The Academy Blog

Eddie Arroyo (b. 1976, Miami) documents the effects of gentrification through landscape paintings. He received a BFA in Painting from Florida International University and has exhibited at the Girls’ Club Collection, Bridge Red Studios, Spinello Projects, Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida Atlantic University, Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. Arroyo solo exhibitions include Developers Survey, Bakehouse Art Complex (2015), Aesthetics of Commerce, Swampspace (2015), and Witnessing the Effects of Gentrification, Haitian Heritage Museum (2017). Arroyo is a South Florida ​Consortium Grantee and is in the 2019 Whitney Biennale.

​ Lecture Video

Photo Credit: Miranda Barnes

Larry Ossei-Mensah, MOCAD’s Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator uses contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. The Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit spaces around the globe from New York City to Rome featuring such artist as Firelei Baez, Allison Janae Hamilton, Brendan Fernandes, Ebony G. Patterson, and Stanley Whitney to name a few. Moreover, Ossei-Mensah has actively documented cultural happenings featuring the most dynamic visual artists working today such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Federico Solmi, and Kehinde Wiley.

Ossei-Mensah is also the co-founder of ARTNOIR a global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class. Ossei-Mensah is a contributor to the first ever Ghanaian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennial with an essay on the work of visual artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Ossei-Mensah also recently co-curated, with Dexter Wimberly, the critically acclaimed exhibition at MOAD in San Francisco Coffee, Rhum, Sugar, Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox co-curated. Fall 2019 Ossei-Mensah will be curating his second exhibition at the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context with Josh Ginsburg from the A4 Arts Foundation and Jova Lynne, Ford Curatorial Fellow at MOCAD.

Ossei-Mensah has been profiled in publications including The New York Times, Artsy, and Cultured Magazine, which recently named him one of seven curators to watch in 2019. Follow him on Instagram/Twitter at @youngglobal or www.larryosseimensah.com

Lecture Video

Dexter Wimberly

Mark Rosen is the Associate Director of Marketing at Artsy, overseeing social media and contributing to consumer marketing strategy for the world’s largest online database of contemporary art. Based in New York City, he and his team regularly engage over 3.5 million followers across platforms and develop strategies to acquire and retain consumers on Artsy.net. Lecture Video

www.artsy.net / @artsy / @markatthemuseum

Dexter Wimberly

Paul Anthony Smith (b. Jamaica, 1988) creates paintings and unique picotages on pigment prints that explore the artist’s autobiography, as well as issues of identity within the African diaspora. Referencing both W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and Franz Fanon’s theory of diasporic cultural confusions caused by colonialism, Smith alludes to African rituals, tribal masks, and scarification to obscure and alter his subjects’ faces and skin. Through Smith’s process of picotage, rendered with the use of a ceramic tool to pick away at surfaces of photographic prints, he achieves rich textures that appear almost iridescent. With this method, Smith questions the potential of a photograph to retain and tell the truth of one’s past.

Smith’s work has been acquired by numerous public collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, and has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including a solo show at the Atlanta Contemporary, a two person show at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and group shows at the New Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the Seattle Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; among others.

Ledelle Moe was born in Durban, South Africa in 1971. She studied sculpture there at Technikon Natal and graduated in 1993. Active in the local art community, Moe was one of the founding members of the FLAT Gallery, an artist initiative and alternative space in Durban. A travel grant in 1994 took her to the United States where she embarked on a period of study at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Sculpture Department Master’s program. She completed her Master’s Degree there in 1996 and soon after accepted an adjunct position in the Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. Later she taught at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC, Virginia Commonwealth University and St.Mary’s College of Maryland. Moe has exhibited in a number of venues including the Kulturhuset (Stockholm, Sweden) the NSA Gallery (Durban, South Africa), the International Sculpture Center (Washington, DC), The Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC) and American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY. Throughout this time Moe has remained strongly connected to South Africa, returning to visit annually. In 2013 she has returned to live and work in South Africa and teach at Stellenbosch University. Projects include large-scale concrete installations at Socrates Park and Pratt Institute in New York City, and The African Museum of Art in Washington DC . In 2002 Moe was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Award and in 2008 Kreeger Museum Artist Award. Projects include installations in Salzburg, Austria, Brooklyn, NY, Boston MA, Cape Town, India, the Biennale Internationale D’Art, Martinique, Perez Museum, Miami, Semaphore Gallery in Neuchatel, Switzerland and the Biennale De Dakar, Dakar, Senegal.

Kay Takeda
Senior Director of Artist Programs, Joan Mitchell Foundation

The financial lives of artists can be complex in terms of employment, compensation, and the realities of navigating the nonprofit and for-profit world, each with its own language and expectations. This conversation will focus on a few key areas of personal finance that can make a difference in how artists make decisions in their lives and work, examples of artists making changes in how they approach finances, and a practical discussion of professional sticking points when it comes to money.

Kay Takeda has worked for over 20 years to advance artists and the arts sector. She is currently the Senior Director of Artist Programs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she oversees the Foundation’s diverse roster of artist-centered initiatives, including its grants, residencies, and professional development programs. In her previous role as Vice President, Grants & Services at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), she developed and oversaw grantmaking, professional development programs, and community initiatives. Her background also includes leading national grantmaking programs at Arts International, and managing exhibitions and programming at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor. She serves on the board of Movement Research, has sat on numerous funding panels, and lectures widely on professional issues affecting artists.

Tony Matelli was born in 1971 in Chicago, Illinois, and received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1995. Matelli has exhibited widely, mounting solo and group exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1, The Davis Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, ILLUMInations at The Venice Biennale, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Palais de Tokyo, and The High Line. The artist lives and works in New York.

Bill Powers owns Half Gallery in New York. He is the author of several books, including What We Lose in Flowers . . . (Karma, 2012) and Interviews with Artists (Gagosian, 2013). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ Style, Purple Fashion, and the Wall Street Journal.

Michael Kagan lives and works in Brooklyn. He holds an MFA from New York Academy of Art (2005), where he was awarded a postgraduate fellowship (2005–6). He has collaborated multiple times with Pharrell Williams and Mr. Williams’s company, Billionaire Boys Club. He has also created a series of commissions based on the archives from the Smithsonian Institution. His artwork was used as the cover of the White Lies’ album Big TV. The album cover was listed on multiple lists of the top covers of the year and won the 2013 Best Art Vinyl award. Solo exhibitions include I Was There When It Happened(2019-20) at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art; We Have Felt the Ground Shake (2018) at Bill Brady Gallery, Miami, FL; Lights Out (2016) and Thunder in the Distance (2014), both at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY; and I Am My Father’s Son (2012) at Space SBH, St Barthélemy, French West Indies. Selected group exhibitions include Mission to Space, Children’s Museum of the Arts (2016–17); Your Favorite Artist’s Favorite Artist, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY (2014); Shake the Dust Off, Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York, NY (2012); and Growing Pains at Charles de Jonghe, Brussels, Belgium (2010).