The Academy Blog

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) utilizes a variety of techniques, including oil, acrylic, airbrush, marbling, and the staining of raw canvas, to create figurative paintings that are at once confounding and familiar. Challenging systemic conventions of representations of women in art history, commercial advertising, and pop culture, Williams refers to her female figures as “zombie nudes” – figures that are sentient, yet ambiguously generated. Earlier this year, Williams presented a series of new paintings that reimagine the coded narratives of American media in With Pleasure at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. With her west coast debut as well as three solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, Williams has garnered critical recognition for her contribution to figurative and feminist painting, noting the complexity of her compositions, technical virtuosity and the psychological depth of her narratives. In her review of Williams’ 2017 exhibition Your Good Taste is Showing, Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote: “These painting are timely, but they are also enigmatic, off-putting and out there in rewarding ways.” Williams received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, has been included in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally and has been honored as the Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. She had solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Bard College at Simmon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA; and Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY, and will be included in a forthcoming group exhibition opening January 2020 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY. Additionally, Williams will release a series of monoprints in collaboration with Pace Prints during Art Basel Miami Beach 2019.

Eric Fischl (b. 1948, New York City) is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. His paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints have been the subject of numerous solo and major group exhibitions and his work is represented in many museums, as well as prestigious private and corporate collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modem Art in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, St. Louis Art Museum and many others. Fischl has collaborated with other artists and authors, including E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. Fischl is also the founder, President and lead curator for America: Now and Here. This multi-disciplinary exhibition of 150 of some of America’s most celebrated visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights and filmmakers is designed to spark a national conversation about Americanidentity through the arts.

Laura van Straaten

As a feature writer —rather than a critic — Laura van Straaten has interviewed artists, gallerists, curators and collectors from more than a dozen countries for The New York Times and its style magazine T, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine, Departures, Art Review, The Art Newspaper, artnet News, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia and other print and online media in the U.S and abroad. She enjoys writing for a broad readership, as well as for art world insiders, on artistic and curatorial intention and processes; the behind-the-scenes stories of what is exhibited and why; and “underdog” stories outside the big city art markets.

Nico Wheadon is the executive director of NXTHVN, a multidisciplinary arts incubator in New Haven, Connecticut. She is also an adjunct assistant professor of Art History and Africana Studies at Barnard College, and Professional Practices at Hartford Art School within the interdisciplinary MFA program. Wheadon is an independent writer and regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet and C&, with her first manuscript slated for publication by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. She is the former director of public programs and community engagement at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she was celebrated for the pioneering artist projects, community engagement initiatives, and strategic partnerships she delivered during her five-year tenure. She has lectured internationally at universities, conferences and symposia, and currently serves on the advisory boards for More Art, and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Through her highly collaborative and experimental practice, Wheadon mines the rich intersections of contemporary art, dialogic pedagogy and social practice. She holds an MA in Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmith’s College, University of London, and a BA in Art-Semiotics from Brown University.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently the recipient of a 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and faculty at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Current projects include performances and solo presentations at the Noguchi Museum (New York); Zilkha Galleries, Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) and Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago).

Image / photo Credit: Sean Donnola

Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels is a Director at the Jack Shainman Gallery where she manages artists within the gallery roster including Hank Willis Thomas, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nina Chanel Abney and Meleko Mokgosi, among others. She is also the founder of We Buy Gold, a roving gallery. She is also on the curatorial team of The Racial Imaginary Institute, which seeks to change the way we imagine race in the U.S. and internationally by lifting up and connecting the work of artists, writers, knowledge-producers, and activists with audiences seeking thoughtful, innovative conversations and experiences. Joeonna was a founding Director of For Freedoms, the first artist-run Super PAC which uses art to inspire deeper political engagement for citizens who want to have a greater impact on the American political landscape.

Barnaby Furnas is a contemporary American painter known for his gestural paint handling and chaotic imagery. In his portrayals of violent battlefield scenes, the artist melds the formal virtuoso of historical painting techniques with emblems of American history, as seen in his Untitled (Antietam) II (2008). “Paintings don’t just show one minute happening. They can show an hour of things happening,” he has said. Born in Philadelphia, PA in 1973, he received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1995 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2000. Over the years that followed, the artist has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.

Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. He is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and a 2019 National Magazine Award. Before joining New York in 2007, Saltz had been art critic for The Village Voice since 1998, and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize during his tenure there. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others, and has appeared at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.