Featuring Bo Bartlett, Vincent Desiderio, Zoey Frank, & Amy Sherald moderated by Noah Buchanan and Carl Dobsky
Against the backdrop of the Big Stories exhibition at the New York Academy of Art, four of the nation’s leading figurative painters meet to discuss The Narrative in art, and its evolving role in today’s world.
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Bo Bartlett (b. 1955, Columbus, GA) is an American realist with a modernist vision. His paintings are well within the tradition of American realism as defined by artists such as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Like these artists, Bartlett looks at America’s heart—its land and its people—and describes the beauty he finds in everyday life. His paintings celebrate the underlying epic nature of the commonplace and the personal significance of the extraordinary.
Bartlett studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He received a CFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1980 and a Certificate of Filmmaking from New York University in 1986. He holds an Honorary Doctorate of the Fine Arts from New York Academy of Art and Honorary Diploma from Lyme Academy of Art.
Bartlett’s awards include the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the 1858 Prize for Southern Art, and the South Arts Fellowship. Notable collections include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Seattle Art Museum (WA), Denver Art Museum (CO), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA). In 2018, Columbus State University opened the Bo Bartlett Center.
Bartlett is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York, NY, and he lives and works in Columbus, GA and Wheaton Island, ME.
Vincent Desiderio (b. 1955, Philadelphia, PA) graduated from Haverford College in 1977 and later attended the Accademia di belle arti in Florence, Italy followed by four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He is a Senior Critic at the New York Academy of Art and has been a visiting professor at numerous universities both here and abroad, most recently with a three-year appointment at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in China through the country’s “Thousand Talent Program.”
Desiderio has received several grants and painting awards, among which are the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1991, and the Grand Prize of S.A.S. Prince Ranier III, Thirtieth Annual Show of Contemporary Art in Monte-Carlo, Monaco in 1996. In both 1984 and 1986, he was awarded a studio by the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, P.S.1. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from both the New York Academy of Art and the Lyme Academy. In 2007, Desiderio was invited to be Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College.
His work can be found in many important public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY); The Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum of American Art (Philadelphia, PA); The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO); Galerie Sammlung Ludwig (Aachen, Germany); The Albright Knox Museum (NY; Museo Botero (Bogota, Columbia) and The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN).
Numerous articles about Vincent Desiderio have appeared in periodicals and magazines including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, The Village Voice, the New York Post, The New York Sun, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquire, Le Figaro, American Art (Smithsonian Publication), Comparative Literature (University of Oregon) and others.
In 2016, Desiderio’s painting SLEEP was used as the basis for Kanye West’s video, FAMOUS.
Zoey Frank (b. 1987 in Boulder, Colorado) makes use of patterns and elements of abstraction in her large-scale multi-figure compositions. Her work draws on a wide range of approaches to pictorial space from across art history.
Frank studied for four years with Juliette Aristides in the Classical Atelier at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, before receiving her MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design in California. She has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, and three first place awards in Manifest Gallery’s International Painting Annual. Her work has been featured recently in New American Paintings, Hi Fructose magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, Artists and Illustrators, and American Art Collector, among many others. In 2023, she served as a juror for the Bennett Prize and for the Figurativas award at the MEAM Museum in Barcelona. She is represented by Sugarlift Gallery in New York and Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam.
Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, GA) received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004 and BFA from Clark-Atlanta University in 1997. She documents the contemporary African-American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly figurative paintings. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture to situate Black life centrally in American art. In October 2022, Sherald presented The World We Make, her first European solo exhibition at Hauser and Wirth in London. She was the first woman and first African-American to receive the grand prize from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, and in 2018, was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait commission for the National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Long Museum (Shanghai); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR); Embassy of the United States (Dakar, Senegal); and the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (Washington, DC).
Click here for more information about the Big Stories exhibition.