The Academy Blog

Ian Alteveer, curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, poses for a portrait to be used on 82nd and 5th, a web feature. © 2012 MMA, photographed by Jackie Neale Chadwick

Ian Alteveer is the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He recently co-curated retrospectives for Kerry James Marshall (2016), Marisa Merz (2017), and David Hockney (2017–18). He organized three Roof Garden Commissions at the museum for Pierre Huyghe (2015), Dan Graham with Günter Vogt (2014), and Imran Qureshi (2013) as well as the installation of William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time (2013). Before The Met, he was a graduate curatorial fellow and curatorial assistant at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and completed his qualifying exams for a PhD at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2006.

Brett Littman is the Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City New York. He was the Executive Director of The Drawing Center from 2007-2018; the Deputy Director of MOMA PS1 from 2003 – 2007; the Co-Director of Dieu Donné Papermill from 2001-2003 and the Associate Director of UrbanGlass from 1996 – 2001. His interests are multi-disciplinary and he has overseen more than seventy-five and curated more than 20 exhibitions over the last decade dealing with visual art, craft, design, architecture, poetry, music, science, and literature. Littman is also an art critic and lecturer, an active essayist for museum and gallery catalogs and has written articles for a wide range of United States-based and international art, fashion, and design magazines.

Jennifer Schipf is AXA XL’s Global Practice Leader for Art. She has a BA in art history and economics from Georgetown University and a BS in interior architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As AXA XL’s Global Practice Leader for Art, Jennifer is responsible for setting worldwide strategy for client solutions, Underwriting guidelines and ultimate profitability. She’s been dedicated to the highly specialized fine art underwriting market for nearly twenty years and recently helped establish the AXA Art Prize. She previously led the organization’s North American Fine Art & Specie team while also serving as leader of Broker and Client Management for North American Specialty. Jennifer is actively engaged in various arts organizations, teaches fine art underwriting courses and regularly participates in industry educational conferences. She also pursues continuing education classes in painting at the New York Academy of Arts (NYAA) and is an active patron of the NYAA, Tandem Press and other art related organizations.

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.

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.