The Academy Blog

For health and safety reasons, the exhibition is open to visitors by appointment only. To view the exhibition please email reception@nyaa.edu to schedule a time Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm.

Courtesy of Eazel / @eazel.art / #Eazel

For health and safety reasons, the exhibition is open to visitors by appointment only. To view the exhibition please email reception@nyaa.edu to schedule a time Monday-Saturday, 10am-6pm.

Courtesy of Eazel / @eazel.art / #Eazel

For health and safety reasons, the exhibition is open to visitors by appointment only. To view the exhibition is by appointment only. Please email reception@nyaa.edu to schedule a time Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm.

Click here to view the 2020 MFA Thesis Catalog

Click here to view the 2020 MFA Thesis Project Page

Courtesy of Eazel / @eazel.art / #Eazel

Click here to view exhibition catalog

Click here to view a video tour of the show with the curators, artists. and writers.

Click here to view the panel discussion from August 13, 2020 featuring co-curators David Kratz and Stephanie Roach with artists Eric Fischl, Luján Pérez Hernández, Rachel Lee Hovnanian and Chris Wilson.

Click here to view the panel discussion from October 15, 2020 featuring co-curators David Kratz and Stephanie Roach with art patron Bernard Lumpkin and artists Tawny Chatmon, Taha Clayton, and Justin Wadlington.

Click here to view the panel discussion from November 12, 2020 featuring co-curators David Kratz and Stephanie Roach with Steve Mumford, Clifford Owens, Paine the Poet, and Pamela Sztybel.

The pain, loss and uncertainty of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The awakening cry for social justice following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and many others.

The unnerving possibility of global recession.

2020 has already experienced seismic events that are shifting values and shaping our choices as citizens and as creators.

Artists and writers are always the antennae of our society, all the more so at a time as challenging as this one.  They have an opportunity—some might say, a duty—to interpret this moment and imagine the world not only as it is, but also as it could be.

This is the guiding challenge of the group exhibition, 2020 Vision.  We asked artists, writers, and creative thinkers to consider three questions of critical importance: Our lives will never be the same, but what will change look like?  What do we want to keep as we rebuild? And what must we guard against?

We invited these creators to express what they saw, what they felt, and what they experienced during this time of pause and reassessment, upheaval and risk, and anxiety and uncertainty.

It is our hope that 2020 Vision marks one of many beginnings in the necessary process of ‘post-traumatic growth’ and positive change for our society and our world.

Curators David Kratz and Stephanie Roach

Editor Emma Gilbey Keller

Participating Sponsor Douglas Elliman

Insurance generously sponsored by AXA XL

The New York Academy of Art will present “2020 Vision” at the Southampton Arts Center, co-curated by Academy President David Kratz and Stephanie Roach of the FLAG Art Foundation and edited by Emma Gilbey Keller.

“2020 Vision” takes as its subject the lived experience of our present, a time of social upheaval and unimaginable loss but also a moment of stirring change. The works in “2020 Vision” offer a glimpse of how creative minds are critically engaging with 2020, from Chris Wilson’s vibrantly colored painting of a Black funeral in Baltimore to Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s witty installation commenting on social distancing, with two computer monitors at opposite ends of a dinner table.

Notably, the exhibition encompasses not only visual artworks but a variety of texts, including poetry and essays from writers and thinkers reflecting on what 2020 means. Contributors include former US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, mass incarceration activist Paine the Poet and chef J. Kenji López-Alt. “2020 Vision” has over 60 participating artists and writers, and like many New York Academy of Art exhibitions, the show features work from current art students and young emerging artists hung alongside contemporary stars such as Eric Fischl and Rashid Johnson.

“2020 Vision” will be on view July 25 – December 27 at 25 Jobs Lane in Southampton and is supported by AXA XL, a division of AXA.

Tour the virtual exhibition via Eazel below.

Courtesy of Eazel / @eazel.art / #Eazel

Contributing Writers:

Curtis Bashaw, Hotelier, Curtis’s Index

Thomas Dyja, Historian, New York, a City and a Community

Various Writers, idreamofcovid.com

Keionna Jackson, Operations Intelligence Analyst United States Air Force, The War: COVID-19

Julia Jordan, Playwright, Opening Night

David Kamp, Author & Journalist, The Siren Song of… Covid?

David Kamp, Author & Journalist, with Steve Porcaro, Singer & Songwriter, The Covid Kid

Emma Gilbey Keller, Author & Journalist, Shaved Heads in Lockdown

J. Kenji López-Alt, Chef & Food Writer, Deviled Egg Salad Sandwiches

Bernard Lumpkin, Art Patron, Inside Out

Vivek Murthy, 19th Surgeon General of the United States, Excerpt from Together

Wendy Olsoff, Gallerist, The Future of the Art Gallery

Paine the Poet, Poet, Crisis Journal 

Sarah Paley, Poet, Bringing Back the Dead and Eastertide 2020

Brynne Rebele-Henry, Poet & Author, Looking Forward

Stephen Roach, Economist, The Quality Imperative

Brooke Shields, Actress, A Life in a Day

Douglas Unis, Surgeon, Stay Home…if you don’t want an orthopaedic surgeon treating you for pneumonia!

David Kratz is a painter and the President of the New York Academy of Art. In 2008, he received an MFA from the Academy, where he focused on figurative art and won the Vasari Prize for best-in-show painting at the MFA Thesis exhibition. Kratz has shown in group exhibitions at the New York Academy of Art, Lodge Gallery, Sotheby’s, and Eden Rock Gallery in St. Barth. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University School of Law, Kratz has served on the boards of Citymeals-on-Wheels, the Lifelines Center, and the New Group, as well as helping to found One Day’s Pay. He became president of the Academy in 2009, and since then developed a new strategic plan, spearheaded a facilities renovation and expansion, and oversaw the Academy’s accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

Stephanie Roach has been the director of The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, since the institution’s founding in 2008, where she has developed and overseen more than sixty exhibitions with a range of guest curators, including those by Lisa Dennison, Jim Hodges, and Shaquille O’Neal, as well as in-house exhibitions featuring over six hundred established and emerging international artists. At FLAG, Roach curated One, Another (2011) and Space Between (2015), a co-curated exhibition with Louis Grachos. She is currently an Institutional Advisor for the Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize and was on the jury panel for the New York Academy of Art Seventh Annual Summer Exhibition in 2013. She has been a member of the Leadership Circle at The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania since 2009 and a member of the Contemporary Circle at The Jewish Museum, New York, since 2016. Roach graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.

Emma Gilbey Keller is an author and a journalist. She has written two books, The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family and Back Again (2008) and The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela (1994). She has been a contributing writer and a columnist for The Guardian, and her work has appeared in Slate, Vanity Fair and The New York Times among other publications. She lives in Southampton with her husband, Bill Keller.

2020 Summer Exhibition Jurors 

Joeonna Bellardo-Samuels, Director, Jack Shainman Gallery

Andrea Scott, Art reviewer, The New Yorker

Alia Williams, Director, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery