011-03-14T13:52:00.000-04:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to share a new note by Hilary Harkness. Regularly posting her "Notes from Studio Lockdown," Hilary blogs with us as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition in May at Mary Boone Gallery in New York City. Follow her on this blog for sneak peeks into her studio practice!

Dear friends,
Now is a good time to give your palette a thorough cleaning and freshen your color choices for springtime.

1. Green has more possible connotations and symbolic uses than any other color. Green means go, is the color of envy, and it stands for an environmental movement. Everyone knows that if you eat a green m&m it will make you horny. As a child during the cold-war 80’s, the wisdom in my schoolyard was that as the nuclear bombs come in– best way to go out was in a bathtub full of green jello.

One of my favorite artists, Cary Liebowitz a.k.a. Candy Ass, has given a new blush of meaning to the color green: not only is it the color of indigestion, it is the color of apology.

Cary Leibowitz

2. There are more than three ways to achieve the color green using paint. You can use a green pigment, you can mix it from blue and yellow, and you can also mix it using black and yellow. I like to juxtapose all three, as well as using color-proximity to imply that a yellow or a blue might in fact include a touch green.

Here is a riddle for students: when depicting a piece of yellow fabric, how do you keep the shadows from looking either greenish or a darker yellow? Please chime in!

A friend of mine recently was choosing a shade of green to paint her living room walls. She showed me nearly identical paint chips from different brands of paint, but the corresponding test-patches of colors on the walls were quite different. This is because of the endless ways green paint can be formulated. A more opaque pigment will make a deader color on the wall, but an uncomplicated mix of a dye color will make the room look so bright that you might wonder if martians have landed.

Ross Bleckner

3. There are more shades of green than any other color. The color that spans the least number of shades is the color red. Artist Ellen Altfest exploits the full potential of green in many of her paintings, as you can see in this nuanced image.

Ellen Altfest

4. A green painting is the most difficult to color-correct when reproduced photographically. It is important to carefully check that your digital image matches your real-life painting.

5. Green paintings are the least marketable. This is the word on the street. However, no art dealer I have spoken with will go on the record as having difficulty in selling anything.

Inka Essenhigh

6. Green is the most atmospheric of any color. This seems to fly in the face of the use of blue to connote distance in Renaissance paintings, but on a sunny day, when the sky is blue, the air outside seems the clearest to me visually. There just isn’t a lot of “air” to paint.

I remember the day when I was nine years old when a tornado ripped down the main street of my town, passing only three blocks from my house. As the air raid sirens were blasting a disaster alarm, I noticed my mother was missing from the shelter of our basement. I found her on the front porch, enjoying the spectacle. The air was a satanic green as the wind picked up.

Yours very truly,
Hilary Harkness

Studio Shots: Adam LaMothe, Nicholas Borelli, Angela Gram

2011-03-10T23:14:00.001-05:00

Adam LaMothe (Painting, Class of 2012):
"My current body of work explores embarrassment, vulnerability
and absurdity through a series of intimate portraits."

Nicholas Borelli (Painting, Class of 2012):
"In my current series I'm trying to channel Kafka and
Cronenberg to explore human/insect transformations."

Angela Gram (Painting, Class of 2012):
"My work addresses human decay and intends to challenge
this taboo through the aesthetics of nature."

Help this Gentle Lion find a Happy Home and WIN 2 Cocktail Tickets to Tribeca Ball!

2011-03-10T14:51:00.003-05:00

James de Pasquale, Lion, 1983, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 136 in.

Many years ago we inherited this gentle Lion. Though he is very quiet and doesn’t eat much, he’s a big guy and we know in our hearts that there is a happy home for him out there. Please help us place him a good home in a charitable organization, a children’s hospital or maybe a school. Cadogan Tate, our favorite transporters, will take him wherever he is set to go, whether it’s Kansas, Salt Lake City, Palm Springs or the Upper West Side.

So we invite you to participate in a contest
to find a place where he can bring joy to others, too.

Recipient MUST be a charitable organization, a children's hospital or a school (documentation must be provided) in the United States
Contestants must show proof of approval from the receiving institution and provide a contact name and info
The winning location will be chosen by the Academy and Cadogan Tate
Recipient organizations are asked to send photo of ultimate location – before and after installation
The winning contestant will receive 2 COCKTAIL TICKETS to the Academy’s upcoming Tribeca Ball on April 4, 2011

Contest to run March 1 – 31, 2011.

EMAIL ALL ENTRIES TO CONTEST@NYAA.EDU

Thank you and good luck!

Distinguish Yourself as an Artist by Painting from Life

2011-03-09T16:09:00.003-05:00

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to share a new note by artist Hilary Harkness. "Notes from Studio Lockdown" is Hilary's blog with us as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition in May at Mary Boone Gallery in New York City. Follow her on this blog for exclusive views of her studio practice!

Dear friends,

You might wonder why an artist like me, who paints imaginary scenarios, is a proponent of painting from life, but I do it quite regularly. I travel to significant locations to do preliminary studies from life to get a handle on how color behaves, I buy relevant props to paint to add touches of verite, and sometimes even ask my girlfriend to throw a right hook so I can depict a boxer convincingly.

On the other hand, I often make up color schemes that I use in a systematic fashion to make my scenarios seem real. For instance, I know blue light will create cool highlights and therefore the objects will cast warm shadows. I use the rule that highlights are sharper on shiny objects. I scour the works of Fragonard to try to guess at his color system. In addition, the journals of Eugene Delacroix are very useful because he described the exact pigments he used to create reflected light in the shadows of flesh.

Hopper

But here are three examples of why painting from life, at least at some point in your process, is unbeatable. In looking at the following paintings, let’s ask: Why is her face green?

Hopper, detail

A girl looks out from the shadows of her tenement window onto a bright snowy backyard scene. Looking closely, we see that her face has indeed been created using green paint. But in the context of the painting, it is obvious her face is not actually green. No color system in itself tells us why this use of green rings true. We can see from her rosy cheeks that her face is pinkish. If the local color of her face was yellow, then a reflected blue light from the snow could combine with that to make her appear greenish. Maybe the room she is in is green, but she is standing too close to the window for it to affect the appearance of her face. Perhaps the green skin is meant to make her cheeks seem an even more feverish bright red be contrast. The dullness of the green pigment (perhaps the earth color terre verte) makes her cheeks seem to actually radiate heat and light. It adds pathos: is this girl too sick to go out and play? Is she experiencing vicarious delight despite being at death’s door? The use of green in this girl’s face makes this painting transcend any illustration of a snowy scene, and I think this transcendence has sprung from years of observational painting.

Van Gogh

You would have to go to MoMA yourself to see that Vincent van Gogh uses green pigment in the flesh of his subject Joseph Roulin.Great painters don’t simply depict exactly what their eyes see like they are photographic machines; there is interplay between the artist and his subject, and the artist and his canvas.

Van Gogh has selected a limited palette and created a tight color envelope that allows certain greens to read as more neutral flesh-tones. In addition, the contrast of the even greener wallpaper behind Joseph Roulin pushes his face back toward a ruddy alcoholic complexion.

Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman has made many lovely paintings of scenes in nighttime beer gardens. She captures the conviviality of the moment, as well as the darker moments her characters could be experiencing. Eisenman is obviously a close observer of not only the unusual night-time lighting in this type of scene, but the varied emotions of the characters within them.

Yours very truly,
Hilary Harkness

Printmaxing!

2011-03-08T20:44:00.003-05:00

by Aliene De Souza Howell (MFA 2011)

I started printmaking again last semester after years away from it.

Since taking the Narrative Printmaking Seminar, I started creating relief linocuts inspired from poetry. This acted as a significant catalyst in freeing up the imagery in my work. I felt I could get away with anything because of the graphic quality of the black and white and the finality of carving that lent a certain austerity to the image.

I’ve just started using animals as a lens to look at ideas of social practice and how, as humans, we’ve chosen to cultivate ourselves. I’ve always responded to the impact of life size work where you could really enter into the image and have always worked large in my paintings, so I thought I’d push my printmaking and began to work on a 36” x 60” image.

Printmaking instructor John Jacobsmeyer, Yi Cao, Post-Graduate
Teaching Assistant Jan Pecarca and Aliene set the press.

Due to its monstrous size, I needed assistance printing it. The press bed was maxed out and we even had to re-adjust it (a risky feat) and send the block back through the press a second time in order to print the entirety of the image. It worked out and I’ve just begun my second large print!

Pulling it off the press - a first look...

The linocut, finished!

Don't miss the last Open House! March 19, 2011

2011-03-07T07:30:00.002-05:00

MFA OPEN HOUSE DATES

March 19th, 2011

**Attendees will have their application fee reduced from $80 to $60! Please click here to register.

The 2010-2011 Open House postcards feature recent graduate Tamiko Stump in the Academy printshop. (See post about the Academy's new Griffon Series I lithography press.) To request Open House postcards or electronic copies to distribute, please email admissions@nyaa.edu.

Facebook, Curator of Culture: Salon des Refusés

2011-02-28T13:21:00.035-05:00

EDITOR'S NOTE
After the Academy posted a response on this blog to facebook's removal of Steven Assael's artwork (Jan 31, 2011, 5:22pm), The New York Times, Gawker, MSNBC, The Cornell Daily Sun, The Register, ARTINFO, and other news sources have covered this story. Please see below for photos facebook has removed from the Academy and Academy Alum's accounts.

Where do you draw the line?

Steven Assael, "Simone" ink on paper.

Artwork image removed by facebook, 1/31/2011
from the Academy's "Uncovered" exhibition on facebook.

Alyssa Monks, (MFA 2001) "Press" oil on canvas, 2008.
Artwork image removed by facebook, 9/2010.
Alyssa's original facebook account was disabled.

Richard T. Scott (MFA 2007) "Hermetica" oil on canvas.
Artwork removed by facebook, 1/30/2011

John Wellington (MFA 1990) "Break Clean From the Past" oil on aluminum.
Artwork removed by facebook, 2/13/2011
(John has since posted "facebook-is-keeping-you-safe"
censored images on his facebook page.)

Judy Fox, "Venus" 2004. Filled Resin, Casien 67 x 21 x 17
Artwork removed by facebook, 2/22/2011
from the album of the Put Up or Shut Up exhibition
by outstanding faculty of prestigious MFA programs
in the greater NYC area. Also included in the exhibition
were artists Vito Acconci, Jesse Bransford, Maureen Connor,
Patricia Cronin, Vincent Desiderio, Julie Heffernan, Edgar Jerins,
Sharon Horvath, Keith Mayerson, and John Torreano.
________
NB: This image was removed from the Academy's facebook page
after this article was published in The New York Times.

Gary Schneider, "Young Man, 1908, 2008" pigmented ink
on paper, 52.5 x 38.5 in.
Artwork removed by facebook, 2/22/2011
from the album of the Put Up or Shut Up exhibition.
________
NB: This image was removed from the Academy's facebook page
after this article was published in The New York Times.

Patricia Cronin "Canto VI: Circle Three, The Gluttons"
watercolor on paper, 60 x 40 in.

Artwork removed by facebook, 3/1/2011

from the album of the Put Up or Shut Up exhibition.
________
NB: This image was removed from the Academy's facebook page

after the story was published in The New York Times
and also by many other news sources.

Artwork: Judy Fox, "Venus" 2004. Filled Resin, Casien 67 x 21 x 17
Article: The New York Times

Removed by facebook, 3/10/2011

from the Has Your Artwork Been Removed By Facebook? album.

This album has been created to track artworks that have been

removed from the Academy's page. The "offending" artworks appear

with text from articles posted by news sources reporting on

facebook's censorship of artwork on the Academy's page.

JUNE 13, 2011, 3 months later...

After three email messages of "photo removed" received today (in these instances, facebook does not tell you which photo has been removed, so now we're on the hunt for them...), facebook - in an unexpected turn - sent us this "Please Review" notice upon login:

"We've received one or more reports that content you posted violates Facebook policies.
We have not yet taken any action. If this content threatens or harasses anyone,
or contains nudity or excessive violence, please remove it immediately to avoid
your account being warned, blocked, or disabled.

If you don't think this content violates our policies, you don't need to do anything.
If you choose not to remove this content, please keep in mind that
Facebook may still take action on the content and your account."

Of course we don't think this content violates facebook's policies. The images that the New York Academy of Art (an internationally-respected graduate school teaching traditional skills and techniques in the service of vital contemporary art with an emphasis on the human figure) has posted are of student, faculty and alumni artwork. The Academy was founded by Andy Warhol, has been visited by President Clinton, and even enjoyed patronage conferred by HRH Prince of Wales.

Where facebook has become an entity that can affect real cultural ripples, as in the "toppling" of Hosni Mubarak, how does the perception of artwork weigh in? The question remains: how and who shall evaluate what - in a public forum - the public may see?

Art has always asked and responded to this question. If the name of the game is communication and the spread of ideas, should a social network use different criteria to evaluate (art) content than an art history book or a museum?

Well, folks, what do you think?

And on the same day, current student Aleah Chapin's facebook profile photo was removed as well.
She reposted it, as seen here.

August 12, 2011:
"The needs of many outweigh the needs of few..."

Artwork: John Jacobsmeyer, "Planet New Hampshire" 2007. Oil on Canvas 36 x 36 in.

Removed by facebook, 8/12/2011
John Jacobsmeyer was Chair of Faculty at the New York Academy of Art.

Studio Shots: Jon Beer, Jacob Hicks, Nicolas Holiber

2011-02-25T11:15:00.003-05:00

Jon Beer (Painting, class of 2012):

"My work is an exploration of memory and cognition;
I'm creating spaces and worlds where the past and present exist simultaneously.

Jacob Hicks (Painting, class of 2012):
"I'm focused on the meaning of my name - Jacob - which means 'to supplant.'
I supplant my visage and personal narrative into the continuously
reproduced mythologies of Western culture."

Nicolas Holiber (Painting, class of 2012)
is currently painting a series of meat still lives that are about
our relationship to the animals we eat. Says Nic, "Eating is a moral act inextricably
bound to killing, and the implications and contradictions that arise out of that situation."

Winter Fever

2011-02-15T20:39:00.190-05:00

A Review by Maria Kozak (MFA 2011)
A new year of art is upon us. Though it may have gotten off to a slow start; blame the blizzards, there are some exciting things on the horizon. So shovel yourself out of your winter doldrums and go see these shows.

Donald Judd

Pace has several formidable artists currently showing; Tara Donovan is already open in Chelsea. The show features Donovan's intricate drawings that are painstakingly rendered environments unto themselves. Donald Judd opens Thursday. Judd is arguably the the father of minimalist sculpture and is singlehandedly responsible for making Marfa, TX the art destination it is today. The show will focus on lesser known materials that Judd introduced into his work during the final decades of his life. Also look forward to Zhang Huan opening at the beginning of the March.

Also on Thursday night in Chelsea check out Academy alumni Jane La Farge Hamill, Caitlin Hurd, and Christian Johnson's take on the figure at their opening Aloft at J. Cacciola Gallery.

Hurd, Johnson and Hamill at J. Cacciola

Richard Butler

Richard Butler hypochondriacatthegramercyparkhotel opens Friday at Freight + Volume. The British artist/musician (Psychedelic Furs) paints hauntingly elegant portraits of coming of age youth with a minimalist palette and space reminiscent of Bacon. I am most seduced by the way he uses oil paint to depict surfaces like latex and bubble wrap when masking his subjects.

Robin Williams

Also in Chelsea go see Robin William's show The Rescue Party at P.P.O.W. William's work is a little Yuskavage, a little Currin, and a little early Micah Ganske. It is not to be missed by anyone interested in current figuration.

In museum news, there is a mid-career retrospective of George Condo's work that just opened at the New Museum. Condo's work constantly borrows from the historical cannon of western art as he subverts old and new masters.

George Condo

David Wojnarowicz

Finally, go see the Contemporary show at MoMA. There is a fantastic piece by everyone's favorite censored artist, David Wojnarowicz. The show is an investigation on provocative artwork discussing economics, gender and ethnicity since the late 60's.

Lecture: Jeanne Silverthorne

2011-02-14T21:24:00.003-05:00

Tuesday, February 15, 6:00pm

Jeanne Silverthorne, Nightshade, courtesy McKee Gallery

Jeanne Silverthorne is an artist who lives and works in New York. She is best known for sculptures cast in rubber, but her installations often include photographs, videos and kinetic elements as well. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Albright Knox Museum, among others, and her work is in the collections of those museums as well the Leum Samsung Museum, Korea, FINAC, Denver Museum, Weatherspoon Museum, Houston Museum, Sheldon Museum, the Contemporary Museum Honolulu, and the RISD Museum. She is represented by McKee Gallery in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. Reviews and articles about her work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News and Sculpture Magazine. A feature on her projects is scheduled to be published in a forthcoming issue of Sculpture Magazine. This year she has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Since 1993, she has taught at the School of Visual Arts and for seven years she was on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University

All lectures are free and open to the public.
Watch the blog for upcoming lectures including Donald Kuspit & Phoebe Hoban.
Click here for a complete schedule of SPRING 2011 Lectures

The NYAA Library has these resources available exclusively for NYAA students.
Electronic access to Academic OneFile and GALE (links only accessible in the NYAA campus):

Neff, Eileen. "Jeanne Silverthorne: Institute of Contemporary Art." Artforum International 35.2 (1996): 121+. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
Cotter, Holland. "ART IN REVIEW." New York Times 13 Aug. 1999. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
Glueck, Grace. "Jeanne Silverthorne." New York Times 12 May 2000: B34(N); E36(L). Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
Johnson, Ken. "Jeanne Silverthorne." New York Times 23 May 2003: E36. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
Frankel, David. "Jeanne Silverthorne: MCKEE GALLERY." Artforum International 47.1 (2008): 459. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
Frankel, David. "JEANNE SILVERTHORNE." Artforum International 38.5 (2000): 115. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Feb. 2011

LIVE FROM THE STUDIOS!

2011-02-14T12:09:00.005-05:00

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Join Guno in his studio when we broadcast
LIVE FROM THE STUDIOS at the New York Academy of Art.

Watch & Chat LIVE Tues. 2/15/11 at 1pm EST

http://www.nyaa.edu/nyaa/studentlife/livefromthestudios.html

Tune in for a rare glimpse of the artwork Guno creates as a 2nd year drawing major. Spread the word - it's a great way for any prospective student to get an "inside view" of the Academy!

* Tweet questions to Guno:
http://www.twitter.com/NYAcademyOfArt (@NYAcademyOfArt)
* Facebook comments to Guno:
http://www.facebook.com/NewYorkAcademyOfArt

Guno Park, Hemisphere, Scratchboard, 2011

Guno Park was born in Korea; he moved to Canada with his family at the age of 9 and lived there for 20 years before moving to New York. Guno has studied various methods of drawing; oriental calligraphy, industrial design, graphic design, classical animation, and fine art. Recently, he has been exploring the imagery behind his childhood dreams, cognitive architecture, and the hemispheres of the brain. Through these images, Guno hopes to find deeper and clearer answers to his biggest questions about life and art.

Fellows: John O'Reilly

2011-02-11T13:44:00.003-05:00

From Columbus, OH, O’Reilly received a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design. After a year of attending New York Academy of Art, he was awarded a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in 2009 and exhibited there. John's work has been in group shows at galleries including Danese's"Other as Animal," curated by April Gornik in Chelsea, New York City. O’Reilly’s work focuses on universal parallels. His work explores a wide range of issues from comparative vertebrate anatomy to sociology, psychology, genealogy and familial development. Through the manifestation of drawing and sculpture, his work asks the viewer questions of perception in how we as human beings relate to one another.

While you’re in the middle of your Fellowship year, what do you find challenging and satisfying?

As a student getting ready to graduate, I had a specific line of thought I wanted to develop. Using the beginning of my fellowship year to “look inward,” I’ve been able to develop that strain of thought and also to “look outward” by seeing galleries and museums and other artists’ studios. Now I want to digest it all, react visually, and see how it adds to my original intent. My work explores “breath.” The intake, the absorption, the release… the pulse is getting stronger the breaths are getting deeper.

There are now so many “shadows” of ideas that are lingering and morphing into my work, I want to make more projects to elaborate… but the studio space I occupy is filling up quickly and I wish I had more area to create more work. I don’t want to discard anything I’ve started, but I have to – due to my space and time limitations (the Fellows’ Exhibition is coming up in September 2011) – be more selective about which themes I pursue.

John in his studio at the Academy

It’s a constant continuation and evolution. The more things I do, the more they inform each other and reveal a dialogue with myself. I find satisfaction in letting my intuition take over in the process. It becomes meditative where everything slows down and I’m able to sift through ideas and discoveries that manifest themselves in a physical object.