The Academy Blog

Rona Pondick was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1952. She studied at Yale University School of Art and received her MFA in 1977.

Since 1984 she has had over 48 solo exhibitions of her work in museums and galleries internationally, including Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Italy; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands; Rupertinum Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Salbzburg, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.

Her sculptures have been included in over 200 group exhibitions, including numerous biennales worldwide: the Whitney Biennial, Lyon Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale, Sonsbeek, and Venice Biennale. Her work is in the collections of many institutions worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY); Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas); San Francisco Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art (Sculpture Garden) among others
Rona Pondick has received numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant, and others.

Robert Feintuch (b. 1953, Jersey City) lives and works in New York. He studied at Cooper Union (B.F.A. 1974) and the Yale University School of Art (M.F.A. 1976). His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions including shows at The Peggy Guggenheim Foundation (Venice), Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (Venice), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), The Rupertinum (Salzburg), Museum für modern zeitgenössische Kunst (Bolzano), The National Academy Museum, (New York), The Addison Gallery of American Art, (Andover), and in the Venice Biennale. Feintuch has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, Rockefeller and Leube Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Robyn Gibson (MFA 2018) the exhibition is on view at the Academy February 10 – March 7, 2021.

PARALLELS & PERIPHERIES: Practice + Presence is focused on how the New York Academy of Art’s BIPOC artistic community (i.e. students, faculty, alumni, and visiting critics) uses their practice and platform to assert their presence within the world while attempting to negotiate issues of race, identity, visibility, and invisibility in a time of social volatility.

Click here to view the PARALLELS & PERIPHERIES Catalogue
and go to https://nyaa.edu/parallels-peripheries for more info.

Anne Harris has been painting slowly, and drawing quickly, variants of self-portraiture for the last thirty years. She has exhibited at venues ranging from Alexandre Gallery (NYC), DC Moore Gallery (NYC)and Nielsen Gallery (Boston), to theNational Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, The Portland Museum of Art, the California Center forContemporary Art and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Her work is in such public collections as The Fogg Museum at Harvard, The Yale University Art Gallery and The New York Public Library. Grants and awards received include aGuggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship.

Harris teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She heads the Riverside Art Center’s Exhibition Committee and has curated numerous exhibitions there. She is also the originator of The Mind’s I—a traveling expanding drawing conversation about the universality and malleability of self-perception and drawing. This project most recently took place at Espacio Andrea Brunson in Santiago, Chile (August 2019).

Harris lives with her family in Riverside, IL.On Wed, Ja

Funktional Vibrations (2015) © Xenobia Bailey, NYCT 34th Street–Hudson Yards Station.  Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design. Photo: Sid Tabak.

Sandra Bloodworth is Director of Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts & Design (A&D), the program responsible for visual and performing arts throughout the transit system. Sandra joined MTA Arts & Design as a manger in 1988 and has served as the director for 24 years. She has worked with hundreds of artists through A&D’s permanent art commissions, digital arts, graphic art, photography, poetry, musical performances and special programs, all of which are intended to engage riders, enrich stations, and encourage the use of mass transit.  Under Sandra’s leadership the A&D Percent for Art program has become one of the largest and most diverse collections of public art in the world.

Sandra is a recipient of the Gari Melchers Memorial Medal for furthering the profession of fine arts and was awarded the Fund for the City of New York’s Sloan Public Service Award in recognition of her work in the field of public art.  She is co-author of New York’s Underground Art Museum, published by the Monacelli Press. Sandra is a practicing artist and holds degrees in Art and Arts Education, including a B.S. from Mississippi College, an M.A. from the University of Mississippi and an M.F.A. from Florida State University. She has taught at Florida State University, the University of Mississippi and the Department of Art and Arts Professions graduate program at New York University, and frequently speaks on the topic of art in transit.

Photo credit: Namsa Leuba

Billie Zangewa (b. 1973, Blantyre, Malawi; lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa) creates intricate collages composed of hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. These figurative compositions explore contemporary intersectional identity in an attempt to challenge the historical stereotype, objectification, and exploitation of the black female form. Beginning her career in the fashion and advertising industries, Zangewa employs her understanding of textiles to portray personal and universal experiences through domestic interiors, urban landscapes, and portraiture. Her earliest works were embroideries on found fabrics depicting remembered botanical scenes and animals from Botswana, where the artist was raised, but she soon transitioned to creating cityscapes, focusing on her experience as a woman in the city of Johannesburg and her personal relationships. These works explored her experience of the male gaze, leading her to begin to think more critically about how women view themselves and what the visualization of the female gaze, through self-portraiture, could look like.

After the birth of her son, Zangewa began making her well-known domestic interiors to explore the shift in focus from self-examination and femininity to motherhood and the home. Often referencing scenes or experiences from everyday life, Zangewa has stated that she is interested in depicting the work done by women that keeps society running smoothly, but which is often overlooked, undervalued, or ignored. Zangewa refers to this as “daily feminism,” which can be considered a contemporary version of “the personal is political.” Through the method of their making and their narrative content, Zangewa’s silk paintings illustrate gendered labor in a socio-political context, where the domestic sphere becomes a pretext for a deeper understanding of the construction of identity, questions around gender stereotypes, and racial prejudice.

Zangewa received her BFA from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa in 1995. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by Galerie Templon, Paris, France (2020); Afronova Gallery, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2017); Johann Levy Gallery, Paris, France (2008); and Gerard Sekoto Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2005). Recent group exhibitions featuring her work include Alpha Crucis, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2020); I Am … Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. (2019); Second Life, Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech, Morocco (2018); Pulling at Threads, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2018); Making Africa, Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM (2018) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2017); The Half-Life of Love, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2017); A Constellation, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, NY (2016); Making Africa, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Barcelona Spain, and Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands (2016); Women’s Work, Iziko National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa (2016); Body Talk, Wiels, Brussels, Belgium; Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden and Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2015); Making Africa, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain and Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2015); How Far How Near, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014); and The Progress of Love, Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2012).

Zangewa’s work is in several public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. In 2018, Zangewa was selected as the Featured Artist for the FNB Art Joburg Fair.