The Academy Blog - Page 14 of 97 - New York Academy of Art

Kristina Newman-Scott

Posted on September 14, 2020

Kristina Newman-Scott serves as President of BRIC, a leading arts and media institution anchored in Downtown Brooklyn whose work spans contemporary visual and performing arts, media, and civic action. She is the first immigrant and first woman of color to serve in this position and one of the very few women of color leading a major New York cultural institution.

Under her tenure, BRIC embarked on an ambitious human-centered process in pursuit of clarity of purpose in the form of a new four-year Strategic Plan. That process led to a rearticulated mission, informed by the institution’s impact and legacy, and a newly articulated vision statement, guided by aspirational goals. In addition, she led a renewed commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusivity in every aspect of the organization.

Previously, Newman-Scott served as the Director of Culture and State Historic Preservation Officer for the State of Connecticut; Director of Marketing, Events and Cultural Affairs for the City of Hartford; Director of Programs at the Boston Center for the Arts; and Director of Visual Arts at Hartford’s Real Art Ways.

Ms. Newman-Scott’s awards and recognitions include being a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow, A Hive Global Leadership Selectee, and a Next City Urban Vanguard. In June 2018, Americans for the Arts presented Kristina with the Selina Roberts Ottum Award, which recognizes an individual working in arts management who exemplifies extraordinary leadership qualities.

A TEDx speaker, guest lecturer, visiting curator, Kristina currently serves on the Boards of the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Arts Strategies, New Yorkers for Culture and Arts and the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. She resides in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with her husband and two children.

Salman Toor

Posted on September 14, 2020

Salman Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of fictional young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. Toor playfully engages the history of European painting, particularly certain Baroque, Rococo, Romantic, and Impressionist masters with whom he shares an aesthetic kinship; he disrupts entrenched attitudes toward gender and race prevalent within this tradition by introducing elements of fantasy, humor, and cultural hybridity.

Toor’s work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie. In many of his paintings, he creates subtly disarming depictions of familiar idealized environments in which often-marginalized bodies flourish safely and in comfort. In other pieces, Toor creates allegorical spaces of waiting, anticipation, and apprehension; border crossings into a world that may or may not be welcoming. Central to his work are the anxieties and the comedy of identity. In creating his figures, he employs and destabilizes specific tropes in order to reflect on the way difference is perceived by the self and by others. As Whitney curators Christopher Lew and Ambika Trasi have noted, Toor’s project is one that examines “vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.” Furthermore, in depicting the mundane and the memorable moments of his characters’ lives, Toor reveals a deeply relatable existence, ultimately creating an opportunity for empathy through the language of painting.

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University, and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York when the museum resumes programming. Toor’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including most recently Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting, Marianne Boesky, New York; Them, Galerie Perrotin, New York; Are You Here?, the Lahore Biennale 2018, Pakistan; and the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India. Recent solo shows include I Know a Place at Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India; New Painting at O Art Space in Lahore, Pakistan; and Time After Time at Aicon Gallery, New York, NY. Upcoming exhibitions include Relations: Diaspora and Painting, Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; A Story With No End: A conversation with timeless treasures from Xinjiang, M Woods, Beijing, China, and an upcoming Public Art Fund project, New York. Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tate, London, UK; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Kate Fowle

Posted on September 14, 2020

Kate Fowle is the director of MoMA PS1. She was appointed in 2019 after six years as the inaugural chief curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, and director-at-large at Independent Curators International, New York. During her tenure at Garage, she oversaw the institution’s transition from art center to internationally recognized, public-facing museum, establishing new infrastructure and developing departments of exhibitions, archives, education, public programs, performance, publishing, research, development, and communications. Ms. Fowle also worked closely with Rem Koolhaas and OMA to oversee the design and opening of Garage’s first 56,000-square-foot Museum building in 2015.Ms. Fowle’s curatorial projects at Garage included exhibitions and commissions with David Adjaye, John Baldessari, Sammy Baloji, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Olga Chernysheva, Urs Fischer, Rashid Johnson, Irina Korina, Robert Longo, Andrei Monastyrsky, Anri Sala, Taryn Simon, Juergen Teller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. In 2014 she established Field Research, the first research-oriented program in Russia for artists, and in 2017 she established Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art.Ms. Fowle’s recent writing includes catalogue texts on Rasheed Araeen, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Ari Marcopoulos, Sterling Ruby, Althea Thauberger, and Qiu Zhijie. She has authored three books—Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo (2016); Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986–1996 (2016); and Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates (2016)—and established a number of publications series, including Perspectives on Curating, featuring Terry Smith (2012/15) and Zdenka Badovinac (2019), and the Artists Sourcebook, featuring Martha Wilson (2011), Allen Ruppersberg (2014), and Apichatpong Weerawesethakul (2016).

From 2009 to 2013, Ms. Fowle was the executive director of Independent Curators International (ICI). She led the organization out of deficit and transformed it into the largest global network for curators. She also founded ICI’s signature program, the Curatorial Intensive, the first itinerant, short-term international professional training program for curators. Previously, Ms. Fowle was the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing from 2007 to 2008 and chair of the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which she cofounded in 2002. Before moving to the United States, Ms. Fowle was codirector of Smith + Fowle in London. From 1994 to 1996 she was curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Conversation with the Critics

Posted on September 14, 2020

Johanna Fateman is a writer, art critic, and owner of Seagull salon in New York. She writes art reviews regularly for the New Yorker and 4Columns, and she is a contributing editor for Artforum. She is a 2019 Creative Capital awardee and currently at work on a novel.

Seph Rodney, PhD was born in Jamaica, and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He is the opinion editor and managing editor for the Sunday edition for Hyperallergic, and writes on visual art and related issues. He has also written for The New York Times, CNN Op-ed pages, American Craft Magazine and NBC Universal, and penned catalog essays for Joyce J. Scott, Teresita Fernandez, and Meleko Mokgosi. He can be heard weekly on the podcast “The American Age”. His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in May of 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize.

Photo Credit: George Chinsee

Alex Greenberger is senior editor of ARTnews, where he began as an intern in 2013. His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Artspace, and Architectural Digest, and his essays have appeared in catalogues for galleries. He runs a column on the ARTnews website called “The Browser,” which focuses on photographic, moving-image, and digital work, and his recent articles include coverage of calls by activists for accountability and transparency in New York museums, profiles of the artist Wu Tsang and the collective Forensic Architecture, an infographic about French collector François Pinault’s network, a ranking of Hito Steyerl’s videos, and a survey about diversity in exhibition programming at US institutions. He runs the “Retrospective” section on the ARTnews website, in which materials from the publication’s archives are republished regularly. A graduate of New York University’s art history and cinema studies departments, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Bill Viola’s 2002 video installation Going Forth by Day, and he continues to maintain an interest in video art, film, photography, and net art. He can be found on Twitter at @alexgreenberger(where he posts memes about Steyerl and Louise Lawler, in addition to his articles) and on Instagram via the same handle (where he mainly just posts pictures of art). He is based in Brooklyn.